This is a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters by C. J. Schrijver, W. C. Livingston, T. N. Woods, and R. A. Mewaldt. WUWT readers may recognize Livingston as the creator of one of the datasets we regularly follow graphically on our Solar Data and Images reference page.
They reconstruct total solar flux all the way back to 1650, as seen below:
The implication is that in August-September 2009, when we saw such a dearth of solar activity, the sun dipped to a level similar to periods of the Maunder Minimum. Now that the sun is starting to rev up a bit, the question is: will it last? And, if it doesn’t will we see a cooler period on Earth as some suggest, or as the authors suggest, “drivers other than TSI dominate Earth’s long‐term climate change” dominate? Nature (not the journal) will eventually provide the final answer, all we can do is watch and wait.
The abstract:
Variations in the total solar irradiance (TSI) associated with solar activity have been argued to influence the Earth’s climate system, in particular when solar activity deviates from the average for a substantial period. One such example is the 17th Century Maunder Minimum during which sunspot numbers were extremely low, as Earth experienced the Little Ice Age. Estimation of the TSI during that period has relied on extrapolations of correlations with sunspot numbers or even more indirectly with modulations of galactic cosmic rays. We argue that there is a minimum state of solar magnetic activity associated with a population of relatively small magnetic bipoles which persists even when sunspots are absent, and that consequently estimates of TSI for the Little Ice Age that are based on scalings with sunspot numbers are generally too low. The minimal solar activity, which measurements show to be frequently observable between active‐region decay products regardless of the phase of the sunspot cycle, was approached globally after an unusually long lull in sunspot activity in 2008–2009. Therefore, the best estimate of magnetic activity, and presumably TSI, for the least‐active Maunder Minimum phases appears to be
provided by direct measurement in 2008–2009. The implied marginally significant decrease in TSI during the least active phases of the Maunder Minimum by 140 to 360 ppm relative to 1996 suggests that drivers other than TSI dominate Earth’s long‐term climate change.
I asked Dr. Leif Svalgaard about this paper, in particular this paragraph:
“Therefore, we argue that the best estimate of the magnetic flux threading the solar surface during the deepest Maunder Minimum phases appears to be provided by direct measurement in 2008–2009. If surface magnetic variability is the principal driver of TSI changes, then that same period yields a direct estimate of the TSI in that era, yielding values 140 to 360 ppmlower than in 1996 [Fröhlich, 2009; Gray et al., 2010].”
His response was:
Magnetic variability drives the variations of TSI on top of what the nuclear furnace in the core puts out. They are basically saying that there is no long-term background variations. There is a slight problem with the ~200 ppm lower TSI in 2008-2009 compared to 1996. I have shown that the lower estimates of TSI by Fröhlich in 2008 are likely due to uncorrected degradation of the instrument on which PMOD is based.
See:
that shows the difference between PMOD and the best calibrated instrument we have [TIM of SORCE]. All indications are that TSI at the past minimum was not significantly lower than in 1996 and that that level probably also was typical of the Maunder Minimum, in other words this
is as low as the Sun can go.
See also http://www.leif.org/research/PMOD%20TSI-SOHO%20keyhole%20effect-degradation%20over%20time.pdf
You can read the full Schrijver et al paper here (PDF)
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Billybob.
Sunshine is an extremely poor metric.
1. the % of sunshine hours is not well sampled over the entire globe.
2. the instruments used in the past are subject to observer errors that are in the
neighborhood of an order of magnitude.
3. sunshine, as measured by a cambell stokes, is a function of humidity as well.
4. Sunshine is an effect. That is, the amount of sunshine is modulated by clouds
and aerosols. Thats why we look at the total spectrum.
Leif says: “…and now it seems that even mainstream solar physics is embracing the notion that perhaps there is no such background variation.”
Maybe we should start a pool to see how long it takes for climatologists to accept it.
@Leif
> It now seems that there likely is no such [TSI] background variation [as some of
> us have been saying for several years now] so we can hardly ascribe the LIA to
> the Sun and must look elsewhere for a cause.
You may be right, Leif. But Man is a rule-making animal, and the coincidence of “it got cold” and “the sunspots dimmed” on a couple of occasions is sufficient evidence for Univeral Truth for some.
It may be the warmists who will protest the most against the falsification of these solar-caused LIA theories, because they provide a convenient “excuse”, if temperatures don’t get as warm as they would like them to be. (The perception being that we’re entering another “grand minimum”, which also has yet to be proven.)
Leif Svalgaard says:
March 19, 2011 at 3:12 pm
I submitted this article to Anthony 4 days ago, and he mulled it over a while, before posting it. We had an email exchange, when I asked why the hesitation. Here is his answer:
“Because the conclusions are at odds with certain skeptical views related to Maunder Minimum and climate then. But the science is the science, and while I’ve always felt that there was a relationship between the MM and climate then, it may prove to be mostly coincidental.”
This shows a man of strong integrity (as we always knew).
____________________
Bravo, Sir.
Up to about 2000 it was proposed that CO2 had caused the poleward shifts up to that date. However around 2000 the poleward shift stopped and we are now seeing increasing periods of time with the jets more equatorward than they were during the late 20th century warming spell.
The argument is that Ozone depletion with a cocomitent increase in GHG is the prime driver for SH circulation changes in the late 20th century. eg WMO expert assesment 2010 (chapter 2).
Observations and model simulations show that the Antarctic ozone hole caused much of the observed southward shift of the Southern Hemisphere middle latitude jet in the troposphere during summer since 1980. The horizontal structure, seasonality, and amplitude of the observed trends in the Southern Hemisphere tropospheric jet are only reproducible in climate models forced with Antarctic ozone depletion. The southward shift in the tropospheric jet extends to the surface of the Earth and is linked dynamically to the ozone hole induced strengthening of the Southern Hemisphere stratospheric polar vortex.
The southward shift of the Southern Hemisphere tropospheric jet due to the ozone hole has been linked to a range of observed climate trends over Southern Hemisphere mid and high latitudes during summer.
Because of this shift, the ozone hole has contributed to robust summertime trends in surface winds, warming over the Antarctic Peninsula, and cooling over the high plateau. Other impacts of the ozone hole on surface climate have been investigated but have yet to be fully quantified. These include observed increases in sea ice area averaged around Antarctica; a southward shift of the Southern Hemisphere storm track and associated precipitation; warming of the subsurface Southern Ocean at depths up to several hundred meters; and decreases of carbon uptake over the Southern Ocean
The are two schools of thought here, a )O3 depletion is the main mechanism, or b) GHG is the main mechanism ie Shindell and Schmidt 2004 argued that O3 depletion added to the circulation changes from GHG therefore any recovery of O3 will subtract from them eg Polvani et al 2011. suggesting that the negation will cancel the effects of GHG circulation changes in the SH.
The Maunder Minimum lasted for 60-70? years.
Something caused it.
The fact that the sun was relatively inactive over that period looks relevant, but no-one can find the precise mechanism.
The sun has been relatively inactive now for 5? years.
Already the NH has had a series of cold winters. The SST has dropped globally.
It might or might not be the sun.
We need to find that mechanism.
Bob Tisdale says:
March 19, 2011 at 3:28 pm
Leif says: “…and now it seems that even mainstream solar physics is embracing the notion that perhaps there is no such background variation.”
Maybe we should start a pool to see how long it takes for climatologists to accept it.
They are still using the obsolete Hoyt and Schatten TSI in their models.
According to this:
Climate Realists Article
http://climaterealists.com/7360
AUDIO BOOK JOSEPH A OLSON
Joseph Olson, live on the DMZ…the Dennis Miller radio program
Thursday, March 10th 2011, 5:22 PM EST
This is what was said re CO2:
CO2 toxicity.
NASA, when they were getting ready to put a fire-suppression system in the space shuttle and in the space stations…tested carbon dioxide…they saw no measurable side-effects in concentrations less than eighty-thousand parts-per-million. The air has three-hundred-and-ninety parts-per-million. We inhale that three-hundred-and-ninety…we exhale forty-thousand parts-per-million.
HenryP says:
March 19, 2011 at 1:27 pm
Henry, I agree with most of what you say, but this statement is dangerously wrong, so I have to point it out. High concentrations of oxygen will cause severe problems – the body starts ‘burning’ (that is what we do with the stuff, but slowly). The first organ to go is the most sensitive, the eyes. After that, I am not sure, but it is NOT good.
If breathing is a problem, the concentrations can be upped to 90% or more, but you must have constant monitoring on the levels on the blood.
The papers of interest are here
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3772.1?journalCode=clim
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL046712.shtml
John Day says:
March 19, 2011 at 3:30 pm
You may be right, Leif. But Man is a rule-making animal, and the coincidence of “it got cold” and “the sunspots dimmed” …
It is rather that Man is by evolution conditioned to believe in false positives: “is that a tiger in the shadows?”, RUN. Even it it is not 99% of the time, the 1% it is and running [believing the false positive] saves his life thus improves his chances of reproducing, etc.
R.Gates = Troll.
“Tell me how much phase change to water there is going on in the middle of Antarctica? When the earth turns to a Snowball Earth, there’s very little phase change going on, and very little weather going on. Your assertion that water is the overpowering influence on climate (i.e. driver of climate) is not supported by any science. Or perhaps, you’re confusing weather and climate…”
___________
1)Antarctic phase change: surface, solid to vapor, vapor to solid. Under ice, liquid to solid, solid to liquid. (I understand it gets cold enough for even CO2 to precipitate.)
2)I thought the scare du jour was “warming”. (From CO2 that is.)
3)”Coldening” is so retro 1970’s, man. (change subject)
4)”…and very little weather going on.” There is ALWAYS weather going on weather you like the weather or not. (sheesh. Idiocy.)
5)Climate regimes are described in terms of biomes to which the major contributing factor is annual total rain fall/precipitation. There is no “global” climate. It is local.
6)Weather is not climate. Temperature is not climate either.
R. Gates says:
March 19, 2011 at 2:05 pm
You should talk to real people who work in elevated CO2 atmospheres. You can work (and I have done so alongside many other miners) in atmospheres of 2% CO2 with no more ill effects than a good nights rest will cure. That’s with the current OSHA limit of 19% O2. Even 17% O2 is workable, and I did it for many months in a shaft doing repair work. The displacing gas was CO2 at 4%. You are getting all worked up over .03% (300 ppm).
Take note: Underground mining is incredibly hard work… and dangerous.
I double dare anyone to go check it out at a real underground mine.
I had my 19 years of it, thank you, but if you need directions to find one….
RGates: “Milankovitch cycles are pretty much taken as a background…”
Sunshine hours has nothing to do with TSI or Milankovich. It is a measurement of how much bright sunshine is actually striking the earth. There have been large decadal changes in those values. The amount of energy differential between bright sunshine and clouds can be 200,300,400 W/sqm depending on time of year and where you are.
Just for the heck of it I looked at Heathrow’s Sunshine Hours which they started collecting in 1957:
Decade – Sunshine Hours Total
1960s – 14555.7
1970s – 15118.6
1980s – 15264.4
1990s – 16801.9
2000s – 16776.8
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/heathrowdata.txt
Not a small change. 2200 hours or so per decade change from the 1960s to the 1990s/2000s. 220 hours per year more.
Thats a lot of energy.
Leif Svalgaard says:
March 19, 2011 at 4:08 pm
I like that, Leif. Prepare your stores for the coming crop failures, even if they don’t hit.
Why risk it?
R. Gates says:
March 19, 2011 at 1:53 pm
Tell me how much phase change to water there is going on in the middle of Antarctica? When the earth turns to a Snowball Earth, there’s very little phase change going on, and very little weather going on. Your assertion that water is the overpowering influence on climate (i.e. driver of climate) is not supported by any science. Or perhaps, you’re confusing weather and climate…
See the following from which the quote is taken:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Antarctica
“All of these studies have found slight warming in the earliest portion of the record (circa 1957–1965). Since the mid-1960s, all major studies have reported cooling over most of Antarctica.”
We are being told that CO2 would exert its greatest influence in the polar regions since there is so little water vapor to compete with the absorption bands of CO2. From the above quote, it appears as if all the extra CO2 is affecting neither the weather nor the climate in Antarctica since it is more than 30 years since the mid-1960s.
Earlier you wrote: “Without that little non-condensing trace gas CO2, all the water vapor in the atmosphere would condense out and we’d return to the snowball earth of 700 million years ago.” Well CO2 has not done much to keep water vapor in the air above Antarctica. It seems to me that whether or not water vapor condenses out has much more to do with the temperature of the air rather than the CO2 concentration.
Note for Anthony, and Dr. Svalgaard:
Sudden cooling during the Maunder minimum can be best verified against the CET records, the only reasonably reliable temperature record/reconstruction for the period.
Drastic drop in the temperatures only happened in the second half of the MM, and lasted only short period of about 15 yeas. Subsequent rapid rise in temperatures was unprecedented and has not been matched since.
This temperature fall-rise sequence may be partly due to do with the solar activity, however there is strong possibility, that it was mainly due to a perfectly natural process controlling the North Atlantic Ocean currents.
Results of my research are shown in here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NAP.htm
More detailed explanation with relevant data is in the review process for publishing.
Mosher:
“1. the % of sunshine hours is not well sampled over the entire globe.
2. the instruments used in the past are subject to observer errors that are in the
neighborhood of an order of magnitude.
3. sunshine, as measured by a cambell stokes, is a function of humidity as well.
4. Sunshine is an effect. That is, the amount of sunshine is modulated by clouds
and aerosols. Thats why we look at the total spectrum.”
1) There are hundreds of weather stations that do measure sunshine hours. Just because it isn’t standard at all sites does not mean it shouldn’t be. It is the main energy added to our climate. It can be measured. if it isn’t it is a fatal flaw in climate measuring.
2) Not an order of magnitude. Thats a gross exageration. The evidence I have is that modern pyranometer can be out (by WMO standard) 20 minutes a day and the Campbell Stokes can be out by 55 minutes a day.
3) If you say so, but isn’t humidity (a GHG) measured? If it isn’t, it is just another fatal flaw. I mean, if you don’t measure the core items that change climate, don’t then claim “It isn’t x,y or z that causes temperature, it must be CO2 because we don’t measure x,y and z.” Dumb argument.
4) Clouds can be high, low and of different thickness. The papers I read clearly state Clouds are not the inverse of sunshine and vice versa. Fromt he Ebro paper:
“It is surprising that a statistically significant increase
in cloudiness is not accompanied by a simultaneous
decrease in sunshine at Ebro Observatory over the past
century. The explanation may lie in a change in the
proportions of the cloud types. We have shown how high
clouds, less dense and optically more transparent than
low clouds, have increased during the last part of the
century, with perhaps little effect on the sunshine records.”
http://www.iac.es/folleto/research/preprints/files/PP08038.pdf
http://i53.tinypic.com/30l32o5.jpg
vukcevic, thanks for the CET Sunshine/Temp graph.
Someone else did one from 1929 on (graph #3 at bottom)
http://www.halesowenweather.co.uk/cet_sunshine.htm
Some Alpine sunshine hourswhere sunshine hours were hitting 160% of normal around 1990.
http://i54.tinypic.com/30auot1.jpg
From this paper (with Briff and Jones as co-authors): http://coast.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/storch/pdf/Auer.histalp.2007.pdf
I think Briffa and Jones missed the huge jump in sunshine hours. Or left out the graph comparing sunshine hours to temperature.
wsbriggs (March 19, 2011 at 2:46 pm ), in response to R. Gates, exclaims:
Regardless of where one stands on the issue of AGW, I believe this type of comment, which seems to crop up quite regularly at various sites, brings the discussion to the nadir.
eadler says:
Smokey ,
Your beliefs are nonsense. The science which indicates that CO2 is important is well established and has been understood for 111 years. It is clear that you don’t understand what John Tyndall discovered in 1859, the role greenhouse gases, and their radiation absorption spectra, have in controlling the earth’s temperature. John Tyndall demonstrated the absorption spectra of GHG’s in 1859, and explained how they reduced the loss of heat, especially in the night time.
OK, let’s teach eadler some facts about Tyndall: first, he did not prove anything about CO2 absorption. His equipment was far too primitive to distinguish between absorption, reflection, refraction, diffusion, scattering or anything else. He wrongly concluded that all energy missing between the source and the pile in his incompetent experiments had been absorbed by CO2.
Most importantly, Tyndall ignored Kirchhoff’s Law. The conservation of energy falsifies the “greenhouse effect” because Kirchhoff’s Law states: that which absorbs, equally emits. Tyndall either did not know about Kirchoff’s Law, or he ignored it.
Anyone who quotes John Tyndall as the man who proved the “physics” of the “greenhouse effect” displays ignorance. It is the fallacy of appealing to an ignorant authority.
Arrhenius, OTOH, did have some valid points, and when he saw that his 1896 paper [the one every alarmist quotes] was invalid, he wrote a new paper in 1906 drastically lowering climate sensitivity to CO2 to only ≈1.5°C — far lower than the UN/IPCC’s claims of up to 6°C, or even more [which was Arrhenius’ 1896 estimate]. eadler says:
…Arrhenius was forced to make some simplifying assumptions in order to complete his calculation, the magnitude of the effect he predicted is close to what scientists are predicting today with the aid of supercomputers.
So why do we need supercomputers? IIRC, Willis has a very simple model that accurately predicts about 98% of the warming. eadler continues:
In the light of this knowledge and its extensive history, it is you who needs to justify your denial of the basic principles of climate science. Your objections are really unbelievable.
eadler can believe or not believe. But his appeal to the authority of Arrhenius leads here. To get eadler up to speed on Arrhenius, this would be a good place for him to begin.
Billybob.
google sunshine duration. start reading the documents, I’ll suggest the WMO document to start
Ian: ” It’s as if Goebbels has been giving classes to the Warmists. A big lie repeated often enough comes to be believed. 75/25 my [snip].
“Regardless of where one stands on the issue of AGW, I believe this type of comment, which seems to crop up quite regularly at various sites, brings the discussion to the nadir.”
Afraid I have to agree. But maybe we could reference Joe Isuzu…?
I find this exchange worth noting:
Leif Svalgaard responds (March 19, 2011 at 2:42 pm) to Stephen Wilde: (March 19, 2011 at 2:29 pm)
Stephen: “So all the climate changes we have seen are most likely natural with CO2 being an unmeasurably small contributor.”
Leif: “Just as unmeasurable as the solar influence.”
dp says:
March 19, 2011 at 2:41 pm
RGates said:
To think that this rise in CO2, to levels not seen in over 800,000 years, will not affect the climate at all, seems a bit…presumptuous.
“To think it does and to be unable to prove it is equally presumptuous, is it not?”
Yes, it is the classic fallacy of “arguing in a circle.” RGates assumes in his premise what he sets out to prove.