Guest post by David Archibald
Dr Svalgaard has an interesting annotation on his chart of solar parameters – “Welcome to solar max”:
Graphic source: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
Could it be? It seems that Solar Cycle 24 had only just begun, with solar minimum only two and a half years ago in December 2008.
The first place to confirm that is the solar polar magnetic field strength, with data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory:
Source: http://wso.stanford.edu/
The magnetic poles of the Sun reverse at solar maximum. The northern field has reversed. There are only three prior reversals in the instrument record. Another parameter that would confirm solar maximum is the heliospheric current sheet tilt angle, also from the WSO site.
The heliospheric current sheet tilt angle has taken a couple of years to reach solar maximum from its current level.
If the Sun is anywhere near solar maximum, the significance of that is that it would be the first time in the record that a short cycle was also a weak cycle, though Usoskin et al in 2009 proposed a short, asymmetric cycle in the late 18th century at the beginning of the Dalton Minimum: http://climate.arm.ac.uk/publications/arlt2.pdf
Interestingly, Ed Fix (paper in press) generated a solar model (based on forces that dare not speak their name) which predicts two consecutive, weak solar cycles, each eight years long:
The green line is the solar cycle record with alternate cycles reversed. The red line is the model output. Solar Cycles 19 to 23 are annotated.
This model has the next solar maximum in 2013 and minimum only four years later in 2017. This outcome is possible based on the Sun’s behaviour to date.
Well thankfully the GCM’s picked this spot on……..
otherwise I just might’ve become a tad sceptical…..
Alan the Brit says:
May 8, 2011 at 4:04 am
…….
I think that the claim that solar variation is not sufficiently large to account for the MWP, LIA, modern warming period, etc, is most likely correct.
Since oceans absorb huge amount of energy I think that:
Energy in = Energy out but only if integrated over period spanning centuries.
Oceans behave in a manner resembling to a Galileo’s thermometer; but what makes them do that is an idea I’ve been working on for some time now (about 60-70% of work is completed).
Mike McMillan says:
Don’t worry Mike, we’ve nearly doubled CO2 thanks to industrial emissions, that’s about 30% more food under similar conditions of heat and moisture. Oh, hang on, they’re trying to tax us into the stone age to stop us boosting the world’s plant growth. Panic Mike!!!
Leif Svalgaard says: May 8, 2011 at 2:02 am
Bob the swiss says: May 8, 2011 at 1:12 am
The sun is the main climate driver (with volcanos). It has been and it’s still the case today.
No, the Earth’s orbit and axis orientation are.
Yes, main driver for long term ice age and interglacial. I’m more a fan of those effects getting a boost from volcanic activity or lack thereof. A similar boost coined the phrase, “1800 and frozen to death”.
I have a simple theory. The Sun is ultimately responsible for all the global warming or cooling we experience.. period. Anything we do here on our little planet may trap a little heat for a while, but ultimately it will be given up to space.
If the Sun’s output goes down, we will cool. If it goes up, we will warm. It may take a while, but it will happen. It’s like a diet. If you consume more calories than you burn, you will gain weight and vice versa.
Alan the Brit says:
You are (intentionally?) missing the point. The Sun is a churning ball of plasma with strong magnetic currents. Despite the relative masses , it is not unreasonable to suggest that nearby massive bodies and magnetic fields may interact with the Sun to produce small perturbation in the surface activity. Sun spots are small perturbation in the surface activity and are known to affect climate.
Our severely limited knowledge of what happens inside the Sun makes it difficult to formulate a mechanism and chaotic activity makes it hard to spot a simple correlation. To that extent it remains “astrology” to some, however the proposition is not unreasonable.
Two short cycles would be expected if we assume that the solar cycles develop like an interference of two sinusoidal curves with similar, but not identical frequencies; resulting in a beat. The moment the beat occurs one extra pass through zero happens.
Dave (UK) says:
May 8, 2011 at 2:54 am
“If the extended solar minimum of Cycle 23 was the cause of the severe winters we’ve had these past two or three years, the next Cycle could result in a series of winters more like that of ’63. ”
Even if there were similar external conditions I think a ’63-like event is unlikely since we are starting from a warmer climate that at that time.
No way we’re there already. Unpossible…
“If the Sun’s output goes down, we will cool. If it goes up, we will warm. It may take a while, but it will happen. It’s like a diet. If you consume more calories than you burn, you will gain weight and vice versa.”
Rising CO2 is like eating slightly more cake each day.
Its mainly both, obviously sun and earth tilt etc.
Mike McMillan says:
May 8, 2011 at 12:23 am
Newman in 1980 determined that corn growing conditions shifted 144 km per degree C. The good news for the US is that the total corn growing area doesn’t change much, it just shifts about 300 km south. The rest of the world is not so good. Canada’s wheat crop will be wiped out by the 2 degree drop reducing the growing season by 30 days.
Newman, J. E. (1980). Climate change impacts on the growing season of the North American Corn Belt. Biometeorology, 7 (2), 128-142.
Leif Svalgaard says:
May 8, 2011 at 1:59 am
NeilM says:
May 8, 2011 at 1:45 am
“(based on forces that dare not speak their name)” ???
Anyone care to enlighten me?
Astrology…
Coupled with Dynamology.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif
The sunspot Butterfly diagram suggests SC 24 maximum is not even close.
onion2 says:
May 8, 2011 at 6:08 am
“Rising CO2 is like eating slightly more cake each day.”
And where’s the postulated, never observed, positive water vapor feedback that the AGW scientists need to maintain their catastrophe predictions in your cake analogy?
“Update, or Lack Thereof, to the Solar Cycle 24 Prediction”
Doug Biesecker, NOAA/SWPC
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sww/SWW_2011_Presentations/Fri_1030/Biesecker_SolarCycle24.ppt
[i was looking for what else might be recent from NASA or NOAA and found the above… google ask it was just upload “1 day ago”]
This is a highly non-rigourous idea that I tried recently. The methodology is questionable but the result is intersting enough to have a look at.
The idea came as an experiment to see how misleading the IPCCs arbitrary selection of “last 50y of 20th century” was as a period to focus on. (Round number don’t count as a reason in science). It turns out that choice fits their argument perfectly but is not representative.
First I calculated the linear trend for all the possible 50 year periods for HadCrut3 data and plotted the 50 year slopes against the *start* of the 50 year period.
It should be noted that this process itself is transforming the data and the form of the output is quite dependant on the length of the filter. (slopes or around 30 years gives a similar form but with triangular rather than sinusoidal profile).
Anyway, I so struck by the simplicity of the graph that I decided to fit a cosine plus linear trend. It was not perfect but is was a very close fit. So I decided to integrate the function analytically and reconstruct the temperature record from it.
Here’s the reconstructed trends
based on that simple empirical model of the Hadley/CRU data.
It is purely based on the *form* of the data , no physical model or assumptions made.
I don’t think it can be taken too seriously as a predictive model , although I’d give it better odds than a lot of current climate models which failed in the first tens years of extrapolation. 😉
I do not think the form of the 50 years slopes is can be just a coincidence or an artefact of selective filtering, so there is something to made from a closer look.
Here’s the fitted cosine + linear model of the 50 year LSQ slopes.
P. Solar says:
May 8, 2011 at 5:53 am
Even if there were similar external conditions I think a ’63-like event is unlikely since we are starting from a warmer climate that at that time.
Unless I’m mis-remembering the stats from last century, the temperature gains in the 20th Century have been reversed by the cooling of the past decade. So, are we starting a new solar cycle with a warmer climate than ’63?
R Babcock says: (May 8, 2011 at 5:42 am)
“It’s like a diet. If you consume more calories than you burn, you will gain weight and vice versa.”
Unfortunately your example implies an unlimited amount of calorie consumption along with an unlimited amount of calorie burning. Let’s refine it by giving the consumption a fixed amount, much like the Sun which varies little. A 3000 daily calorie consumption will mean weight gain to someone who only burns 2000 calories a day but will mean weight loss for someone who burns 4000 calories a day. The intake is fixed (Sun’s energy) and the variables are completely outside the influence of the intake (Earth’s shape, it’s inclination and it’s orbit). So while the Sun establishes the parameters of climate, slight changes in solar output are swamped by other factors that have nothing to do with the Sun itself.
Total Solar Irradiance from the SORCE instrument is showing a normal solar cycle ramp-up and it didn’t really decline at solar minimum beyond that which would be expected.
SORCE is showing nothing unusual happening in TSI other than than cycle 23 was a little longer than normal.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_640x480.png
The total energy being directed at Earth is changing by such small amounts (a change of +/- 0.4 watts/m2 at the TOA – remember we divide that by 4 for a rotating sphere and 30% of it is just reflected away anyway) so it should make no difference to Earth temperatures.
It needs to change by 10 to 40 times more than that to cause Little Ice Age conditions.
NeilM says:
May 8, 2011 at 1:45 am
Likely solar tides due to planets and/or barycenter stuff. Those rankle the continuum here enough that Anthony has banished them to the ether. You are welcome to discuss them at RealClimate.
From my layman’s perspective the butterfly diagram that Edim posted earlier:
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif
provides good evidence to suggest that solar maximum is still some way off.
Anyone care to comment? Vuk? Leif? Tallbloke? (glad to see you’re still around).
P.Solar on modelling HadCRUT3: you should take a look at Scafetta (2010), which has an excellent fit to two cosines (periods 20 and 60 years) plus a quadratic.
Rich.
“If Ed Fix’s prediction fails it would mean that the ‘theory’ behind it has also failed”
The IPCC GHG models failed to predict that warming would level off in 1999. Does this mean the GHG theory behind them has also failed?