THE DEMISE OF SUNSPOTS—DEEP COOLING AHEAD?
Don J. Easterbrook, Professor of Geology, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA
The three studies released by NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network this week, predicting the virtual vanishing of sunspots for the next several decades and the possibility of a solar minimum similar to the Maunder Minimum, came as stunning news. According to Frank Hill,
“the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.”
The last time sunspots vanished from the sun for decades was during the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1700 AD was marked by drastic cooling of the climate and the maximum cold of the Little Ice Age.
What happened the last time sunspots disappeared?
Abundant physical evidence from the geologic past provides a record of former periods of global cooling. Geologic records provide clear evidence of past global cooling so we can use them to project global climate into the future—the past is the key to the future. So what can we learn from past sunspot history and climate change?
Galileo’s perfection of the telescope in 1609 allowed scientists to see sunspots for the first time. From 1610 A.D. to 1645 A.D., very few sunspots were seen, despite the fact that many scientists with telescopes were looking for them, and from 1645 to 1700 AD sunspots virtually disappeared from the sun (Fig. 1). During this interval of greatly reduced sunspot activity, known as the Maunder Minimum, global climates turned bitterly cold (the Little Ice Age), demonstrating a clear correspondence between sunspots and cool climate. After 1700 A.D., the number of observed sunspots increased sharply from nearly zero to more than 50 (Fig. 1) and the global climate warmed.
The Maunder Minimum was not the beginning of The Little Ice Age—it actually began about 1300 AD—but it marked perhaps the bitterest part of the cooling. Temperatures dropped ~4º C (~7 º F) in ~20 years in mid-to high latitudes. The colder climate that ensued for several centuries was devastating. The population of Europe had become dependent on cereal grains as their main food supply during the Medieval Warm Period and when the colder climate, early snows, violent storms, and recurrent flooding swept Europe, massive crop failures occurred. Winters in Europe were bitterly cold, and summers were rainy and too cool for growing cereal crops, resulting in widespread famine and disease. About a third of the population of Europe perished.
Glaciers all over the world advanced and pack ice extended southward in the North Atlantic. Glaciers in the Alps advanced and overran farms and buried entire villages. The Thames River and canals and rivers of the Netherlands frequently froze over during the winter. New York Harbor froze in the winter of 1780 and people could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing many harbors. The population of Iceland decreased by half and the Viking colonies in Greenland died out in the 1400s because they could no longer grow enough food there. In parts of China, warm weather crops that had been grown for centuries were abandoned. In North America, early European settlers experienced exceptionally severe winters.
So what can we learn from the Maunder? Perhaps most important is that the Earth’s climate is related to sunspots. The cause of this relationship is not understood, but it definitely exists. The second thing is that cooling of the climate during sunspot minima imposes great suffering on humans—global cooling is much more damaging than global warming.
Global cooling during other sunspot minima
The global cooling that occurred during the Maunder Minimum was neither the first nor the only such event. The Maunder was preceded by the Sporer Minimum (~1410–1540 A.D.) and the Wolf Minimum (~1290–1320 A.D.) and succeeded by the Dalton Minimum (1790–1830), the unnamed 1880–1915 minima, and the unnamed 1945–1977 Minima (Fig. 2). Each of these periods is characterized by low numbers of sunspots, cooler global climates, and changes in the rate of production of 14C and 10Be in the upper atmosphere. As shown in Fig. 2, each minimum was a time of global cooling, recorded in the advance of alpine glaciers.
The same relationship between sunspots and temperature is also seen between sunspot numbers and temperatures in Greenland and Antarctica (Fig. 3). Each of the four minima in sunspot numbers seen in Fig. 3 also occurs in Fig. 2. All of them correspond to advances of alpine glaciers during each of the cool periods.
Figure 4 shows the same pattern between solar variation and temperature. Temperatures were cooler during each solar minima.
What can we learn from this historic data? Clearly, a strong correlation exists between solar variation and temperature. Although this correlation is too robust to be merely coincidental, exactly how solar variation are translated into climatic changes on Earth is not clear. For many years, solar scientists considered variation in solar irradiance to be too small to cause significant climate changes. However, Svensmark (Svensmark and Calder, 2007; Svensmark and Friis-Christensen, 1997; Svensmark et al., 2007) has proposed a new concept of how the sun may impact Earth’s climate. Svensmark recognized the importance of cloud generation as a result of ionization in the atmosphere caused by cosmic rays. Clouds reflect incoming sunlight and tend to cool the Earth. The amount of cosmic radiation is greatly affected by the sun’s magnetic field, so during times of weak solar magnetic field, more cosmic radiation reaches the Earth. Thus, perhaps variation in the intensity of the solar magnetic field may play an important role in climate change.
Are we headed for another Little Ice Age?
In 1999, the year after the high temperatures of the 1998 El Nino, I became convinced that geologic data of recurring climatic cycles (ice core isotopes, glacial advances and retreats, and sun spot minima) showed conclusively that we were headed for several decades of global cooling and presented a paper to that effect (Fig. 5). The evidence for this conclusion was presented in a series of papers from 2000 to 2011 (The data are available in several GSA papers, my website, a 2010 paper, and in a paper scheduled to be published in Sept 2011). The evidence consisted of temperature data from isotope analyses in the Greenland ice cores, the past history of the PDO, alpine glacial fluctuations, and the abrupt Pacific SST flips from cool to warm in 1977 and from warm to cool in 1999. Projection of the PDO to 2040 forms an important part of this cooling prediction.
Figure 5. Projected temperature changes to 2040 AD. Three possible scenarios are shown: (1) cooling similar to the 1945-1977 cooling, cooling similar to the 1880-1915 cooling, and cooling similar to the Dalton Minimum (1790-1820). Cooling similar to the Maunder Minimum would be an extension of the Dalton curve off the graph.
So far, my cooling prediction seems to be coming to pass, with no global warming above the 1998 temperatures and a gradually deepening cooling since then. However, until now, I have suggested that it was too early to tell which of these possible cooling scenarios were most likely. If we are indeed headed toward a disappearance of sunspots similar to the Maunder Minimum during the Little Ice Age then perhaps my most dire prediction may come to pass. As I have said many times over the past 10 years, time will tell whether my prediction is correct or not. The announcement that sun spots may disappear totally for several decades is very disturbing because it could mean that we are headed for another Little Ice Age during a time when world population is predicted to increase by 50% with sharply increasing demands for energy, food production, and other human needs. Hardest hit will be poor countries that already have low food production, but everyone would feel the effect of such cooling. The clock is ticking. Time will tell!
References
D’Aleo, J., Easterbrook, D.J., 2010. Multidecadal tendencies in Enso and global temperatures related to multidecadal oscillations: Energy & Environment, vol. 21 (5), p. 436–460.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2000, Cyclical oscillations of Mt. Baker glaciers in response to climatic changes and their correlation with periodic oceanographic changes in the Northeast Pacific Ocean: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 32, p.17.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2001, The next 25 years; global warming or global cooling? Geologic and oceanographic evidence for cyclical climatic oscillations: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 33, p.253.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2005, Causes and effects of late Pleistocene, abrupt, global, climate changes and global warming: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 37, p.41.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2006, Causes of abrupt global climate changes and global warming; predictions for the coming century: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 38, p. 77.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2006, The cause of global warming and predictions for the coming century: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 38, p.235-236.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2007, Geologic evidence of recurring climate cycles and their implications for the cause of global warming and climate changes in the coming century: Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, vol. 39, p. 507.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2007, Late Pleistocene and Holocene glacial fluctuations; implications for the cause of abrupt global climate changes: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 39, p.594
Easterbrook, D.J., 2007, Younger Dryas to Little Ice Age glacier fluctuations in the Fraser Lowland and on Mt. Baker, Washington: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 39, p.11.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2007, Historic Mt. Baker glacier fluctuations—geologic evidence of the cause of global warming: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 39, p. 13.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2008, Solar influence on recurring global, decadal, climate cycles recorded by glacial fluctuations, ice cores, sea surface temperatures, and historic measurements over the past millennium: Abstracts of American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting, San Francisco.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2008, Implications of glacial fluctuations, PDO, NAO, and sun spot cycles for global climate in the coming decades: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 40, p. 428.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2008, Correlation of climatic and solar variations over the past 500 years and predicting global climate changes from recurring climate cycles: Abstracts of 33rd International Geological Congress, Oslo, Norway.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2009, The role of the oceans and the Sun in late Pleistocene and historic glacial and climatic fluctuations: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 41, p. 33.
Eddy, J.A., 1976, The Maunder Minimum: Science, vol. 192, p. 1189–1202.
Hoyt, D.V. and Schatten, K.H., 1997, The Role of the sun in climate change: Oxford University, 279 p.
Svensmark, H. and Calder, N., 2007, The chilling stars: A new theory of climate change: Icon Books, Allen and Unwin Pty Ltd, 246 p.
Svensmark, H. and Friis-Christensen, E., 1997, Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverda missing link in solar–climate relationships: Journal of Atmospheric and SolareTerrestrial Physics, vol. 59, p. 1125–1132.
Svensmark, H., Pedersen, J.O., Marsh, N.D., Enghoff, M.B., and Uggerhøj, U.I., 2007, Experimental evidence for the role of ions in particle nucleation under atmospheric conditions: Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. 463, p. 385–396.
Usoskin, I.G., Mursula, K., Solanki, S.K., Schussler, M., and Alanko, K., 2004, Reconstruction of solar activity for the last millenium using 10Be data: Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. 413, p. 745–751.
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UPDATE: Bob Tisdale has posted a rebuttal. Here is what he has to say via email.
Hi Anthony: The following is a link to my notes on the Easterbrook post:
We should have progressed beyond using outdated TSI datasets, misrepresenting the PDO, and creating bogus global temperature graphs in our arguments against AGW.
I’ve advised Easterbrook, and we’ll see what he has to say – Anthony
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How does Svensmark move from the simple assertion that cloudiness increases when the sun is quiet to the observed changes in surface pressure distribution and changes in jetstream behaviour ?
His concept is curiously incomplete in my humble opinion.
Steeptown says:
June 17, 2011 at 5:07 am
“The real question is how quickly it could happen.”
In my humble opinion, it has been happening for a few years. St. Louis has suffered some horrendously bitter winters in recent years, reminiscent of 1976-1979. Their temperatures remain below “normal.” Arguments from Global Average Temperature are arguments from fictional premisses.
Don K says:
June 17, 2011 at 5:41 am
“But still, the climate of the Little Ice Age couldn’t have been dramatically awful or Europeans would not have colonized New England and the Hudson River valley.”
Interesting observation but a tad subjective. Have you visited Toronto in February? Seems to me that no rational people would colonize it today.
Don
I found your article very interesting and I am concerned by what appears to be a slumbering sun. That said, I do not understand how people are prepared to make such far reaching statements with such certainty attached to those statements when neither cause nor effect is (well) known or understood.
For example, you correctly note that “The Maunder Minimum was not the beginning of The Little Ice Age—it actually began about 1300 AD” Given that statement, it is difficult to see how you can make such a bold statement as “So what can we learn from the Maunder? Perhaps most important is that the Earth’s climate is related to sunspots. The cause of this relationship is not understood, but it definitely exists.”
Does it definitely exist? How many examples would one wish to see between a quiet sun and low temperatures on Earth before one would say that there is a correlation and this correlation is significant? I agree that presently the cause of any relationship (if there is truely a relationship) is not understood and that being the case all one can say is that a relationship may exist.
I am not saying that there is not a correlation between these two event or that a quiet sun will not lead to cooler temperatures on Earth. It is just that I am uncertain and being sceptical of the AGW theorem, I am also sceptical of bold pronouncements such as those set out in your Article (other than I fully agree that cold is bad and that cold is much more of a concern to mankind). .
One challenge here, as much as I support the general concept……
Solar cycle 19, which peaked in 1957-58, was the highest in modern records.
“BargHumer says:
I see a problem here in that the “Warmists” have been handed a big “get out of jail free” card because the fact that the climate cools is linked strongly to sunspots, but their “AGW” problem still exists so that when the climate recovers, all that extra CO2 will make us heat up again rather quickly, and fry!”
No, this is not true, see my previous comment. GHGs retain heat, heating will not accelerate faster because of them once SW absorption picks back up.
The cooling would hide the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect isn’t turned off and the turned back on.
In 2002 Micheal E. Mann also wrote about the little ice age. If you google “Little Ice Age Michael E. Mann” you can find the pdf. In it he talks about increased variability of climate for example “A severe winter preceded the hot summer that precipitated the great fire of London in 1666”. He has in interesting chart showing that “peak maximun cooling occurred at quite different times throughout the Northern Hemisphere”. At the end he of course has to add “This unusual period in climate history occurred before the likely influence of human activity (e.g,. the burning of fossil fuels associated with the industrial revolution).” No matter what you think of him, it’s an interesting read.
A torturous cause and effect should be avoided if a simple, clear, and strong cause and effect is at hand. Earth is a highly variable planet in its own right and has the energy chops to make global warming and cooling occur without need of a varying Sun or varying CO2 equation. And even then, the potential driving force of a varying Sun or varying CO2 is much smaller than the very noisy planet we live on.
Here in the Northwest, USA, we are having record cold temps. And the driving force is clearly the cold pool of water off our coastline, compliments of La Nina’s fickle and long appearance, driven to this state by the oscillating trade winds.
With regards to the relationship between climate and solar activity – is it possible that the sun’s influence on drastic cooling and warming are not equal. I see a lot of effort from the AGW side to illustrate a lack of solar influence on warming, and on this side the fairly evidence of the sun’s role in the drastic cooling of the LIA.
C Porter says:
June 17, 2011 at 5:07 am
If we are now able to predict a solar sunspot minimum in advance of its occurrence, perhaps we should also be allowed to name it in advance of its arrival. Not withstanding the rights of the scientists who proposed its existence to name it, I propose that the readers of WUWT may wish to make a few suggestions.
My contribution is “The Climate Stupidity Minimum”
How about Jim Hansen’s Folly??
This might knock some sense into the alarmists.
No. It won’t.
Their fanatical belief will not be upset by a few “crackpot theories.”
Tallbloke writes “The numerical model I created”
How did you validated your model? Have you used it to predict the future, and then compared the predicted results with what actually happend? If you have done this, do your predicted results agree tihe the observed data? And have you done this a sufficient number of times so that the agreement could not be coincidental, at the 5 sd level? If you have not, then I suspect what you model predicts is not worth the powder to blow it to hell.
“Interesting observation but a tad subjective. Have you visited Toronto in February? Seems to me that no rational people would colonize it today.”
I live in one of the colder parts of New England — about 80 km SSE of Montreal. Toronto is kind of warm by comparison. People managed to grow crops here and North of here in Lower Canada in the 18th Century. Quebec City was founded in 1608, so farming there must have been practical even in the early 17th Century. What held up settlement in this part of the US wasn’t the climate — dreadful though it was and is. It was the fact that the area was a no-mans land between the French in the St Lawrence Valley and the British in the Connecticut and Hudson valleys — not to mention the Iroquois Confederation and the Algonquin who did not live together in harmony.
David Wright says:
June 17, 2011 at 4:50 am
“Correlation is not causation.” I don’t know how many times I have come across that phrase on this site, but it’s a lot.
+1 and it rubs both ways, we have 2 competing or mutally opposite theories, only hard evidence will show if only one or both are true. If temps drop its the sun, if thay rise then its CO2, if temps flatline then both are true.
Moderate Republican says:
June 17, 2011 at 5:19 am
Then why did the CIA write a report in 1974 saying that “The western world’s leading climatologist’s have confirmed recent reports of a detrimental global climate change.” ie cooling if it was not true?
Why would these people say in the same report say we were returning to the climate of 400 years ago?
Even the NAS and NOAA in a 1975 Newsweek article point out a drop in temperature. It was not a myth.
Jim Cripwell says:
June 17, 2011 at 6:02 am
jim,
you are right about caution. anything we think and say will probably wrong, in the light of better data and models in the future.
Me thinks that applies to CAGW as well. and politicians making pricipitous action based on this half baked CAGW theory with unknown amount of faked data could be the real catastrophe
As you read through the predictions of colder years ahead keep in mind that Florida has no state income tax and real estate is VERY cheap right now.
“Everyone in IPCC WG3 should be terminated.”
Steve McIntyre, http://climateaudit.org/2011/06/14/ipcc-wg3-and-the-greenpeace-karaoke/ .
But a return to warming may also be down to the Sun? They dismiss the Sun when warming but are happy to embrace it should we enter another Little Ice Age. Having your cake and eating it.
Few people have the training or the inclination to think about time and climate on a geologic scale. Many AGW proponents remind us of this fact daily–as their discussion focusses on the here and now, and what their models predict for the future. For them, the past is an inconvenience (but nothing that a liberal sprinkling of AGW pixie dust can’t clear up).
IF the solar bubbas are right, and we’re in for a prolonged (by our scale) sun slumber, and IF Professor Easterbrook and others are correct in what that might mean in consequences, then the post-LIA warming may come to be regarded as an anomaly–a slight, temporary, uptick on some future climatologist’s graph.
Don J. Easterbrook wrote: “The evidence consisted of temperature data from isotope analyses in the Greenland ice cores, the past history of the PDO, alpine glacial fluctuations, and the abrupt Pacific SST flips from cool to warm in 1977 and from warm to cool in 1999. Projection of the PDO to 2040 forms an important part of this cooling prediction.”
Since the PDO does not represent the Sea Surface Temperature of the North Pacific, your prediction is flawed. The following is a graph of North Pacific SST anomalies, north of 20N, which is the area from which the PDO (the 1st Principle Component of the detrended SST anomalies of that area) is derived. There’s no flip “from warm to cool in 1999”. In reality, SST anomalies there appear to have peaked in 2004:
http://i54.tinypic.com/4uyn4j.jpg
And here’s a graph of the SST anomalies for the North Pacific north of the equator. There’s no flip from “warm to cool in 1999” there either. Like the subset above, the SST anomalies of the North Pacific may have peaked in 2004:
http://i52.tinypic.com/23kaws2.jpg
Also, how did you create the unusual global temperature graph in Figure 5? It appears that the data before the 1997/98 El Niño has been smoothed with a multiyear filter, and after that, you’ve spliced on some unknown data smoothed with a 12-month filter. It really appears contrived, especially the significant response to the 1998/99/00/01 La Niña . Global temperatures did NOT drop back that far. Here’s a comparison of the IPCC multi-model mean for global surface temperatures and Global HADCRUT surface temperature anomaly data. I’ve used HADCRUT because it has the lowest trend of the surface temperature datasets after the 1997/98 El Niño. Both of the datasets are readily available through the KNMI Climate Explorer:
http://i52.tinypic.com/14dk2yr.jpg
The actual dip in global surface temperatures after the 1997/98 El Niño is nowhere close to as deep as the one you’ve shown in your graph.
Last, why would surface temperatures drop as you’ve shown in Figure 5? We’re pretty close to minimum now. Are you expecting TSI to drop below the minimums of the last few solar cycles? If so, on what are you basing that expectation?
Roald says:
June 17, 2011 at 5:14 am
Figure 5 looks very fishy to me. According to it, the 2000s must have been cooler than the 1990s and we know the reverse is true. And in reality the year 2010 tied with 1998 for record high temperature. ..
Yep – I made this point in an earlier post, but I think Easterbrook might be using US temperatures (I’m not sure, though). They clearly fit his 2001 projection better than the global record.
I’m not convinced by a lot of what he’s written. For example
Temperatures dropped ~4º C (~7 º F) in ~20 years in mid-to high latitudes.
Which 20 year period? I would like to see the evidence for this.
So far, my cooling prediction seems to be coming to pass, with no global warming above the 1998 temperatures and a gradually deepening cooling since then.
According to UAH, 2010 was virtually indistinguishable from the highly anomalous 1998. There has been no statistically significant cooling in any record – and no cooling of any description in some.
I’m also dubious about the solar reconstructions. I can see that this post is appealing to many readers of this blog, but we are already ~5 years in to this minimum (it didn’t start with the AAS announcement) and there’s precious little evidence of a significant downturn in temperatures (and whatever you do – don’t mention the ice).
Roald:
“Blackfoots”, maybe. “Blackfeet”, could be, I dunno. But “Blackfeets”? You been watching too much Tom and Jerry! (ref: “meeces”) : > )
Whatever marginal temperature rise we get from 100ppm of anthropogenic CO2 is going to become a small blessing in disguise if and when there’s a natural shift to a cooler climate. I’m afraid it won’t be nearly enough to halt the large negative effects of a repeat of the Little Ice Age but something is better than nothing.