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
“WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” From Orwell’s 1984
“Cold is hot” From the warmers during the next cool period
Jim Cripwell says: “…It reminds me of how everyone “knows” that the Black Daeah was caused by bubonic plague. This was based on a guess at the end of the 19th century, when bubonic plague was found, and for the first time a possible reason for the Black Death was discovered. Most data is anecdotal. Recent studines indicate that the Black Death was caused by a virus like Ebola….”
Utter nonsense. The symptoms of ebola and the Black Death are different, the period from onset to death is different.
The University of California was, I think, the second highest contributor to the Obama campaign, and therefore, hoping to profit from all the “green.energy” investments in their endowment portfolio.
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As a student I was a sort of anarcho conspiracy theorist. I was obsessed with the seeming close relationship between the UC Regents and Hollywood money / the MSM. Maybe there was something to that.
mkelly says @ur momisugly June 17, 2011 at 6:58 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?”
The CIA may be a lot of things, but I am not sure many people would consider them climate science experts. Offering up the CIA as refutation of climate science isn’t a terribly convincing argument, and many would consider it a straw man, but let us not go there.
mkelly says @ur momisugly June 17, 2011 at 6:58 am said “Even the NAS and NOAA in a 1975 Newsweek article point out a drop in temperature. It was not a myth.”
There is no citation here so who knows what was actually said and the full context, but in any given short time period temperatures will rise and temperatures will fall. That NAS and.or NOAA reported that is to be expected, but that doesn’t not support a leap that body of work embodied in the climate science field had it wrong. Nor does it refute the citation I provided above. Many would consider your line of argument a straw man, but let us not go there.
While the LIA started around 1300 and the MM didn’t start until 1645, we can’t say with any certainty that the sun played no role in the cooling from 1300 to 1645. Observations of sun spots did not start until 1610, and by then the number of sun spots had already dropped very low. Much lower than we see today.
Was the period from 1300 to 1610 “normal”, or was it low? We don’t know. Therein lies the problem.
check TSI in figure 2 versus TSI in figure 4.
I suggest that we name this minimum The Obama Minimum.
Another potential name would be The Greenpeace Minimum.
If we wanted to get technical we could call it The Mann Minimum.
Other suggestions?
Josh, do you want to play with this?
Constructive criticism;
You guys need to label the graphs better:
Figure 3 apparently shows both sunspot numbers and temperatures, but no temperature scale is shown.
Also what are GSN and WSN?
Figure 4 -which curve is temperature and which is watts per square meter ?
THE MYTH OF THE 1970S GLOBAL COOLING SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS
William M. Connolley
The name says it all. Hands up those of us that were actually alive in the 1960’s and 1970’s and remember the hype over global cooling! I was in schools in the 60’s and remember us discussing it at the time.
The problem is that most of the people alive today were born after the 60’s and 70’s, so they fall victim to people like Connolley et al., who doctor Wikipedia and rewrite history to suit their own view of the world. This is nothing new. Stalin rewrote the history of the Soviet Union to suit his purposes. The Church has rewritten history in an effort to clean up its own image. Mann and the IPCC rewrote history with the hockey stick to eliminate the LIA and MVP. Hansen and GISS continue to rewrite history, altering the historical temperature records to “improve” them.
History is not a fine wine. Records do not improve with age. Back in the 70’s science was not nearly as politicized as it is now. Scientists actually understood that there was no significance in scientific consensus. That more often than not, it ends up that 10,000 scientists were wrong and only 1 was right.
Why does climate science use the term “denier”? Stop for a minute and consider the underlying premise behind AGW, the IPCC and climate science. It has nothing to do with climate. The driving force is fear. Fear that: “industrial pollution must be stopped before it kills us”.
Like Lord Voldemort, the name that may not be mentioned, it is this fear of death from industrial pollution that is driving the language. “Denier” is not a reference to climate change, except at a superficial level. Deep down, at a gut level no one talks about, denier is meant in the same context as a holocaust denier. That you are denying the deaths caused by industrial pollution.
It really has very little to do with climate change or sea level rise of ocean acidification, that is simply polite speech for “he who cannot be mentioned”. Fear is driving the crowds, and the predators are taking advantage. Be it through taxes, or subsidies or grants. Like wolves surrounding a herd of sheep, the Al Gores of the world are purposely whipping up the crowd to incite panic, knowing that in the panic it will be much easier to pick of the strays and feast on the spoils.
I think we can survive another little ice age… I think it is just a matter of us making sure that earth will not get “too white” (no racist pun intended). We can do that in the same way as they are removing snow in the nordic countries (salt) or employiing more and better laser beam technology directed to melt snow layers in areas where there are largely thin layers of snow (by using aeroplanes)
kuhnkat
June 17, 2011 at 8:19 am
Dang Bob, you are such a party pooper.
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He’s just trying to confuse and distract as alarmists are want to do, using the techniques they learned from their Marxist propagandist teachers.
@ur momisugly aaron
“GHGs retain heat, heating will not accelerate faster because of them once SW absorption picks back up.”
Ok, this Gieco caveman is wondering how you explain this, as the “greenhouse” effect is present regardless of the levels of atmospheric CO2 (natural or man “made”). What puzzles me this most is that “GHG’s retain heat” remark….dazzle me with your insight.
Michael Mann claims increased volcanic activity, not reduced solar activity, caused the cooler temperatures during the Little Ice Age.
Is that right?
Looking for some help from community here – is there a proven correlation between solar activity and recent changes in the earth’s temperature? (seems like there would be)
If volcanic activity did cause the LIA, what explains the cooler temperatures during the Dalton Minimum? If anyone can point me toward some research I would very much appreciate it!!
Thanks
Matt
Ref- Mann cites volcanoes as the cause of the Little Ice Age – http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/solar-minimum-climate/
LOL. Don’t worry, I won’t mention that the Arctic sea ice is running at or close to record low levels according to all major research institutes despite the alleged global cooling.
John Finn says: “I’m also dubious about the solar reconstructions.”
Yup. Figure 4 uses the outdated TSI reconstruction of Hoyt and Schatten. I added that to the comments I just published on this post:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/comments-on-easterbrook-on-the-potential-demise-of-sunspots/
Interesting post, but of course purely based on speculation of 2 different levels of what “might” happen.
1) Will we indeed see a Maunder type minimum over then next few decades? Still quite unknown and speculation we might, is just that, speculation that we “might”.
2) If we do see a Maunder type minimum in sunspots, will this necessarily lead to cooler temps? Again, pure speculation not based on any quantifiable effects.
On top of all this of course is the fact that we have 40% more CO2 in the atmosphere than the last time the sun took a little nap. How this will mitigate the effects of any diminished solar activity is also not known.
Finally, I think the temperature graphs used in Dr. Don Easterbrook’s post are a bit skewed in the sense that they don’t give a true picture of the global warming we’ve seen over the last few decades, and don’t accurate portray the fact that the decade of 2000-2009 was the warmest on record and it certainly occurred after 1998, which he seems to want to suggest was the high water mark and a “gradually deepening cooling since then” (his words exactly). Well Dr. Easterbrook, how can the decade of 2000-2009 be the warmest on record with a “gradually deepening cooling” since 1998? Doesn’t seem to make much sense. One alternative to Dr. Easterbrook’s temperature graph would be this one from NOAA:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201105.gif
Which of course, doesn’t show Dr. Easterbrook’s “gradually deepening cooling” since 1998.
And interesting post by Dr. Easterbrook, but one that has a lot of “what if’s” related to the sun, and seems to get neglect that fact that, at least according to the data, we have not seen a gradually deepening cooling since 1998.
DesertYote says: “He’s just trying to confuse and distract as alarmists are want to do, using the techniques they learned from their Marxist propagandist teachers.”
I assume the “He” in that sentence is me. I’m a lukewarmer, not an alarminst or marxist propagandist. Your comment made me laugh, by the way. If you’re not aware, Anthony regularly cross posts my posts here at WUWT. An alarmist would not have ended a post about this…
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/comments-on-easterbrook-on-the-potential-demise-of-sunspots/
…with:
Arguments about anthropogenic global warming cannot be won by misrepresenting the PDO, or by using outdated TSI data, or by creating unusual global temperature anomaly graphs that are obviously wrong to anyone familiar with the instrument temperature record.
Have a good day.
RE: Steven Mosher
“check TSI in figure 2 versus TSI in figure 4.”
Another biggie. Wow! Good catch Mosh. Was this a test to see if anyone would notice?
Roald says:
“…Arctic sea ice is running at or close to record low levels…”
What “record” are you referring to? The sattelite record since 1979?
Dr Easterbrook shows the temperature record back to the MWP. And the Holocene had much warmer periods than today. Any thinking person would conclude that during those climate optimums the Arctic had less ice than today. It may have been completely ice-free. Thus, your extremely short ‘record’ is meaningless.
The current Arctic climate is completely normal. There is zero evidence that CO2 is causing the ice to decline. It is simply natural variability. Because CO2 is well-mixed in the atmosphere, the Antarctic would be declining like the Arctic if CO2 was the cause. But the Antarctic is not losing ice like the Arctic, which is losing ice because of ocean currents.
I believe Easterbrook is onto to something significant. I’m stunned more “scientists” don’t put more weight on the sun. For instance, one need only look at the solar system itself to understand the power of the sun and its effect or lack of effect on the planets. Having said that however, I’ve long been a proponent of the historical earth and its many ice ages and indeed the warm periods in between. Periods no one understands while seemingly ignoring the triggers that caused both effects (ice and warm) on the planet in their original timelines. Which says to me we as humans don’t understand the forces that shape out system well enough to make claims such as the AGW side do constantly. Easterbrook on the other hand, actually talks about the historical earth, its effect on both the planet itself and the humans in that time frame. Hard won history – history on a human scale our ancestors survived through – a history Easterbrook warms us all is indeed possible.
Greenhouse Effect = +33.00⁰C Water Vapour causes 95% of the effect = 31.35⁰C Other Greenhouse gasses cause 5% of the Effect = 1.65⁰C CO2 is about 75% of the Effect of all GHGs = 1.24⁰C Total worldwide Man-made CO2 is about 7% of atmospheric CO2 = 0.086⁰C. So what’s all this talk from the AGW side about CO2 mitigating cooling? And the CO2 talk here? I though folks here understood CO2 isn’t the driving force claimed by the warmest fanatics. Am I wrong? If so where?
The globe experienced the 10th warmest May since record keeping began in 1880, as the climate phenomenon La Niña ended its 2011 cycle. The Arctic sea ice extent was the third smallest extent for May on record.
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110615_globalstats.html
R. Gates says:
June 17, 2011 at 9:29 am
On top of all this of course is the fact that we have 40% more CO2 in the atmosphere than the last time the sun took a little nap.
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Gates, you say that on almost every post you make……
….is that some sort of scare tactic? LOL
http://www.globalclimatescam.com/2009/11/illustration-of-mans-co2-contribution/
TomB says @ur momisugly June 17, 2011 at 8:50 am “The “myth” of the global cooling of the ’70s? How old are you? Had you been an adult during that time, I can assure you – you would have heard, seen and read stories warning of the coming ice age. It’s not a “myth”.”
Hi Tom – I am not saying it is a myth that the media talked a lot about it, but it appears that is it a myth that the body of scientific work at the time was focused on global cooling. That is a BIG difference.
I think we’d both agree the MSM isn’t wonderfully reliable in their reporting.
Anyway – thanks for the note back.
Enough with this frivolity that I started on this blog of naming the next minimum.
There are many fine scientists living or now gone who would thoroughly deserve attribution, such as Landscheidt who has been mentioned a couple of times, or even Svenmark whose work may ultimately prove the connection between the sun’s quiescent state as measured by sunspot count and climate.
So apologise to these great men for the nonsense that I started.
Henry Galt:
“If there is some lag in the system (if, indeed there is a system;-) then: 179×2=358 and 2003-1645=358. Just sayin’.”
We could call that the “Fairbridge” lag then?