Guest Post by Ric Werme
Nils-Axel Mörner, best known for his career of studying sea level and sea level records, reported in the April 2011 issue of the journal Energy & Environment that:
At around 2040-2050 we will be in a new major Solar Minimum. It is to be expected that we will then have a new “Little Ice Age” over the Arctic and NW Europe. The past Solar Minima were linked to a general speeding-up of the Earth’s rate of rotation. This affected the surface currents and southward penetration of Arctic water in the North Atlantic causing “Little Ice Ages” over northwestern Europe and the Arctic.
At the time I thought this was a bit of a reach, and still do, but it fits in well with:
- today’s earlier post, Study: solar activity lull increases chances of cold UK winters
- discussions at ICCC #6 about more coming cold winters and realizing that some people were quite familiar with the paper, e.g. Nicola Scafetta but some were not (I gave Bill Gray my copy) and
- a “flurry” of reports from the southern hemisphere and July skiing in the northern hemisphere.
Mörner claims
During the Spörer, Maunder and Dalton Solar Minima, Arctic water was forced southwards all the way down to Mid-Portugal and the adjacent land areas experienced “Little Ice Ages” (Mörner, 1995, 2010). At the same time, however, the Gibraltar and NW Africa experienced warm events. This North-South opposed climate conditions are well understood in terms of differential distribution of current flow-masses along the northern and southern branches, respectively, of the Gulf Stream (Mörner, 1995, 2010).
While he mentions Svensmark’s “brilliant new theory,” Mörner refers to changes in the Earth’s rotation rate due to changes in the solar wind. I have a lot of trouble with that. I’m more comfortable with changing rates due to build up of seasonal snow and ice at high latitudes. Nevertheless, Mörner explains:
Due to the changes in rotation, the oceanic surface current system is forced to respond (Figure 1). As a function of this, the Gulf Stream alters its main distribution of water along the northern and southern branches, and simultaneously cold Arctic water can, at the speeding-up phases of Solar Minima, penetrate far down along the west coasts of Europe creating Little Ice Age environmental conditions (Figure 2).
Note this is a regional change, any global effects will like be much milder.
As for the timing of all this:
The date of the New Solar Minimum has been assigned at around 2040 by Mörner et al. (2003), at 2030-2040 by Harrara (2010), at 2042 ±11 by Abdassamatov (2010) and at 2030-2040 by Scafetta (2010), implying a fairly congruent picture despite somewhat different ways of transferring past signals into future predictions.
The onset of the associated cooling has been given at 2010 by Easterbrook (2010) and Herrara (2010), and at “approximately 2014” by Abdassamatov (2010). Easterbrook (2010) backs up his claim that the cooling has already commenced by geological observations facts.
At any rate, from a Solar-Terrestrial point of view, we will, by the middle of this century, be in a New Solar Minimum and in a New Little Ice Age. This conclusion is completely opposite to the scenarios presented by IPCC (2001, 2007) as illustrated in Figure 3. With “the Sun in the centre”, no other conclusion can be drawn, however.
While the official home for the article is at Energy & Environment, a non pay-walled version is at eike-klima-energie.eu
H/t to David L. Hagen
Up in central Australia at a camp by the last shrinking permanent waterhole after the long drought, the aboriginal tribe is sitting around the campfire all grumbling about the whitefella’s global warming when one young blackfella turns to the Witch Doctor and asks if he thinks it will be a cold wet winter this year at long last. All eyes turn expectantly to the WD who doesn’t have a clue but quickly replies he’ll need to spend a couple of days out in scrub reading all the signs. That satisfies the tribe so next morning he treks off all day to the highway to the closest servo (gas station) and the lone phone box and rings up the Bureau of Met down south in the big smoke for a long range weather forecast. There’s a 60% chance of it comes the reply and reasonably satisfied he treks off back to the tribe and tells them they’d best get busy gathering and hunting in preparation for a move to higher ground. A week or so goes by and the question arises again around the campfire about whether he still thinks the big move is on. Again the WD reckons he needs a couple of days out in the bush and so back to the highway he treks all day to ring the BoM again. This time it’s a 75% chance so back he goes and gets the tribe to redouble their efforts and gather what remaining food and firewood they can in readiness for the expected move soon. Another week or two and the same questions from the tribe and again he’s off to ring the BoM. This time the answer is that the BoM is almost 100% sure but being a bit of a skeptic about their degree of certainty he asks how can they be so sure. Easy comes the reply, because all the blackfellas are on the move up north. Damn those bloody climate changin’ whitefellas and their feedback effects!
We have had somewhat short, but brutally cold, winters the last few years here in NC. Well, brutally cold for NC, I know that’s mild for you mid-westerners. My gas bills already top $200 in Dec-Feb, adn I certainly do not own a McMansion…
matt v said:
“It seems to me that our climate does not correlate with sun spot activity at all but follows more the cycles of Enso, SST [as indicated by AMO and PDO, NAO and AO.]”
Climate correlates well with sunspot activity on the timescales of MWP to LIA to date but not so well on shorter timescales.
I think the reason is that on shorter timescales the ocean cycles dominate.
The little sheep at The Weather Channel claim all the current weather disasters are a result of global warming: floods, drought, tornadoes, etc, etc. How do they keep a straight face when presenting such garbage? Must be a genetic mutation of brain function that is shows up in lack of logical reasoning.
The jet stream, as a major contributor in atmospheric coupling to the lithosphere, has a significant interannual effect on LOD, about two ms’ worth. Sunspot cycles have a decadal and secular effect, and if the solar wind turns out to have any, it would be by way of atmospheric coupling or ice mass variation (=sea level fluctuation). The correlation between sun spots and the Parana River indicates adequate grounds for a sunspot/LOD correlation, though it might be difficult to tease out such an effect amid all the noise (but for all I know it has already been done–at least attempted).
Someone really does need to treat this LOD problem but it’s not a one man job, and I fear the best experts would hesitate to get their boots muddy. I ain’t no expert here. –AGF
You’ll note that these anti-AGW predictions of solar minima also take about 40 years to falsify. Can’t they at least predict something that can be falsified in 10 years?
“The past Solar Minima were linked to a general speeding-up of the Earth’s rate of rotation”
Please could you provide references to explain this statement?
RE. Observa: Superb!
MAttN;
There’s a wee trick I read in an architectural mag some years ago I’ve used to great effect ever since. Get a small fan, ideally one designed for vertical operation, and use it in a corner of your largest room. (More than one room is better, of course.) Aim it upwards, forcing mixing of cool floor air and warm ceiling air. The room will feel much more comfortable, and your heating (or cooling) system will have to work much less to maintain the thermostat at your preferred setting. The built-in version uses a hollow column in the corner, but that’s just a minor improvement.
You can get up to 40% reduction in heating/cooling costs. Really significant, for a fairly small investment in fan and electricity (est. 10-20¢/day) .
(If the fan isn’t a “vertical” type the bearings will burn out if it’s angled too sharply upwards, so just angle it slightly, aimed at at corner, possibly with a sloped deflection surface if you want to increase efficiency.)
P.S. The above is an example of technological adaptation to climate change. Either direction.
😉
So if all this pans out, any idea how it would affect North America?
When will this Ice Age ever end? I want my global warming, and I WANT IT NOW!
Back a few hundred million years ago, when a day was only 23 hours long, diurnal temperature extremes would have been lower, which I suppose would constitute a different climate. So LOD variation of hours rather than dozens of milliseconds would indeed affect the climate–over the aeons. –AGF
RE: Brian H: Another trick is to have an alternate AC air return near the ceiling. Is this code anywhere?
I think Nils should stick to sea levels analysis – that’s his forte and where most of his credibility lies. His LIA stuff feels a little hinckey to me.
As for a new LIA, I’d leave that to the scientists who are evaluating current and past solar maxs/mins and their implications, plus analysts of PDO’s, MDO’s, ENSO’s, etc..
I do remember an engineering magazine I was reading in the early 70s that said reducing sulfur dioxide from industrial emissions would result in an increase in world temperature, which made sense at the time. The U.S. then scrubbed out black soot (which heats the earth) and reduced sulfur dioxide (which cools the planet). The net result? No idea (neither does the IPCC). There’s an historic environmental to-an-fro there and I don’t know what it implies for temperature. Similarly, China’s hell-bent-for-leather development of coal with it’s attendant black soot and aerosol generation for the next 30-40 years could either exascerbate or dampen global warming that will occur. Who knows?
I do know one thing – the 60’s and 70’s were frakkin’ cold when I grew up. Miserably cold. Since then, it ain’t been a cake walk, but one or two degrees off the savage lows of those winters mean a lot. Don’t want to go back there. You don’t want to either.
I predict just as homo sapiens from Africa replaced Neandertal man in Europe after the last ice age…… homo superiorensis from Africa will do the same to etc after the next ice age.
While the study is an interesting read, the only thing I take away, is the danger of taking any action, based on current knowledge. We must resist the unreasoned urge to “do something now”, panic of the AGW convinced. Until we know whether to zig to the left or zag to the right, we run the risk of self inflicted injury.
There are prudent actions which apply to either scenario, such as increasing granary storage capacity, energy reserves, cold and hot hybrid seeds. Of course, agenda free, research and projections, would aid our decision processes immensely, but I guess we will have to make do… without. What a criminal shame! GK
Jerry from Boston says:
July 6, 2011 at 8:35 am
Yeah, all that soot can reduce the ice albedo and melt it at the same time the air is cooling–sort of like what we’re seeing now. They built a dirt road to get to Chacaltaya which hastened its demise. –AGF
A general comment on little ice ages and climate change:
The resonse of mobile life forms to seasonal weather changes or longer term climate change has usually been migration. But the next time that the climate does change to significantly warmer or cooler, we’d have to worry a bit about how flightless animals would be able to migrate past all the fences, roads, towns and cities that we have put in their way, poor little sods!
And you might also have to worry a bit about how the big species (us) would manage it, given the political and national boundaries that we have put in our own way.
Right now there are about 350 million people in Mediterranean North Africa, a significant number of whom, having suddenly found themselves in uncomfortable circumstances, are keen to get onto leaky boats and make their way across the Mediterranean to the North side. And the 350-odd million on the north side have found this so disturbing, that they have clubbed together to bomb the hell out of the people that they perceive to be the cause of the discomfort that is causing this human migration.
So how much more disturbing would it be, if the well heeled 350-odd million on the north side of the Med. (not to mention another 70-odd million on the north side of the Canadian/US border) found an arctic wind at their backs, frozen rivers, crop failures, roads and vehicles buried under snow and cities grid-locked by snow and ice, and decided to move rather more desperately southwards?
Sub-saharan Africa and the Mexican border might start to look like the promised land.
And as a geologist, I think it is more likely to be a change for the cold, and am not entirely sure that this would be gradual enough for comfort.
It bears thinking about.
I am struggling to link LOD with any meaningful overall climate change (in terms of net radiation budget and temp increases). The LOD is irrelevant to total incoming solar radiation hitting the earth – in net terms it will remain the same whether the earth spins twice as fast or half as fast? The main difference a LOD change would be (I presume) in the length of time sunlight heats a particular patch of the earth, affecting the amount of ocean and atmospheric heat absorption and convection, etc – which I can see would affect local climate and local weather but not really global as the overall real energy budget remains the same? Or am I missing something?
onion2 says:
July 6, 2011 at 4:29 am
I fully expect the world to continue warming, with the consequence of egg on certain faces.
—
Like it’s been warming for the last 13 years? Oh, wait …
A.G Foster-
‘For gorsake, stop laughing, this is serious!’
http://bytesdaily.blogspot.com/2010/09/some-of-you-may-be-familiar-with-above.html
I do not yet see actual evidence supporting the following 3 theories:
1) significantly shorter LOD causes global climate cooling
2) significantly shorter LOD caused by reduced solar winds during grand solar minimums
3) a grand solar minimum has already started
I still do not see a plausible mechanism between grand solar minimums and cooling climate on Earth. Though I must say the discussion at these kind of posts do stimulate some excellent scientific comments.
John
Ah – on a minutes reflection on my last post – perhaps the best we can say is that a longer day will result in greater diurnal temp variation and a shorter day, less diurnal temp variation – so actual climate/weather patterns would obviously be affected, e.g. more thunderstorms in summer from a longer day evaporating more water, colder winter nights, etc – so yes, I can see climate being different – but still not the actual average global surface temps ?
Warming, cooling, it’s all the same. Liberals will use anything that comes to hand to justify an increase in government power: http://historyhalf.com/the-global-warming-agenda/