There’s an extraordinary admission about solar activity and cold winters in the UK from the Met Office in an article in FT Magazine.
It is as if the blinders have been removed.
The relevant passage is below from the much larger article.
“We now believe that [the solar cycle] accounts for 50 per cent of the variability from year to year,” says Scaife. With solar physicists predicting a long-term reduction in the intensity of the solar cycle – and possibly its complete disappearance for a few decades, as happened during the so-called Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715 – this could be an ominous signal for icy winters ahead, despite global warming.
Read the article – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/35145bee-9d38-11e0-997d-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1RacNghPj
h/t to WUWT reader “Lord Beaverbrook”
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this could be an ominous signal for icy winters ahead, despite global warming.
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If you believe that the sun has very little effect……..then CO2 has practically none
If you believe the sun has 50 per cent of the variability from year to year….
….then you’re stuck having to believe that natural variability is much stronger than CO2
R. Gates said:
“We see the short-term solar cycle and ENSO cycle riding on top of the longer-term upward trend.”
What longer term upward trend?
The longer term natural trend has been downward since the beginning of the Holocene.
A shorter term natural trend has been upward since the LIA
Granted that more CO2 has a warming effect in theory. However it is offset by a faster water cycle and any residual after the offset is miniscule and unmeasurable in the face of natural solar and oceanic variability.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
July 9, 2011 at 11:29 am
The original data link is below.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ersst/
John Finn says:
July 9, 2011 at 7:41 am
It is as if the blinders have been removed.
I don’t know about the Met Office but the “blinders” have been removed from someof the leading aGW proponents for a number of years. This paper from 2001 (nearly 10 years ago) was co-authoured by Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt
“We examine the climate response to solar irradiance changes between the late 17th-century Maunder Minimum and the late 18th century. Global average temperature changes are small (about 0.3° to 0.4°C) in both a climate model and empirical reconstructions. However, regional temperature changes are quite large. In the model, these occur primarily through a forced shift toward the low index state of the Arctic Oscillation/North Atlantic Oscillation as solar irradiance decreases. This leads to colder temperatures over the Northern Hemisphere continents, especially in winter (1° to 2°C), in agreement with historical records and proxy data for surface temperatures”
I think here’s a tendency for both sides to build ‘strawman’ arguments and to misrepresent what the other is actually saying. I can’t ever recall the AGW side saying the sun doesn’t have an influence. In fact I think they’ve over-estimated the early 20th century solar influence
An interesting argument – but incorrect. Gavin Schmidt has obviously changed his opinion since the paper you quote. Here is the abstract from a paper in the “JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 114, D14101, doi:10.1029/2008JD011639, 2009” some eight years later:
We demonstrate that naive application of linear analytical methods such as regression gives nonrobust results. We also demonstrate that the methodologies used by Scafetta and West (2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008) are not robust to
these same factors and that their error bars are significantly larger than reported. Our analysis shows that the most likely contribution from solar forcing a global warming is 7 ± 1% for the 20th century and is negligible for warming since 1980.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2009/2009_Benestad_Schmidt.pdf
“The sun has a negligible effect for warming since 1980” does not quite match with ““We now believe that [the solar cycle] accounts for 50 per cent of the variability from year to year,” says Scaife.”.
I think there is a tendency for aGW (sic) proponents to use a scatter-shot approach supporting all potential outcomes, to allow their ‘loyal followers’ to quote ‘peer reviewed’ papers that support their current argument. I am not sure that this ensemble approach can be used with opposing conclusions from ‘Learned’ Papers as it is with mismatching model results.
Several correspondents have seemed surprised that mainstream science pays attention to solar radiation. They should realize that the basis for the explanation of warming caused by greenhouse gases (CO2, methane etc), is the fact that heat accumulates when it is trapped in the atmosphere by these same gases. This was a controversial premise twenty years ago, but it no longer is.
CO2 is not the harmless trace gas that some of your commentators assert. When we overload our atmosphere with millions more tons than can be absorbed by the oceans, soil and vegetation, we are ensuring that we have a warming problem, and ultimately a climate change problem caused by excessive heat and moisture in the atmosphere and the raft of attendant problems deriving.
Stephen Wilde says:
July 9, 2011 at 11:44 am
R.Gates said:
“we were at the bottom of the solar minimum, with a blank sun for months on end. You might also recall, that during this time, the stratosphere was in general contracting (i.e. cooling),”
I have seen data that suggests that the stratosphere has not been cooling since the mid 90′s and that there may now be a slight warming.
__________
Would love to see that data, as everything I’ve read says the exact opposite in general. Of course the stratosphere responds to the solar cycle and has annual variability, but when these are taken into account, the most recent data seems to show longer-term cooling. Some of this is posited to be related to increased CO2 preventing LW radiation from reaching in the same quantities back the stratosphere, but certainly during the recent solar minimum, some cooling seems to have also been related to the lower amounts of high energy UV coming from the sun. One great reference on this is:
http://www.arl.noaa.gov/documents/JournalPDFs/RandelEtal.JGR2009.pdf
Stephen Wilde says:
July 9, 2011 at 11:57 am
“Granted that more CO2 has a warming effect in theory. However it is offset by a faster water cycle…”
_______
That’s exactly right. The hydrological cycles accelerates with increasing amounts of CO2. It’s the long-term negative feedback process used to keep CO2 from going into a “run-away greenhouse” situation. Problem is, this works over a long period of time…thousands, tens of thousands of years. CO2 has spiked rapidly in geological terms…far too rapid for the simple rock weathering-hydrological cycle to remove it, and of course, it continues to spike upward as the anthropogenic generation of it continues. Some scientists have even suggested helping out the rock-weathering/CO2 removal through geoengineering efforts:
http://www.seercentre.org.uk/research/using_rockdust.htm
Lord Beaverbrook says:
July 9, 2011 at 1:44 am
At last common sense prevails, maybe we in the UK will have sufficient stocks of grit and snowploughs during winter from now on.
Sorry we are broke, can’t afford this!
R.Gates, thanks for your responses. I would reply as follows:
i) You said:
“One great reference on this is:
http://www.arl.noaa.gov/documents/JournalPDFs/RandelEtal.JGR2009.pdf”
Thanks for that link. It shows the cessation of stratospheric cooling since 1995 pretty well does it not? It may be a bit early yet for the effect of the recent solar minimum to show up but give it time.
ii) You said:
“The hydrological cycles accelerates with increasing amounts of CO2. It’s the long-term negative feedback process used to keep CO2 from going into a “run-away greenhouse” situation.”
So we are agreed in principle. However the thermal effect of a faster water cycle is on a timescale of just a couple of weeks and does not relate to the weathering time for rocks as you try to suggest. In climate terms it is virtually instantaneous. Note that I was referring to the thermal effect of CO2 being offset NOT the removal of CO2 from the air via rock weathering. The ocean temperature (and thus CO2 absorption capability is a far more important factor than rock weathering in any event as regards CO2 addition or removal.
R. Gates says:
July 9, 2011 at 10:25 am
1) CO2 does not “supply” energy as a driver (i.e. forcing) to the climate, and I never said it did. Rather is serves as a “greenhouse” gas through the absorption and re-transmission of LW radiation, thereby altering earth’s energy budget and effectively keeping more heat in various parts of earths systems. Over the long-term, an increase in CO2 will alter earth’s energy budget and thereby alter the climate.
Too bad you ignore the OTHER function of GHGs, that is, they radiate away energy transferred to them kinetically. This is what I call the “cooling effect” of GHGs. As long as you and others continue to ignore this simple physical mechanism you will continue to over estimate the overall effect of adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
““Third, scientists at the Met Office and elsewhere are beginning to understand the effect of the 11-year solar cycle on climate.”
If true that statement is an appalling indictment of the lack of historical knowledge of modern British meteorologists. One of the leading economists of the 19th century was William Stanley Jevons who argued as long ago as the 1870s that the sunspot cycle affected crop yields and thereby affected the business cycle.
William Stanley Jevons, 1835-1882
http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/het/profiles/jevons.htm
“In 1875 and 1878, Jevons read two papers before the British Association which expounded his famous “sunspot theory” of the business cycle. Digging through mountains of statistics of economic and meteorological data, Jevons argued that there was a connection between the timing of commercial crises and the solar cycle. The basic chain of events was that variations in sunspots affect the power of the sun’s rays, influencing the bountifulness of harvests and thus the price of corn which, in turn, affected business confidence and gave rise to commercial crises. Jevons changed his story several times (e.g. he replaced his European harvest-price-crisis logic with an Indian harvest-imports-crisis channel). However flimsy his explanations, Jevons believed that the periodicity of the solar cycle and commercial crises — approximately 10.5 years, by his calculations — was too coincidental to be dismissed. ”
Unlike most recent economists who have written about the subject of climate change (Lord Stern for one) Jevons actually knew something about meteorology. He had studied science before turning to economics and spent some years in Australia . See the entry below in the online Encyclopedia of Australian Science.
http://www.eoas.info/biogs/P000062b.htm
“William Stanley Jevons was assayer at the new Sydney Mint 1854-59 then returned to England. While in Australia he made systematic observations in meteorology, botany, geology, and of social phenomena, and in 1857 became interested in the new art of wet-plate photography.”
Although later economists have tended to reject Jevons’ idea that there was a close correlation between the sunspot cycle and the business cycle his basic point, that the solar changes affect agriculture output and thereby have economic consequences seems to be irrefutable.
Surely there must be SOMEBODY in the Met Office who has heard of Jevons? They should have been studying the sun for decades now rather focussing on the greenhouse effect to the exclusion of everything else.
Roy
At 7:46 AM on 9 July, kadaka (KD Knoebel) quotes an online article about the U.S. Air Force’s Condor Cluster supercomputer, cobbled together out of the essential guts of 1,716 PlayStation 3 gaming consoles, in which we find the following:
Buying retail? Like there’s nobody in the Department of Defense smart enough to call up a relative who knows somebody in the business and get units that kinda “fell off the truck” for a bunch less than wholesale?
Gawd, you think there’s no Sicilians in the Pentagon? The U.S. government is the longest-operating criminal syndicate on the North American continent.
Richard M says:
July 9, 2011 at 1:23 pm
R. Gates says:
July 9, 2011 at 10:25 am
1) CO2 does not “supply” energy as a driver (i.e. forcing) to the climate, and I never said it did. Rather is serves as a “greenhouse” gas through the absorption and re-transmission of LW radiation, thereby altering earth’s energy budget and effectively keeping more heat in various parts of earths systems. Over the long-term, an increase in CO2 will alter earth’s energy budget and thereby alter the climate.
Too bad you ignore the OTHER function of GHGs, that is, they radiate away energy transferred to them kinetically. This is what I call the “cooling effect” of GHGs. As long as you and others continue to ignore this simple physical mechanism you will continue to over estimate the overall effect of adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
_____
Not sure exactly what you mean by this, but I’d be glad to review any research you have on the kinetic cooling effects of LW radiation on CO2. I ignore nothing in climate science on purpose, and welcome all new areas of study.
Stephen Wilde says:
July 9, 2011 at 1:09 pm
R.Gates, thanks for your responses. I would reply as follows:
i) You said:
“One great reference on this is:
http://www.arl.noaa.gov/documents/JournalPDFs/RandelEtal.JGR2009.pdf”
Thanks for that link. It shows the cessation of stratospheric cooling since 1995 pretty well does it not?
_____
No, actually, it does not, and the graphs and data indicate quite the opposite. But just to put a point on it, there’s this from the conclusion of the paper:
“Global mean temperatures derived from both
MSU channel 4 brightness temperatures and radiosonde
observations reveal the lower stratosphere has cooled at a
rate of 0.5 K/decade between 1979 and 2007.”
and this:
“The SSU and radiosonde data suggest the middle and
upper stratosphere are cooling at a more rapid rate than the
lower stratosphere”
Don’t see any mention anywhere of a cessation of stratospheric cooling.
____
But then you (Stephen) goes on to say:
Quoting what R. Gates said:
“The hydrological cycles accelerates with increasing amounts of CO2. It’s the long-term negative feedback process used to keep CO2 from going into a “run-away greenhouse” situation.”
So we are agreed in principle. However the thermal effect of a faster water cycle is on a timescale of just a couple of weeks and does not relate to the weathering time for rocks as you try to suggest. In climate terms it is virtually instantaneous. Note that I was referring to the thermal effect of CO2 being offset NOT the removal of CO2 from the air via rock weathering.
____
We are indeed agreed in principle, and it seems are indeed talking about two different things. While interesting to me, when talking about climate, the shorter term thermal effects seem not so important to me as the longer term issue of changes in the earth’s energy balance brought about by increasing amounts of CO2 and the longer term negative feedback of reducing that CO2 through the hydrological cycle.
.
Ian W,
There isn’t a contradiction anywhere in there. The 2001 Shindell et al. paper is talking about regional responses to changes in solar activity as seen for the Maunder Minimum – around 1600-1700AD. The global change was quite small (0.3 to 0.4 deg C) but there were quite large regional effects.
The Benestad and Schmidt 2009 paper is talking specifically about the 20th Century, which featured much smaller solar changes. As such the global response is clearly going to be smaller than 0.3-0.4 deg C. Out of the ~0.7 deg C warming they attribute 7± 1% to solar changes.
The Scaife comment ’50 per cent of the variability’ is unrelated to both the above statements. It’s talking about the 11-year solar cycle causing year-to-year variability in temperature, not multi-decadal trends as in the two papers above. It’s also not clear whether he is talking about variability on a global scale or specifically North-Western Europe.
First, this extraordinary concession from the MET should be applauded, not sneered at.
Mike Lockwood proposed a similar solar-based scenario last year and outwitted the MET with an accurate seasonal forecast.
Secondly, a brief chronology of MSM reports on solar effects on climate…
BBC, February 1998
Scientists blame sun for global warming
The Sun is more active than it has ever been in the last 300 years
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NASA, March 2003
Study Finds Increasing Solar Trend That Can Change Climate
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BBC, July 2004
Sunspots reaching 1,000-year high
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BBC, April 2008
‘No Sun link’ to climate change
“We started on this game because of Svensmark’s work. […] The IPCC has got it right, so we had better carry on trying to cut carbon emissions.” – Prof. Terry Sloan, Lancaster University.
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Time, December 2008
The Planet Gets Cooler in ’08. Say What?
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BBC, April 2008
‘Quiet Sun’ baffling astronomers
“If the Sun’s dimming were to have a cooling effect, we’d have seen it by now” – Mike Lockwood.
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New Scientist, September 2009
World’s climate could cool first, warm later
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NewScientist, May 2010
Quiet sun puts Europe on ice
(Mike Lockwood predicting cold winters for Europe)
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DailyStar, UK, December 2010
“BRITAIN’S winter is the coldest since 1683 and close to being the chilliest in nearly 1,000 years.”
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R.Gates – try growing some plants in an atmosphere enriched to 1000-1500ppm of CO2 and report your findings. Only by doing so can you really appreciate the effects of the current CO2 famine.
Also, when making claims about the capacity of CO2 to “accelerate the hydrological cycle”, please cite evidence, including experiments that can demonstrate the effect.
In anticipation of your doing so in future, many thanks.
“We now believe that [the solar cycle] accounts for 50 per cent of the variability from year to year,” … this could be an ominous signal for icy winters ahead, despite global warming..
Uh, let me get this straight –
they aren’t sure what possible natural cause or causes that may have been influencing the warming in the last half of the 20th Century, so it must have been anthropogenic CO2 emissions, yet when it starts cooling, they believe the solar cycle will account for 50 per cent of the variability.
In any case, if the sun accounts for 50 percent, then it would seem to be clear that CO2 can not possibly be the most dominant of the influences, can it?
It’s not just the Met Office that is addressing the real-world winter conditions in Britain and the solar link. The UK Parliament announced a ‘winter resilience review’ in December 2010 after the obvious unpreparedness in 2008/9 and 2009/10. This seems to have prompted M Lockwood et al to come up with this analysis:-
The solar influence on the probability of relatively cold UK winters in the future
M Lockwood, R G Harrison, M J Owens, L Barnard, T Woollings and F Steinhilber (2011)
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/3/034004/pdf/1748-9326_6_3_034004.pdf
Here’s some of it:-
The ‘winter resilience review’ seems to be a sensible risk analysis – perhaps the Met Office is getting the picture?
What must be very depressing for UKers in particular is that they have a PM who (expletive deleted) well ought to be putting up sane policies but is instead right at the front of the lemming-charge. USers and OZers have similar suicidal national policies, but at least their govts are on the side of politics from which such policies are more likely.
A scientific question : Am I right in saying that IR doesn’t penetrate sea surface, so all its energy goes into evaporation? If so, then the energy goes back up into the atmosphere as latent heat. On condensing prior to coming down again as rain (etc), the heat is released back into the atmosphere, basically exactly where it came from. That creates more IR, half of which goes out into space. The cycle keeps repeating, so over time, a greater and greater proportion of the IR ends up in space. Net effect : very little global warming. Is that correct?
It seems to me that any increase in the Earth’s temperature due to increased CO2 is easily overpowered by the Solar Cycle (and also by other natural cyclical phenomena). Much more so is the temperature increase due to man-made CO2.
Pray we don’t have to suffer another ice-age for people to realize this.
The answer is called climate sensitivity to CO2. Who do you believe has it beter figured?
The most recent estimates from IPCC (2007) say this value (the Climate Sensitivity) is likely to be between 2 and 4.5°C. But Sherwood Idso in 1998 calculated the Climate Sensitivity to be 0.4°C, and more recently Richard Lindzen at 0.5°C. Roy Spencer is not too far from these low values.
More at http://www.oarval.org/ClimateChange.htm
” … despite global warming”
Of course global warming will still be happening despite the coming ice age … yeh right. I think the technical term is “covering their butts”.
R. Gates says:
July 9, 2011 at 2:08 pm
_____
Not sure exactly what you mean by this, but I’d be glad to review any research you have on the kinetic cooling effects of LW radiation on CO2. I ignore nothing in climate science on purpose, and welcome all new areas of study.
No research required. This is simple common sense applied to simple physics. No more difficult than understanding the warming effect of GHGs.
It all has to do with how the heat enters the atmosphere. When radiated from the ground the GHGs block the radiation from heading out to space. Simple, right? Half of it gets radiated back towards the surface. However, that is not the only way heat enters the atmosphere.
Heat energy enters the atmosphere from conduction, direct absorption from the sun and latent heat. Once that energy is in the atmosphere most of it cannot escape UNTIL it is transferred through collisions to a GHG. At that time half gets radiated out the space which cools the atmosphere. IOW, a cooling effect. It is almost completely symmetric to the warming effect. If you use KT(07) as your heat budget guide, the cooling effect is about 1/2 the warming effect. If you believe the 1.2C per doubling of CO2, then the cooling effect reduces that to .6C. End of alarmism. End of cAGW.
“this could be an ominous signal for icy winters ahead, despite global warming”
Holy Orwell, Batman! Classic example of why this project cannot be sold and perhaps why they should have found something else to blame CO2 for to start with.
Using the term “climate change” would have helped but too many already realize that the ‘AGW causes everything’ story is really a religious view. What else can it possibly be? And here, linking “icy winters” to “warming” tests that faith.
So if this CO2 project is to survive, it needs to be repackaged. A new threat. Something that is a real and obvious concern to anyone. Seems undeniable that it has caused a mass global eco-doomsday mentality that will surely be bad for the children. That might work.
Once again RGates hijacks a thread. Like a virus…really.
Anything to advance his/her AGW agenda.
It really is getting to the point though, of being of zero value, to even discuss.
Why can’t you stick to the topic of the thread?
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Khwarizmi says:
“R.Gates – try growing some plants in an atmosphere enriched to 1000-1500ppm of CO2 and report your findings. Only by doing so can you really appreciate the effects of the current CO2 famine.
Also, when making claims about the capacity of CO2 to “accelerate the hydrological cycle”, please cite evidence, including experiments that can demonstrate the effect.
In anticipation of your doing so in future, many thanks.”
_______
Of course plants love CO2 (up to a point) just as much as we love oxygen (up to a point). The “dose determines the poison” concept, which is valid in many cases of a carefully balanced system such as the climate and biosphere of earth and the human body. It seems, for at least around the past million years, the earth has pretty much enjoyed a range of CO2 far less than 1000-1500 ppm, and the last time it was that high, human ancestors were probably something akin to a tree shrew. Of course, we know now from ice cores that we are seeing the highest CO2 since humans came down from dwelling in trees. The range of CO2 during the Holocene, or the past 10,000 years, prior to the advent of industrialization allowed for the cultivation of grains which really are the foundation of modern civilization. In short, the grain crops that we enjoy and have enjoyed, and that came to be cultivated in the past 10,000 seem to have done well with CO2 in a range under 300 ppm, and it would seem that grains might not do so well in the environments and steaming jungles of millions of years ago when CO2 might have been over 1,000 ppm. Certain plants perhaps, but not grains.
As far as the effects on the hydrological cycle and higher CO2 in the atmosphere…unfortunately at present we don’t have a planet we can practice with to conduct experiments (though some seem to think we ought to use earth itself for such things– a risky proposition) Fortunately, we do have the next best thing, which are extremely powerful super-computers that are used to create simulations of earth. It is these simulations, when higher CO2 levels are used, that show various effects on hydrological processes of the planet, with the net result being that they “accelerate” in a general sense, meaning that there is more net precipitation falling, and this leads to increases in rock-weathering, which, over the long term, removes CO2 from the atmosphere and posits it in the oceans to eventually become limestone. At least, this is what the science and climate models tell us, and it seems, recent evidence would support it:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/10/global-warming-river-flows-oceans-climate-disruption.html