Guest post by David Archibald
When I started out in climate science in 2005, the prevailing view in the sceptic community was that carbon dioxide-caused global warming was real but it wouldn’t be anything as bad as it was painted by the AGW crowd. Sceptics generally thought that climate was a random walk and at that stage we hadn’t quantified the carbon dioxide heating effect. Roy Spencer’s paper finding negative feedbacks from warming was at that stage two years off. At the time, I thought that climate was controlled by the Sun and set out to find the relationship. The relationship had been found by Friis-Christensen and Lassen in 1991, and I extended their work to use solar cycle length as a predictive tool.
Now has come the first paper from Northern Hemisphere scientists to use solar cycle length to predict climate. Three Norwegian researchers, led by Professor Jan-Erik Solheim of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Oslo, have just published a paper entitled “Solar Activity and Svalbard Temperatures”. It is available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3256
What these eminent scientists are predicting is significant: “We predict an annual mean temperature decrease for Svalbard of 3.5°C from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24 (2009–‐20) and a decrease in the winter temperature of ≈6°C.”
A 6°C temperature decrease in under ten years from the present day! This is significant at two levels. Firstly, it is going to get really cold very soon. This predicted cooling is calculated to have a 95% confidence level. Secondly, it gives the sceptic community a climate forecast that is based on physical evidence, with a statistician signing off. When the predictions of these three wise Norwegian are borne out, that is going to be a big thing.
Figure 3 from the Solheim paper is above. Forecasts for SC24 temperatures based on length of SC23 are given with 95% confidence intervals (diamonds with bars) for the year and winter temperatures. Temperatures over the rest of the decade will return to the early 20th Century.
This figure is from Willis Eschenbach’s post of 12th May, 2010. Location of Svalbard is marked by a snowflake and the North Pole is shown as a red star.
KR dsays:
“Humlum has in the past claimed CO2 does not act as a forcing based; upon incomplete data from a single highland Greenland ice core – GISP2…”
That’s Doctor Humlum to you, chump. GISP2 is recognized as being among the most accurate proxies for CO2 and temperature during the past several hundred thousand years.
KR complains about extending the instrumental record, in an attempt to whitewash the deceptive “hide the decline” shenanigans by the “Team”. The fact that Dr Humlum did not play the same game is to his credit, and his excellent website is well worth a look.
As usual, when the alarmist crowd cannot dispute the evidence, they engage in ad-hominem attacks like KR’s. That might work at pseudo-science blogs like realclimate and skepticalscience, but ad-homs get called on the carpet here.
Anyone here want to give 20 to 1 odds that this temperature drop will happen? Thats how most of the Public will interpret a 95% confidence interval.
Lets not champion what we so often criticize from the proponents of AGW. This is an interesting scenario and one that deserves further review. However we must make clear to the Public that a 95% confidence interval does not imply an equivalent probability for the projection ultimately being realized in the real world.
What makes me a skeptic is an aversion to overly confident claims. What makes me angry is using confidence intervals to “persuade” non statisticians. I am coming to believe that confidence intervals do more harm than good with respect to the communication of science.
Polar Vortex initiation and teardown dates? These are tied to tropospheric warming which is tied to heating due to radiation? A decrease in radiation means much more efficient cooling while a increase in GCR means less water to block outbound radiation? Leading to a very strong vortex?
I also seem to recall a comment this spring about Arctic Polar Vortex getting so cold that we had a real Ozone hole for the first time in a very long time. Hmm.
Remember that Antartica is cold due to its very strong Vortex.
I wonder if the Vortex is the key??
Smokey is quite correct, the proper reference is “Dr. Humlum, professor of physical geography at UNIS”. Mea culpa on that, I did not intend offense by improper addressing.
Espen, Smokey
The problem with GISP2 (which is valuable data!) is that Dr. Humlum on his website represents one high latitude high altitude local proxy (GISP2) as a global record. Current work in temperature reconstructions use >1000 proxies, not just one. And in addition Dr. Humlum fails to show recent warming (over 2C) at that proxy location, which induces a huge offset from the global temperature record. He also fails to include the modern instrumental CO2 data, showing just the ice core CO2 data, while arguing against a relationship between modern CO2 levels and modern temperature changes.
In short, he assumes a single proxy was global, and argues against recent changes in CO2 and temperature without showing recent data. This does not give me confidence in his work…
—
In regards to the paper discussed in the opening post – I am again pleased that Dr. Humlum and colleagues made testable predictions. I have not yet, however, seen a ‘length of solar cycle’ correlation to climate (other than TSI changes), prove out, so (personal opinion) I’m a bit skeptical in that regard.
Regarding solar cycle length (to be a bit more focused on topic) – there’s little in the literature to support any correlation with climate change:
Benestad 2005 (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005…/2005GL023621.shtml):
“There have been speculations about an association between the solar cycle length and Earth’s climate, however, the solar cycle length analysis does not follow Earth’s global mean surface temperature. A further comparison with the monthly sunspot number, cosmic galactic rays and 10.7 cm absolute radio flux since 1950 gives no indication of a systematic trend in the level of solar activity that can explain the most recent global warming.”
Lassen 1999 (http://www.dmi.dk/dmi/sr99-9.pdf) comes to much the same conclusions – there are other papers out there as well.
Solheim et al 2012 makes significant claims to the contrary, and they will have to prove their conclusions correct.
The BS alarm is ringing. Going by the figure above, the curves match with variations of only a few degrees in most cases. The prediction involves a large rapid reversal. It seems to me, most likely there would be an inertia factor (e.g. heat capcity) that would limit the speed of the shift. A temperature decrease may be likely. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did occur. I wonder whether it can happen as fast as predicted. That dramatic temperature swing is a bold prediction. It will be interesting to watch what happens over the next decade.
Jimmy Haigh says:
December 16, 2011 at 7:32 am
One solar cycle. Spooky or what?
Not at all. I have on numerous occasion pointed out that the geomagnetic filed is well correlated to the solar cycle, and the solar cycle is preceded by the interplanetary index IHV by anything up to 8 years, and this is well recognised in the solar science by most scientists from Hathaway to Svalgaard.
IHV index is “derived from magnetometer data recorded at two points on opposite sides of Earth: one in England and another in Australia. IHV data have been taken every day since 1868…. When a gust of solar wind hits Earth’s magnetic field, the impact causes the magnetic field to shake. If it shakes hard enough, we call it a geomagnetic storm.”
Why advance? “The underlying physics is a mystery.”
Here is what that shake looked at the eve of the recent Japan’s devastating earthquake:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Japan.gif
Nothing spooky, it is that science is moving at the snails pace, anything odd and the academic scientists withdraw into their cosy little shells.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/gms.htm
I take any prediction for catastrophic cooling, or warming, with a grain of salt.
Advances in Meteorology
Volume 2009
Volume 2010
Volume 2011
Volume 2012
WOW! You mean this journal has been around for over 2,000 years?
Hmm, let’s see;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_Publishing_Corporation
“Founded in 1997, Hindawi currently publishes more than 300+ peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as, more recently, a number of scholarly monographs. However, as of 2011-09-07, only 22 of the journals currently have a listed impact factor. The company has its headquarters in Cairo and an office in New York. Hindawi is one of the leading publishers in the open-access publishing movement.”
http://journalseeker.researchbib.com/?issn=16879309
“Start year:2009”
So;
Volume 1 = 2009
Volume 2 = 2010
Volume 3 = 2011
Volume 4 = 2012
And in only, what will be, at most, four years of publication, how many “Special Issues” will “Advances in Meteorology” have? 49? No, not quite, but nine, three in 2010 and six in 2012.
Nice to see that E&E has some competition for incompetent publications.
“…good or bad for polar bears?”
Maybe they’ll go back to Ireland.
ScienceDirect: …Irish Origin for the Modern Polar Bear…
I still have not seen persuasive arguments that warming at the scale being discussed is bad.
Cooling at this scale will be seriously bad.
The dismissing of this paper is already occcuring at RealClimate with the pompous egotists resorting to ridicule. True believers they all are.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_ext.png
KR says:
And the Arctic ice cap is decreasing too, at an accelerating rate (see http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/) – 2011 ice volume looks to be as low or lower than 2007. As that year-round Arctic ice goes away there is a direct effect on decreasing summer albedo – hence a warming feedback.
KR, you must be confused. Albedo is a surface function not a volume function. The link above that I provide shows that the surface ice for 2011 is (as of 12/15/11) just slightly below the standard deviation for the long term average. And during the full year was at times at the standard and at times below. The arctic surface ice does not appear to be “decreasing” “at an accelerating rate” as far as albedo is concerned.
Skimming over the paper I don’t see a lot of discussion about solar and climate physics, except for a brief mention of albedo and wind patterns etc. But I think the authors made it perfectly clear that this paper is primarily focused on investigating _statistical correlation patterns_ in temperature series records.
Nothing wrong with that approach. They saw a pattern in historical data which they believed expressed a predicable truth about the climate in that region of the world. So they made a hypothesis and based some predictions on that hypothesis. We’ll find out in a few years if the predictions come true. That’s all according to the scientific method.
But if it does get colder, as they predicted, we’ll still have to judge if it was a ‘lucky guess’ or a genuine truth about Nature. Also have to be careful about extrapolating these findings to other regions or eras.
Time will tell.
At the risk of sounding serious, has anyone done any credible studies on this? It isn’t just the colder average temperature another LIA will bring, but the decreased precipitation and consequent effects on crop production.
How can one get anyone interested in this? Everybody “knows” that we’re about to melt down, not freeze up. The real problem is that if we freeze up instead, a) we will be completely unprepared for it, I mean really, really unprepared; b) they will come for scientists the world over with pitchforks and torches as several billion people starve.
To give you a small hint of the problem, consider wheat. The bulk of the world’s wheat is grown in the cooler northern climates — Europe, China, Canada, the US, Russia. Something like 1/2 to 2/3 of this crop is vulnerable to late frost, early frost, midsummer frost, or the drought conditions that often accompany NH cool periods. One “year without a summer” such as historically has occurred when cool cycle conditions coincide with e.g. volcanic aerosol cooling and this crop would be decimated. The cost of bread and livestock feed and (downstream) meat would skyrocket. The cost of beer would go up (damn you, frozen barley!). We could see real starvation and economic collapse in first world countries, not third world countries, as we are all overpopulated for a colder, less productive world.
I think we could survive a single bad (cold) summer, just as we can and have survived single bad (hot) summers and dry summers, but generally the hot and dry has proven to be regional and more associated with e.g. ENSO and the like. Global cold would be so very, very bad.
Volcanoes should not be ignored. In the 1800s there were not one, but two major volcanic — not “eruptions”, explosions: Krakatoa and Tambora. Tambora blasted 38 cubic miles of earth and ash into the air and was heard 2000 miles away; Krakatoa added another 5 cubic miles, and dropped global temperatures by 1-2C in a single year. We haven’t had anything comparable to either one — Mount St. Helens was less than 1 cubic mile.
FWIW, Tambora has been waking up again recently. And there are many other volcanoes that are quite capable of exploding, as did Krakatoa, Tambora, Mt. St Helens, with little warning and great violence.
Truthfully, human impact on the environment is nontrivial in some cases — arguably the Sahara desert was created by the introduction of goatherding into an environment that barely got by binding moisture in the first place, and massive cutting of forestland and replacing it with farmland or city certainly affects local climate. However, our impact is dwarfed compared to the impact of natural events that we can no more control than a flea can control an elephant. We live with such control over our local environments that we forget how vulnerable we are to things like natural climate fluctuations and how little control we have, really, over them.
Of course, sooner or later Nature — I mean the real thing, not the journal — is there to set us straight. The list of events that are probable on a centennial timescale and that can have an enormous effect on human populations is long: Pandemic is probably at the top of the list, but volcanic explosions, “bulls-eye” coronal mass ejections, catastrophic earthquakes (and associated tsunamis). Mere drought — not “human caused” drought, but perfectly natural drought — is inevitable on a century time scale (look at the history of major droughts of the last two or three centuries).
I don’t think people appreciate how good warm is. They take it for granted, even as they underestimate the ability of the planet to buffer and thrive under warm cycle weather. Historical evidence suggests that the really dangerous instability is to cold cycle behavior — once one passes a tipping point there, it’s 90,000 years or so until the next warm cycle. If we do move back towards ice age behavior, little or not, in the great wheat baskets of Canada, the US, Europe, Russia and China, if we do have the cold cycle NH regional droughts that dominated e.g. the Younger Dryas, the first three consecutive cold years that ruin crops will kill billions of years. We might manage one year. We might survive two. Three would exhaust our food stockpiles, destroy a major fraction of the world’s economy as people spend any amount of wealth in pursuit of food as opposed to the luxuries that are now its primary basis, cause world war and massive misery and despair.
Warm is good. Cold is, on the other hand, quite terrifying.
rgb
mkelly
Agreed – direct feedbacks are from ice area/extent, not volume. But thinner ice is more susceptible to bunching up or being driven out of the Arctic by weather, so over the longer term (as weather/currents vary up and down) less volume means less coverage.
If the weather and currents of 2007 were in operation this year, we would have lower extent based upon the ice volume. And the volume keeps decreasing…
ShrNfr,
Lets be careful when using paintings as a proxy for clouds– the rise of impressionism as an example focused artists on certain light conditions- so was there a change in clouds or did painters select certain cloud conditions because they afforded the “right” light? Or did they pick cloudy summer days because it was too hot otherwise given the fashion of the time or fear getting a tan and destroy the illusion of blue-blood? Or did they etc, etc, etc? Interesting but IMHO not useful.
I understand skeptics pleasure at seeing evidence and predictions of cooling, as it falsifies the warming catastrophes of the establishment’s CO2 war. We should never show joy at the re-emergence of cold. With populations reaching 7 billion, cooling cannot improve crop yields and new fertilizers and GM stock do not compensate for a shorter cooler growing season. There will be much suffering under such a scenario. We may see all the gains, brought about by modest warming erased.
What preparation for cold does ANYONE see being actively considered? Where are the giant UN silos located that are full to the rim with emergency food stocks? When will a Joseph, with the multi-colored coat, appear with directions to stockpile grain for seven years of lean?
Instead, all I see is more plans to burn grain, to establish more carbon credit. I hope they all choke on it. GK
On a slightly different topic, I check
spaceweather.com daily to note sunspots, solar flux and the current solar wind. It seemed like the sunspot number generally correlated with the solar flux but lately the solar flux seems considably higher than the appearance of the sun’s face would justify.
I love a conspiracy as much as the next guy so I wonder if that’s the way it should be?
A lot of good comments here.
A lot to digest but there seems to be a 60-65 year cycle and the change is due.
If one of the longer cycles is also due, change we can’t believe?
Previous link to WUWT showed that the earth is now entering a near circular orbit. As such, the prospect of an early return to an ice age is remote. This does not prevent the climate from varying and we are probaly entering a cold period. If solar activity remains low, as suggested, then we may be in for a long period of cooling but not sufficient to trigger an ice age. We may have to hope that the warmists are correct and more CO2 will lift the temp. I believe that in the next few years we will need it. But I enjoyed the post – hope I’m around for the next ten years or so to see how it all works out! Keep burning the carbon! The sad truth is that we simply don’t know enough to make a reasonably educated guess. I have come to the conclusion that climeatology is to climate science as astrology is to astronomy.
Robert Brown says:
December 16, 2011 at 9:08 am
==============
I share your thoughts.
To prepare for that, should we burn our food stocks?
To echo comments above, I just finished reading “The Little Ice Age” by Brian Fagan.
I’m thinking that it’s kind of a bummer that we can’t elevate global temperatures in any measurable way by burning carbon. The IPCC’s 3 – 6 degrees per doubling might have been quite handy for the next big freeze.
Gareth Phillips says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:25 am
Something I have always found strange is that any increase in ice in the Antarctic is dismissed as just being sea ice, but a reduction in sea ice in the Arctic is seen as critical. What is the difference?
___________________________
Confirmation Bias
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20111004_Figure6.png
KR says:
“And the volume keeps decreasing…”
KR per the link provided above the volume of multi-year ice has been getting larger each year since 2007. In January when all the first year gets added to second and second gets added to third etc there will be a considerable jump in volume of multi-year ice. So again I think you are not correct in your “keeps decreasing” mode.