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.
R. Gates says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:01 pm
But this forcing to the cool side will be tempered by the longer-term forcing to the warmer side from anthropogenic greenhouse warming.
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Thank you Nostradamus.
You talking about that inexorable, immeasurable non-deviation from the mean ??
Came across this paper today (one Keith Briffa initially said should be rejected for publication with a single sentence review in email 0084.txt. My guess is they jiggered it around to show the current period to be warmer than the MWP and that was enough to get it through review by “the team”)
Anyway:
http://www.jaakkoharjuvaara.com/LUONTO/2009_Helama_et_al_Journal_of_Quaternary_Science_vol_24.pdf
Summer temperature variations in Lapland during the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age relative to natural instability of thermohaline circulation on multi-decadal and multi-centennial scales.
Would tend to validate the notion of coming cooling. Bottom line of the paper is:
Pamela Gray (December 16, 2011 at 6:12 am)
“An extrinsic system such as Solar cycles are long enough to encompass several Earth bound intrinsic oceanic and atmospheric cycles that are well known temperature drivers.”
Yes, we all know the atmosphere & ocean drive the seasons Pamela. (/sarc)
Beware the hazards of anomaly-think.
Espen (December 16, 2011 at 6:28 am) wrote:
“most of the variance in world temperatures is found in the NH”
So asymmetry in solar input over the terrestrial year matters tremendously …and this is exactly what the data say (…but of course most people prefer abstract conception to observation)..
Smokey says:
December 16, 2011 at 4:37 pm
“The North Pole has been ice free during the Holocene, and it may well be ice free again, since the planet is still warming from the LIA.”
Exactly how far back to precise records go, anyway? Something tells me KR is drawing extravagant conclusions from a very small sample size. I’ve never seen any of the curves at most a little more than a decade old.
Is this a typical case where a warming advocate is trying to force a fight on ground of his own choosing, based on assumptions which are unverified?
Not of a lot of clear thinking going on here. Solar cycle length is nonstationary. (That means it doesn’t stay at one length.) Ask a mechanic if drive wheels rotate at the same rate as the crank shaft. They don’t. Why? Differential transmission. So coherence is in the rate of change. The point people are missing is that frequency splitting of dominant terrestrial modes by solar cycles CHANGES over time. At some point in time, there will be some capable people who get serious enough to realize this is what the data say. (No theory — 100% observation.)
M.A.Vukcevic wrote (December 16, 2011 at 8:16 am) wrote:
“science is moving at the snails pace, anything odd and the academic scientists withdraw into their cosy little shells.”
Well said Vukcevic. I remember a prof boasting to a class about how impossible it would be for him to get fired. With a great sense of humor, he stressed that an abstract narrative only has to be “cute” to become accepted & popular among academics. Easy safe street at the ivory tower. None of the stimulation of real cut throat jungle threats we face daily in the private sector business world. Academics are truly brilliant with abstraction, but they need outside help to see nature as it’s actually observed.
Carl Sagan and Steven Schneider claimed the same thing in the 1970’s when we were getting colder yet CO2 emissions were climbing rapidly.
Oh, and the above was apparently in a published peer-reviewed paper at the time. Physics worked the same then as it does now. Why the difference? Politics.
Bart – “Exactly how far back to precise records go, anyway? Something tells me KR is drawing extravagant conclusions from a very small sample size. I’ve never seen any of the curves at most a little more than a decade old.”
Well, you might look at records since 1953 (over 50 years) (http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html, in particular http://nsidc.org/sotc/images/mean_anomaly_1953-2011.png) – or since 1900 (http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/Copenhagen/Copenhagen_Diagnosis_FIGURES.pdf – Fig. 13), – perhaps over the last 1450 years (Kinnard 2011, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7374/full/nature10581.html).
I think that’s more than a decade or so, don’t you?
Before someone deliberately misrepresents what I wrote about asymmetry, let me be crystal clear: I’m NOT referring to north-south asymmetry on the sun. The asymmetry is over the terrestrial year. The phenomenon is known in some fields as aliasing (in this case physical aliasing), but some might prefer to call it a modulation in the context at hand. Aliasing of the solar cycle shows up in many of the geophysical variables we regularly discuss here. Beware metrics of solar-terrestrial relations that ignore (a) terrestrial seasons & (b) changing solar cycle length.
Regarding my previous post – the middle figure is both models (1900 on) and observations (1950’s on), not measurements from 1900, my apologies – the last one, however, is from an extensive bit of work going back 1450 years.
Don’t fall for the latest Fenton Communications generated popular bandwagon. What often happens in cases like these is Monsanto provides seed and a crop is produced. Then the state then collects the seed produced by the cotton plant during ginning and attempts to hand out that seed the following year and it does not sprout because these varieties do not produce viable seed.
Then the local ag minister says it’s not his fault, the seed came from Monsanto (which the first generation seed did).
Regarding Arctic ice – Also see Kinnard et al 2008, http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/2008/2007GL032507.shtml, where they note the expansion of the seasonal ice range since 1870.
Again, more than a decade…
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 16, 2011 at 8:16 am
Not at all. I have on numerous occasion pointed out that the geomagnetic field 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.”
You are a bit confused. You confuse IHV with the aa -index, and there is no mystery in how either is generated: e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/IAGA2008LS-final.pdf
Sometimes, especially during the declining phase of the cycle, coronal holes are strongly recurrent [i.e. they live for several rotations of the sun]. It is thought that this is related to the polar fields of the sun, the holes being extensions of the polar fields, so the recurrent activity might be a measure of the polar fields which are a good predictor of the strength of the next cycle. So, no mystery there either. The trick is to pick the right recurrence peak if there are several [which there were this time around – pick the wrong one and your prediction is wrong].
Paul Vaughan says:
December 16, 2011 at 8:30 pm
The asymmetry is over the terrestrial year. The phenomenon is known in some fields as aliasing (in this case physical aliasing), but some might prefer to call it a modulation in the context at hand. Aliasing of the solar cycle shows up in many of the geophysical variables we regularly discuss here. Beware metrics of solar-terrestrial relations that ignore (a) terrestrial seasons & (b) changing solar cycle length.
There is no such aliasing ‘over the terrestrial year’. Only cyclomaniacs get confused over changing cycle lengths.
KR, yes, ice has been low. There is NO indication that it is any lower now than it was in the 1930’s because we didn’t have satellite coverage then. First of all while ice was generally declining, it is well-known that 2007 was not a melt event due to temperature. It was a wind anomaly that blew a huge amount of the ice out into the Atlantic. There was a very large loss of ice in 2007 but that was not due to any commensurate warming of the sea surface. That said, one must be careful of sea surface temperatures for the Arctic when there is less ice, for obvious reasons. If you have, say, half the surface area covered by ice this year compared to last year, this year’s “sea surface temperature” for the arctic ocean is going to be higher even with a similar water temperature. It’s pretty darned difficult to correct for.
That said Arctic ice seems to lag by some years what is going on in the rest of the world based on historical behavior. We generally started down globally in temperature only in 2004 at the end of the late 20th century warming. It will take a while for that to reach the Arctic.
At this point I think it is fairly well recognized by a lot of different people reaching their conclusions independently through different research that we appear to be poised to experience a significant drop in temperatures. At the same time such research as Mann’s “hockey stick” has been completely discredited at this point. Tisdale shows in his link above that in the Arctic there is no significant difference between the early 20th century warming and the late 20th century warming. We know with certainty that ice recovered from that event.
There is absolutely no observational evidence that we are experiencing any unusual Arctic conditions. Any claim of catastrophic warming is speculation. Based on natural cyclical patterns seen since the middle 19th century, it is much more likely that we will see 30 years of cooling in the Arctic than any significant warming. The research of CRU and others pointing to catastrophic AGW has already been discredited based on observational divergence from their speculation in addition to questionable data and methods. With every passing year the divergence from the models grows. There is a growing body of literature that suggests we may be headed for significant Arctic cooling. I am willing to see how the next 10 years or so pan out.
KR says:
December 16, 2011 at 8:26 pm
“I think that’s more than a decade or so, don’t you?”
What are the sources of the data? How were they spliced together? How many declines or advances were “hidden”, how many fudge factors and biases were introduced, when disparate data records turned out to be inconsistent where they overlapped?
We’re rather justifiably suspicious these days of what goes into the sausage.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 16, 2011 at 8:51 pm
You are a bit confused. You confuse IHV with the aa -index,
No sir, notice the quotation marks. I was quoting directly your solar colleagues Dr. Hathaway and Wilson, as still available at the NASA’s website.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/21dec_cycle24/
(paragraph 3 onwards with accompanying clearly marked illustration).
A 95% confidence interval…….Okay Vikings, hand them oars back into the stores, the Greenland trip is cancelled for a bit!
philincalifornia says:
December 16, 2011 at 5:40 pm
R. Gates says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:01 pm
But this forcing to the cool side will be tempered by the longer-term forcing to the warmer side from anthropogenic greenhouse warming.
———————————————————————
Thank you Nostradamus.
You talking about that inexorable, immeasurable non-deviation from the mean ??
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No, I’m talking about the inevitable, measurable deviation from the temperatures caused by natural forcings when human forcings are added.
KR says:
December 16, 2011 at 7:14 am
“Looking at the authors, I note one of them is Ole Humlum. ”
Oh yes!!! Maybe he smokes? Maybe he believes in God? Maybe he had a seminar once for Statoil? (Yes, as you all know out there; Statoil is the GOVERNMENT Oil company in Norway), or perhaps he questions the Big Bang Theory?
Who knows? So don’t believe a word of what he is saying, don’t check his curves, nothing, I tell you!
Just like Isaac Newton, going to Trinity College, and all……..
I’m not sure if this important paper on the the study of solar cycle length has been mentioned here, but it gives great detail on the natural fluctuations in the length’s:
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0606426
The bottom line is the SCL seems to have a strong natural variability of About 188 years, and some other lessor cycles at about 40 and 87 yesrs, which, to the attentive, has several implications, not the least of which means we are at a period in solar cycle length similar to the Dalton minimum. The other implications of course would make Carl Smith quite happy.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 17, 2011 at 1:14 am
No sir, notice the quotation marks. I was quoting directly your solar colleagues Dr. Hathaway and Wilson, as still available at the NASA’s website.
That Hathaway is confused does not mean that you should be too, especially when being told by the inventor of the IHV index [me] that that description is wrong. It pays to actually read the references I have given, which you clearly have not bothered to do. Bad form, I would say. Wouldn’t you in your heart agree?
Leif Svalgaard (December 16, 2011 at 8:55 pm) wrote:
“There is no such aliasing ‘over the terrestrial year’.”
You are incorrect. Check the data a LOT more carefully.
You’re going on abstract misconception. I’m going on observation.