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.
Sunsettommy says:
“Glacial Age is coming near now.”
——-
Define “near”. Not likely in the next 10,000 years at least.
davidmhoffer (December 17, 2011 at 11:41 am) wrote:
“They just react to any given change in radiance according to their temperature.”
In the polar night??
It’s about circulation. The highest variance is in winter.
Too much focus on averages. Not enough on time rate of change of equator-pole spatial gradients.
I suggest changing abstract conception to match observation.
Word to the wise:
Shooting the messenger doesn’t help when your conflict’s with the data.
KR,
incredibly writes:
“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 – without including the modern instrumental record. Including the full set of data shows his approach to be invalid. Not a promising background…”
Here is what the NOAA has to say about the ice core data:
EXCERPT:
ABSTRACT
Greenland ice-core records provide an exceptionally clear picture of
many aspects of abrupt climate changes, and particularly of those
associated with the Younger Dryas event, as reviewed here.
Well-preserved annual layers can be counted confidently, with only 1%
errors for the age of the end of the Younger Dryas 11,500 years before
present. Ice-flow corrections allow reconstruction of snow accumulation
rates over tens of thousands of years with little additional uncertainty.
Glaciochemical and particulate data record atmospheric-loading changes
with little uncertainty introduced by changes in snow accumulation.
Confident paleothermometry is provided by site-specific calibrations
using ice-isotopic ratios, borehole temperatures, and gas-isotopic ratios.
Near-simultaneous changes in ice-core paleoclimatic indicators of local,
regional, and more-widespread climate conditions demonstrate that much
of the Earth experienced abrupt climate changes synchronous with
Greenland within thirty years or less. Post-Younger Dryas changes
have not duplicated the size, extent and rapidity of these
paleoclimatic changes.
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
LOL
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 12:39 pm
“I know the data intimately having studied this for 40+ years. There is no support for any of your claims.”
You’re incorrect.
Unfounded and not supported claims carry no weight.
R.Gates,
“Define “near”. Not likely in the next 10,000 years at least.”
In 10,000 years.Canada will be under the ice.
We are already seeing glaciers that did not exist more than 1,000 years ago.
Fremont Glacier in Wyoming is only about 300 years old.Before that time.There had been no glacier there for many thousands of years.But it is already 150m thick.
It has been cooling for thousands of years now.It is obvious and unmistakable.You and many others here are arguing over a secondary temperature trend of a few decades.The dominant one is the entire interglacial period.The one almost everyone is not thinking about.
As we go deeper into the Climate Autumn.We will see more new glaciers develop and further south too.
Both the Greenland and Vostock ice core data show a clear long term cooling trend.
You can read more on this with a recent publication from John Kehr:
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/the-book/
This is an area of climate science that is rarely considered.
M.A.Vukcevic (December 17, 2011 at 11:15 am) wrote:
“[…] there are two very accurate ‘fundamental’ oscillating periods as the sidebands equidistant from a central frequency :
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-Vfspec.htm “
The reason you get symmetry is the date ranges you’ve picked. Even though a bit crude, you’re awareness of the early 20th century phase reversal is encouraging. I again advise you to start windowing your spectra …and be sure to vary windowing parameters.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/15/hegerl-et-al-react-to-the-uncertainty-monster-paper/#comment-150267
You might also want to consider windowing some cepstra (that’s not a typo) so you can start gaining a handle on the harmonic families in windowed spectra. Again: Be sure to vary windowing parameters. (If you don’t, that’s like ignoring the focal length knob on your microscope. Microscope has more adjustments than just magnification. You might also consider moving the slide around spatially…)
I appreciate your graphs Vukcevic — might shake something loose in the mainstream so it can fall back into better place…
When the time’s right I’ll have more on the early 20th century phase reversal.
Leif Svalgaard (December 17, 2011 at 1:15 pm) wrote:
“Unfounded and not supported claims carry no weight.”
Ignorance, misinterpretation, & misunderstanding are your choices.
Come on Paul!
DR. Svalgaard is a solar scientist of long and good standing.
I suggest that if you have something useful and factual to present your case.Then by all means do so.
But leave out the disrespect please.
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 1:34 pm
Ignorance, misinterpretation, & misunderstanding are your choices.
I have noted that many of your post contains words that begin with mis- That ought to make you reflect a bit…
KR: “that since Antarctic sea ice vanishes in the summer any changes in sea ice extent there has little effect on albedo or for that matter feedbacks”
err…no. The current [a few days ago] deficit of sea ice in the Arctic relative to the long term median is less than the current surplus in the antarctic. In the Arctic, there is basically no insolation, because it’s December, and similarly in antarctica the sun is ‘on’ almost 24 hours. Your statement is flat wrong.
RERT – “The current [a few days ago] deficit of sea ice in the Arctic relative to the long term median is less than the current surplus in the antarctic”
I would have to disagree, based upon the actual numbers for seasonal changes – see a good discussion (with those numbers) at http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/monckton-skewers-truth/, also another at http://www.skepticalscience.com/arctic-antarctic-sea-ice.htm
Arctic sea ice loss is about 3.3x the Antarctic sea ice gain – and don’t forget that the Western Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) is losing land ice as well. The Eastern Antarctica ice sheet appears stable so far (a good, no, a seriously good thing, considering the amount of water there).
—
As to summer – Remember that Southern hemispheric summer is in December, Northern hemispheric summer is in June. I try to keep that in mind when discussing things in blogs including folks from NZ and Australia. Measuring Arctic winter by the Antarctic summer (or vice versa), is really not an appropriate comparison.
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 12:51 pm
davidmhoffer (December 17, 2011 at 11:41 am) wrote:
“They just react to any given change in radiance according to their temperature.”
In the polar night??
It’s about circulation. The highest variance is in winter.>>>
Yes, in the polar night. “Polar amplification” is a term thrown around by warmists as part of the CAGW meme. I used “radiance” as one example to illustrate the physics. The CAGW meme is based on energy being abosrbed and re-radiated by CO2 and other GHG’s. Since they in turn aborb energy from upbound LW radiated by the earth, if it is GHG’s to which we are referring, their effect is 24 x 7. Whatever number of watts/m2 is attributed to CO2, those watts/m2 will have a larger effect on temperature (in degrees) during the polar night as the same number of watts/m2 would have in the tropics at high noon.
Not that I buy the significance of either. They are both overcome by natural variance and circulation. I’m just pointing out that even if the CAGW meme that CO2 is going to cause any measurable warming, most of it will come at cold temps in the depths of winter and very little at high temps in summer. Break the GISS or HadCrut temperature records down by latitude, that’s exactly what you see.
My point being that “polar amplification” is a fiction. Regardless of what is driving the fluctuations, circulation, solar variance, CO2….the temperature variances SHOULD be higher at the poles both on the way up, and on the way down, and the highest variance SHOULD be in the winter. There’s nothing being “amplified”.
@sunsettommy (December 17, 2011 at 1:43 pm)
Dr. Svalgaard is incorrect.
@Leif Svalgaard
Please explain as concisely as possible the conventional mainstream understanding of the R-C & R-M effects, noting any key reservations you might have personally.
Regards.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/16/polar-amplification-works-both-ways/#comment-833434
Publish or Perish? No. Pay and Publish? Yes. $600/article
http://107.20.170.83/journals/amet/apc/
So with 300+ “journals” at say 12/year with 10 papers/journal gives;
300 * 12 * 10 * $600.00 = $21,600,000.00 per year
Number of employees? North of 200 (but let’s just say 500 for now).
Egypt per capita GDP/GNI = $6.200.00 (2010 CIA Factbook) or $2,340.00 (Worldbank 2010) or $2,271.00 (UN 2009) (all in US $). So, for the sake of simplicity the average of those three is $3,600.00/year.
$21,600,000 / 500 = $43,200.00/person or $43,200.00/$3,600.00 = 12X the average income of an Egyptian.
Not a bad business model, if you were to ask me.
Now if the Vatican Printing Office were to charge $600.00/Bible …
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 4:12 pm
@sunsettommy (December 17, 2011 at 1:43 pm)
Dr. Svalgaard is incorrect.
As I said unfounded and not supported claims carry no weight
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Please explain as concisely as possible the conventional mainstream understanding of the R-C & R-M effects, noting any key reservations you might have personally.
That explanation is decades old. In 1977 I explained it as laid out in section 7-9 of http://www.leif.org/research/suipr699.pdf
Further elaborated here: http://www.leif.org/research/The%20semiannual%20variation%20of%20great%20geomagnetic%20storms.pdf and here: http://www.leif.org/research/Semiannual-Comment.pdf and here: http://www.leif.org/research/Semiannual%20Variation%201954%20and%201996.pdf
None of this has any bearing on aliasing or solar cycle lengths. The local geometry determines a slight modulation of geomagnetic activity. The Sun does not know about this. Your reference to ‘conventional mainstream understanding’ is nonsense as if there were any other viable one. We understand quite well what is going on. There are other modulations as well, which again have nothing to do with what you are peddling. There is some evidence that the internal variations of the sun may play an additional role, e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/Asymmetric%20Rosenberg-Coleman%20Effect.pdf but this is speculative. Most people stick with the classical explanation.
It is going to get really cold very soon. This predicted cooling is calculated to have a 95% confidence level.
Are you really that sure? Yeah really? Really really sure? That you have all the variables right? All those little influences right? All those forcings and feedbacks, and their signs and values? Yeah right, sure.
This display of confidence in ones own calculations is a red flag for me. And in what way does (heliologic?) global cooling alarmism differ from antropologic global warming alarmism? All you need to do is get more people on board that confirm your predictions with more models and more tree ring reconstructions. Form a consensus. Settle the science. You know the drill.
Tony Mach says:
December 17, 2011 at 4:51 pm
Yes I am really sure. That is why a statistician is amongst the authors – so we know just how sure we are (spoken as a non-author). As I said in the post, this is going to be big. Time to quote Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Open your mind to the possible, Tony. Longer ski seasons ahead.
Thankyou for suggesting to get more people on board. More papers are in train. Professor Solheim and his co-authors got a signal out of only 100 years of data. There are plenty of temperature records only that long. Start near the poles and work towards the equator. We will be having conferences on the solar cycle length – temperature relationship by 2014.
EFS_Junior – Very interesting, I had not realized that “Advances in Meteorology” was a pay for publishing publication.
Folks – “pay for publishing” journals are just not measuring up to the quality (at any level) of subscription based publications. Please see http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/06/10/nonsense-for-dollars/ for a fascinating account of a computer generated jargon jumble being accepted by a supposedly peer reviewed publication accepting $$$ for printing articles.
Personal opinion: “Pay for publishing” journals are a recent development – and completely worthless, as they will accept anything in order to have content.
KR,
Denigrating journals you don’t like [because they publish papers you don’t like] presumes that subscription journals are above board. They’re not. Most if not all mainstream climate journals have been co-opted by the “Team”, and they have completely lost their credibility as a result. Check out this physicist attempt to correct an egregious error in a mainstream journal.
Instead of attacking someone for submitting an article to a journal, let’s see you defend people like this. The fact is that mainstream climate journals have been corrupted, and they have zero objectivity.
KR, different journals have different standards but you are correct in that this journal does publish once an author has been endorsed. I do notice in this case that the initial submission was in September and that there was a revision submitted two month later in November before acceptance for publication so it would appear that some sort of review was done before publication and I also note that this article has been selected for a special issue in 2012. That would indicate some degree of real scrutiny of the article. Unlike “Tamino”, whose article in a different posting on this site was accepted 19 days after submission and is absolute nonsense, these authors apparently were required at least one revision before publication.
We do have rather strong correlation in the record of changes in temperature regime that coincide with changes in solar activity, any specific cause notwithstanding. We can speculate on the reasons for it, but it is pretty clear that we do see it. We also clearly see in the record that highest latitude changes seem to lag these events by some years, usually around 10 or 11 years. Again, the exact mechanism for that can remain unknown to us yet we can accept that they do occur.
My first impression would be that the changes they are proposing in general trend are consistent with similar trends noticed in the past. What is remarkable here is that they quantify the change. The direction of the change and the timing of it would be expected due to the change in solar activity. Quantifying the degree of it is what is interesting here. That they find a strong 62-68 year cyclical variation over the temperature record is also not unusual. It is seen practically everywhere on the globe (though greatly subdued in the tropics and might be more readily seen in precipitation patterns than in temperature records in that region of the planet). And again, the drivers of that cycle can be speculated upon, but we know that they exist and have seen then over the course of temperature records for over a century and a half. The lag between solar activity and temperature change was first noted in the the difference between a short cycle and warming in the Arctic. This is simply an exercise in the opposite mode.
So they will get the direction of the change correct. Their estimation of the amplitude of the drop might be a little high though it will likely fall within the error bars (which are rather generous in that we are nearly there already).
crosspatch – My concern with “pay for publishing”, or more succinctly “pay for play” journals is that (as I noted in the link in my previous post) some of them appear willing to accept totally computer generated nonsense for publication. That means no peer review, and a lack of scientific motive (no motive other than printing for $$$).
Subscription based journals, at least, have some incentive to publish meaningful papers – otherwise they lose subscribers. “Pay for publishing” journals, on the other hand, lack that incentive. And I find that disturbing.
This is not to say that decent science cannot be published in a pay for publishing””, or that bad articles can slide through peer review in a subscription based journal – but it’s not a good starting point.
Another flood of misunderstandings:
Leif Svalgaard (December 17, 2011 at 4:42 pm)
–
Leif Svalgaard (December 17, 2011 at 4:27 pm)
“As I said unfounded and not supported claims carry no weight”
The best example of an unsupported claim is your “uniform 0.1K” solar-terrestrial narrative, which is mercilessly razed by observational data. Trust obliterated.
David Archibald (December 17, 2011 at 7:05 pm) wrote:
“Start near the poles and work towards the equator.”
Excellent.