Guest post by David Archibald
Solar Cycle 24 is now three years old and predictions of the date of solar maximum have settled upon mid-2013. For example, Jan Janssens has produced this graph predicting the month of maximum in mid-2013, which is 54 months after the Solar Cycle 23/24 minimum in December 2008:
For those of us who wish to predict climate, the most important solar cycle attribute is solar cycle length. Most of the curve-fitting exercises such as NASA’s place the next minimum between 2020 and 2022 (eg: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/06/nasas-november-solar-prediction/). Solar minimum in December 2022 would make Solar Cycle 24 fourteen years long, which in turn would make the climate of the mid-latitudes over Solar Cycle 25 about 1.0°C colder than the climate over Solar Cycle 24.
Curve-fitting leaves a lot to be desired. Even late in the progression of Solar Cycle 23, the curve fitters in NASA had poor predictive ability.
Examination of Altrock’s green corona emissions plot from mid-2011 suggests that a new predictive tool is available to us. The original is available here:
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~deforest/SPD-sunspot-release/6_altrock_rttp.pdf
This is my annotated version:
Altrock had observed that solar maximum occurs when the “rush to the poles” reaches 76°. The magnetic poles of the Sun reverse at solar maximum, which is also considered to be the beginning of the new extended solar cycle.
We also observe that solar minimum for the last four minima has occurred when emissions are exhausted at 10°. The latitude of 10° is shown as the red line on the diagramme. Further to that, the last two solar cycles show that the month of minimum can be predicted by drawing a line between solar maximum (the point at which the rush to the poles intersects 76°) and the point of exhaustion at 10°. The bulk of activity is bounded by this line.
Altrock has noted that the “rush to the poles” in Solar Cycle 24 is much weaker and much slower than in previous solar cycles. The line he has drawn intersects 76° in mid-2013, consistent with other predictions of Solar Cycle 24 maximum.
The shape of the emission regions also suggests that Solar Cycle 24 will be quite extended. The blue bounding line from the Solar Cycle 23 maximum intersects 10° latitude in 2026, making Solar Cycle 24 eighteen years long.
That would be an exceptionally long solar cycle. The most recent cycle that neared that length was the seventeen years from the maximum of Solar Cycle 4 to the maximum of Solar Cycle 5. Prior to that, the Maunder Minimum had some very long solar cycles as interpreted from C14 data:
It seems that the first solar cycle of the Maunder Minimum was also eighteen years long.
An eighteen year long Solar Cycle 24 would be very significant in that it would be five and a half years longer that Solar Cycle 23. With the solar cycle length/temperature relationship for the US-Canadian border being 0.7°C for each year of solar cycle length, a further cooling of 3.8°C is in train for next decade. The evolution of Altrock’s green corona emissions diagramme as a predictive tool will be followed with some interest.
Back to the subject of curve-fitting, it may be still too early to call Solar Cycle 24 using that technique. The following graph shows the raw monthly data for sunspot number amplitude for Solar Cycles 5 and 6 (the Dalton Minimum) with Solar Cycle 24 to date aligned on the month of minimum. Solar Cycle 5 took about four years to get going before it had a sudden burst, and then died off over the following ten years. It is still a bit too early to be certain about how Solar Cycle 24 will shape up.
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A Physicist says:
(1) If we focus on global temperature averages, and we subtract short-term fluctuations correlated to independent observations of volcanoes, ocean current oscillations, and the solar cycle, then we see very clearly a warming trend.
(2) If instead we focus on local temperature records, and we do not subtract any short-term correlates, then we see very clearly that both in the US and around the world, more local temperature records (by far!) are being broken at the high-end than at the low-end. Which again, shows us a warming trend.
(3) Scientists like Jim Hansen are on-record as predicting that both kinds of evidence of warming (global warming trends and local heat temperature records) will strengthen in coming years.
I reply:
(1) Go and look on the latest WUWT thread of Scafetta’s. See how far short the warming has been compared with the IPCC predictions. Then see whether Hansen’s estimates of sensitivity to doubling CO2 bear any credence.
(2) I look at CET records of the following sort: >10-year extremes of daily maxima, within each month. So there are 4 types of records: high max (hottest day), low max (all days relatively cool), high min (all days relatively warm), low min (coldest day). Here are some results:
Year #hot #cold
2011 6 1
2010 0 6
2009 0 1
2008 1 6
So, in central England in the last 4 years colds have been outnumbering hots. In any case, when the mean temperature (over say 10 years) is close to a maximum because of admitted warming, should we not expect more hot records than cold ones?
(3) Lots of people are on record with BS predictions. That doesn’t make them right. In 2008 the UK Met predicted half of the next 10 years would exceed 1998’s global temperature. Not one has yet, and the remnants of La Nina make it unlikely 2012 will.
Cheers,
Rich.
Various commentators have asked about how the Foster and Rahmstorf paper got through peer review. If one goes to the ERL page, it was received on 27th September and accepted for publication on 16th November. From the Climategate emails, that tends to indicate it got a very light check, probably without anyone checking the maths. It is also probable that they had already arranged the reviewers from the “Team”.
It doesn’t need much maths ability to see that they added a fudge factor to get the trend they wanted with no scientific basis behind it.
This flawed paper makes one think that it was rushed out to meet the requirements for AR5 so they can say that the world is still warming even if the data says it isn’t.
Ed Caryl says: January 8, 2012 at 1:43 pm
A physicist,
That’s weather, not climate. The snow cover in Asia is higher than last year. Check here:
http://www.climate4you.com/SnowCover.htm
The charts for Greenland are interesting.
Ed you might want to check that out again. I just created myself a blink chart from the images at the link you provide and with the exception of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan it shows that snow cover over all the Northern Hemisphere is LESS than last year. Of course that doesn’t really mean a thing considering that even in the LIA Philadelphia recorded a 73 degree high temperature in February.
@Chrism,
this is appears to be the Team answer to the travesty of stopped warming. They just needed something…anything. The fierce support on Blogs supports this view.
As we have seen multiple times, the IPCC reports allow inclusion of peer reviewed rubbish.
Frank Lansner says:
January 9, 2012 at 4:01 am
Thankyou. I will add one further thing. It seems that the length of a solar cycle is determined at its conception – at solar maximum of the prior cycle. By the time the following minimum is reached, there is a enough data to determine what the length of the cycle will be. So, despite the system being a big sloppy pile of plasma subject to varying torque, once it is conceived it is like being on railroad tracks. So, if that is the case, at the moment of conception of a solar cycle, all the forces are summed up and then the course is set in stone for the next 18 years. While the solar cycles we see average 11.1 years, the extended cycle to the last sunspot of that cycle is about 18 years.
“”””” Robert Brown says:
January 9, 2012 at 11:32 am
……………………………..
Can I play? “”””””
Better learn the rules of the game first !
“”””””
1) True. The coffee does not get any hotter. In fact, it cools. You can try this experiment yourself. Put hot coffee into a vacuum thermos. Measure its temperature. Wait one day. Measure the temperature again. Look, it is cooler! “””””
You get one gold star.
“”””””””
Note that this assumes that the temperature of the mirror is lower than the temperature of the coffee. If it is a “perfect mirror” surrounded by a perfect vacuum, well then, the temperature remains perfectly constant. But life isn’t perfect, sadly. “””””
I’ll take back that gold star please; MIRRORS reflect ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION Perfect mirrors reflect any kind of EM radiation; and EM radiation doesn’t know ANYTHING at all about Temperature. The Temperature of the mirror doesn’t matter a jot.
“””””
2) Also true. It gets cooler, assuming that the temperature of the mirror is lower than the temperature of the ground. Unless the earth is a source of heat, in which case you have to do a bunch of math to answer the question. Darn! “””””
Yes darn! now you have one demerit; the Temperature of the mirror is quite irrelevent. Also, mirrors reflect EM radiation, they do not reflect “heat”. “HEAT” is a verb, not a noun.
“””””
3) False! It acts very little like a mirror. A mirror reflects 100% (or close to it) of the energy incident on it back in the direction of incidence. CO_2 does nothing like this. A CO_2 molecule “heats up” (by absorbing the energy) and then bounces around in the gas, sharing its heat with the rest of the gas. From time to time it reradiates some of the energy in a random direction, as do the other molecules of gas it has shared the heat with. “””””
This earns you a splotch instead of a mark or a star; it is true that CO2 DOES NOT act like a mirror; it can absorb and then re-radiate; that is NOT reflection.
A Mirror DOES NOT reflect energy back in the direction of incidence; it takes three mirrors (Corner cube) to do that. Reflected energy always lies on the opposite side of the normal (to the mirror) from the incident energy; but you got lucky, I’ll give you back the gold star for recognizing that the other molecules it shares heat with also can radiate..
“”””””
The heat it absorbs is thus conducted and convected to the entire atmosphere in which it resides, and some of it happens to be reradiated in the right direction to reach the ground. Eventually, of course, the whole atmosphere radiates energy in the right direction (and wavelengths) to reach “outer space” in detailed balance with the energy being radiated up from down below.
It doesn’t warm the ground as it acts not-terribly-much like a mirror — it slows the rate at which it cools, kinda like the thermos in 1) with an imperfect mirror at a finite but cooler temperature.
Again, to figure out how much it slows the cooling is a hard problem. It is even harder if water vapor is around, as water vapor is many times more powerful a greenhouse gas and actual clouds are so much again. A cloudy night is likely a “warm night”. A clear, dry night is likely to cool a lot. That’s why it can actually freeze by dawn in the middle of the desert, at the same place one experiences 40+C temperatures during the day! “”””
You need to get checked for dylsexia : “”””” A cloudy night is likely a “warm night”. “””””
Correct pronunciation is: A warm night is likely a cloudy night. The clouds DO NOT make it warm; the warmth during the previous day caused the evaporation of moisture, which rose via convection until it cooled to the de point, and caused the cloud to form. The hotter it was during the day, the higher the dew point altitude will be, due the the normal altitude/Temperature laps rate. The warmth caused the clouds; not the other way round; it always cools after sunset.
Of course, the influx of a mass of warm air from somewhere else will cause a “Tilt” alarm to go off.
4) Answer cloudy, try again later. You’re talking about part of a process of overall cooling. If you trace the time history of a single molecule on the surface, it might emit radiation (cooling), have the radiation make it clean through the atmosphere and be lost, then absorb a quantum of radiation from the overhead “reflecting” atmosphere (warming), cool by bouncing off an air molecule and transferring its energy (cooling the surface, warming the air), be warmed by the molecule next to it, be warmed again by an absorbed quantum, be cooled by radiating away a quantum of energy, and so on ad nauseam.
The one thing that is certain is that if it is nighttime and all things are equal (ignoring bulk heat transport in or out via wind, assuming a reasonably normal thermal profile to the atmosphere) is that the surface will cool, more slowly as the integrated scattering cross-section of the atmosphere overhead increases (increasing the probability of backscatter and increasing the time required for heat to make it out of the system, heating the atmosphere and/or clouds until the higher temperature of the atmosphere/clouds brings the overall system into a dynamical balance. But the surface always cools, never heats.
So on average, 4 is true. The backscattered radiation does not (net) warm the surface unless the clouds are already warmer than the surface for some reason. Microscopically it is false — any radiation incident from above is going to warm this molecule or that in a process that is overall cooling.
What is true (and what I’m sure you are trying to say) is that coffee, the ground, and so on will cool more slowly with a mirror, or clould, or diffuse specular reflector of some sort between it and 3K cold “outer space”. This, of course is true.
What’s my score?
@Stephen Fisher Wilde says:
January 8, 2012 at 7:50 pm
“Nonetheless I never expected to see such a close correlation on such short timescales.”
That`s what I have been telling you all along. My solar based forecast from 11 months back, said the main incursions of Arctic air this winter, would be from the last week in Jan, to the first week in March. And I did specify an unusually warm Nov, and an average to mild Dec.
@Otter says:
January 8, 2012 at 2:32 pm
” I had seen comments over the years, that volcanic activity had dropped off as the sun’s activity increased.”
The pattern I can see in the short term, is larger eruptions occurring on stronger warm bursts after colder winters.
Ulric, I find your forecast for February interesting. Are you willing to say how you arrived at it? Is it based on planetary movements affecting the Sun, and if so is it sunspots or something else?
Thanks (in advance),
Rich
Ulric Lyons January 10, 2012 at 6:47 am said:
re volcanic activity
“The pattern I can see in the short term, is larger eruptions occurring on stronger warm bursts after colder winters.”
Ulric, do you have any theories on the mechanism of this?
I am intrigued by the possible role of sun motion (orbits around the barycentre) in this manner:
1. Sun motion drives solar activity
1a. Solar activity drives weather
2. And (seperately) sun motion drives seismic activity
Sam says:
January 8, 2012 at 10:32 pm
First. You spell my name wrong. Wenson, Not Wensen.
Thank you for trying answering my questions.
“Because CO2 is a changing factor, ”
Why? How to prove it? A clear night still cooler than a cloudy night. A Cloudy day still cooler than a sunny day ( in term of the rest conditions are the same )
I think there are a lots “changing factors”, maybe, many of the them even scientists don’t know yet.
On world scale, The average temperature didn’t go up a lot as predicted.
And to prove CO2 is “change factor” you need to show me monotone increase in the average temperature as the concentration of CO2 increases. This didn’t happened yet.
One year hotter, next year cooler just tells me that it is the “Natural Variance.”
Monotone increase didn’t happen, that means CO2 is not on the driver seat. When it will sit on the driver seat?
0.3 C up in average is not much. Every year, some places get hotter, some other places get cooler.
If only talk about average, I’m sure every one can stand 1 degree C warmer temp .
Also, the climate is very localized concern. (Mars climate not very important to earth.) like in my hometown, we get warmer. The crop yells much higher. ( many reason for the higher yell, At lest longer growing season is not bad thing) No one complain the warm. Every one is happy about the change.
About the sea level .People talk about sea level a lot. The sea didn’t goes up a lot.
If the average temp goes up but Greenland or/and Antarctic temp go down in the summer, the see leave would not up. If the average temp goes down but Greenland or/and a Antarctic go up( lot), the sea level still goes up.
The rest of the answers are not very clear to me currently . Sorry, I just ignore them At this time.
Wenson
George says:
January 8, 2012 at 3:03 pm
The lack of Solar Activity has resulted in an extended run of high GCR counts, very much similar to the run of high GCR activity of the 1970’s. It was about 6 years into that elevated plateau of GCR counts that the High Pressure settled in place over the Eastern Pacific/West Coast of N. America and kicked off the 1976/77 drought in the West. It’s about that same time again. The 1976/77 hiatus ended in 1978 when the Sun ramped up and the GCR counts fell out of that high plateau state.
Not saying what caused what, but the parallel is rather striking. Somewhere in these events (and those that David is drawing our attention to) is a smoking gun that has been seen in the near historic past.
RE: George
Thanks! From your post I immediately understood this news story about jetliners having to make unscheduled stops from strong headwinds flying from Europe to U.S.
“Headwinds returning from Europe are more extreme than we have seen in 10 years,” said a United spokeswoman. For the past decade, December headwinds averaged 30 knots, according to United data. But last month, the winds averaged 47 knots, and, on the worst 15 days of the month, 60 knots. WSJ Jan 11., 2012
@See – owe to Rich says:
January 10, 2012 at 9:52 am
“Ulric, I find your forecast for February interesting. Are you willing to say how you arrived at it? Is it based on planetary movements affecting the Sun, and if so is it sunspots or something else?”
It is based on heliocentric planetary calculations, and I would regard the key forcing agent as being the solar wind speed.
Fred Berple, you should have signed off with a “/sarc”