Guest post by David Archibald
Figure 1: Ap Index 1932 – 2012
The Ap Index is the weakest of the solar activity indicators and has returned below the floor value of solar minima over the last 80 years – the green line in the chart above.
Figure 2: Solar Cycles 20 and 24 Ap Index and Neutron Count
The last time there was a cooling event in the modern instrument record was during Solar Cycle 20. Aligned on the month of minimum, Figure 2 shows that while the Ap Index and neutron count are co-incident to date in Solar Cycle 24, they were quite divergent over two thirds of Solar Cycle 20.
Figure 3: Neutron Counts over Solar Cycles 20 to 24
One big difference between Solar Cycle 20 and the other solar cycles of the modern instrument record is that just over half way through the cycle, the neutron count returned to levels of solar minima and remained there for the balance of the cycle. That is shown in Figure 3 above which also shows that the neutron count of Solar Cycle 24 is yet to depart from levels associated with previous minima, three years into the solar cycle.
Further to the post on Solar Cycle 24 length based on Altrock’s green corona diagram at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/08/solar-cycle-24-length-and-its-consequences/, Altrock noted the slow progress of Solar Cycle 24 in mid-2011. From Altrock, R.C., 2010, “The Progress of Solar Cycle 24 at High Latitudes”:
“Cycle 24 began its migration at a rate 40% slower than the previous two solar cycles, thus indicating the possibility of a peculiar cycle. However, the onset of the “Rush to the Poles” of polar crown prominences and their associated coronal emission, which has been a precursor to solar maximum in recent cycles (cf. Altrock 2003), has just been identified in the northern hemisphere. Peculiarly, this “rush” is leisurely, at only 50% of the rate in the previous two cycles.”
Altrock’s green corona diagram is available here: http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~deforest/SPD-sunspot-release/6_altrock_rttp.pdf
If Solar Cycle 24 is progressing at 60% of the rate of the previous two cycles, which averaged ten years long, then it is likely to be 16.6 years long. Using that figure of 16.6 years would make Solar Cycle 24 seven years longer than Solar Cycle 22. Using a solar cycle length – temperature relationship for the US – Canadian border of 0.7°C per year of solar cycle length, a total temperature decline of 4.9°C is predicted over a period of about twenty years.
Has a fall of that magnitude happened in that time frame happened in the past? A good place to look is the Dye 3 temperature record from the Greenland Plateau, available here: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/gisp/dye3/dye3-1yr.txt
Figure 4: Dye 3 Temperature Record from Oxygen Isotope Ratios
There is plenty of noise in this record and rapid swings in temperature, for example the 5.2°C fall from 526 to 531 at the beginning of the Dark Ages.
Figure 5: Dye 3 Temperature Record 22 Year Smoothed
Averaging the Dye 3 temperature record using the 22 year length of the Hale Cycle produces a lot of detail. What is evident is that there has been a very disciplined temperature decline over the last four thousand years. The whole temperature record is bounded by two parallel lines with a downslope of 0.3°C per thousand years. The fact that no cooling event took the Dye 3 temperature below the lower bounding green line over nearly four thousand years is quite remarkable. It implies that solar events do not exceed a particular combination of frequency and amplitude. From that it can be derived that this particular combination of frequency and amplitude with be ongoing – that is that cooling events will happen just as frequently as they did during the Dye 3 record.
Figure 6: North – South Transect through the Grain Belt
The relationship between temperature and growing conditions at about the latitude of the US – Canadian border is that one degree C will shift growing conditions by about 140 km. With a total 4.9°C temperature decline in train, that means a shift of about 700 km. Figure 6 shows the result of that temperature decline. Witchita will end up with the climate of Sioux Falls, which in turn will be like Saskatoon now. The growing season loses a month at each end.
I am uncomfortablewith graphs that have no scale names and with graphs that have very different timescales with no clear reason.
I am assuming that the -5°C is not a forecast but an indication of what could happen if your proposition is correct. -5°C would be 3/4 the way to the next ice age and seems highly unlikely judging by past ice age arrivals.
John finn you are just fishing. None of your statements are born out by the unadjusted data elsewhere. Danemark, Sweden, France etc.
Figure 4: Dye 3 Temperature Record from Oxygen Isotope Ratios. There is plenty of noise in this record and rapid swings in temperature, for example the 5.2°C fall from 526 to 531 at the beginning of the Dark Ages.
I miss a conclusion.
What is possible to know today, out of some few data and logic, is that i.) there is a decreasing global temperature since the boost 20 ky ago, when the last ice age ends, and ii.) there are a lot of high frequency temperature proxies for the last two millennia, suggesting temperature frequencies of non sinusoid shape, and iii.) that the high global temperature frequencies and rapid swings can be explained in general with synodic heliocentric geometric tide functions, and iv.) that the decreasing global temperature since the boost 20 ky ago can be explained with resonant sawtooth diffusion waves on the Sun (after Robert Ehrlich) and moreover for the last 1 million years. This is shown in this graph 1 , in graph 2, and in graph 3, where are superimposed 3 temperature proxies and 2 synodic solar tide curves between the years 450 AD and 630 AD.
The conclusion is that because all known global temperature proxies can be explained with geometric pattern from the Sun or the solar system, there must be solar physical mechanisms which let change the heat current on Earth.
V.
“John Finn says:
January 22, 2012 at 1:57 am”
No cooling in the late 60’s early-mid 70’s northern hemisphere, UK? Are you joking? We were living through the coming iceage until 1976, then we had a hot summer. The in 1979, we had not only the winter of discontent, it was bitterly cold too. You wont find that in the HadCRUT data because the raw data no longer exists. It has all been…”adjusted”…
@ur momisugly John Finn
A cooling event did indeed take place within the UK at least, the papers were full of ice age speculation. Perhaps if climate science agencies and individuals were not engaged in behaviour such as shown in the link below you might have been able to look up a 70s cooling event. There are various examples of how different agencies are adjusting data to better suit failed models.
http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/12/science-by-lubchencos-noaa-fake-global-warming-by-changing-historical-temperature-data.html
A physicist at 4:10 am above tries in his usual underhanded way to denigrate one of the true giants in 20th Century physics, Prof Freeman Dyson. According to Dr Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson was every bit as deserving of the Nobel Prize as he was, but in the hard sciences the prize is limited to three recipients, and Dyson happened to be the newest member of the team.
Freeman Dyson synthesized and reduced to practice the Feynman/Schwinger/Tomonaga solutions to the renormalization problems of quantum electrodynamics. He deserves the sole credit for that accomplishment. The fact that a pipsqueak now tries to put down a great physicist by leaving out the context, because that physicist questions the manmade global warming nonsense, is a reflection on ‘a physicist’, not on Dyson. And it should be remembered that Freeman Dyson is a co-signer on the following statement, another reason the alarmist crowd hates him:
That statement says it all, and the attempt by ‘a physicist’ to belittle someone whose shoes he is not fit to shine shows the lengths to which the alarmist cult uses ad hominem attacks, because they lack the science to make their case.
“There is no convincing evidence” is a very strong statement by more than thirty thousand co-signers with degrees in the hard sciences, including over 9,000 PhD’s. I challenge ‘a physicist’ to co-sign that same OISM petition.
In the last analysis by David Archibald, using a different method, a temperature drop of 3.8C was envisaged at the US Canadian border. So an average of the two is 4.35C this would imply a move South of UK food growing conditions of roughly the entire length of the UK, ie. the distance from Edinburgh to Southampton.
The implications for UK food security and for the rest of the World would make an interesting study and no doubt interesting reading. Should we be worried ?
In 2009 the UK imported 40% of it’s food, I wonder how much that figure will increase as growing conditions move South. In addition we would also have to examine whether or not those same imports may reduce or cease to become available as other countries which are currently net exporters of food find their crop production also declining due to a global drop in temperatures.
The US can probably weather such changes quite readily by reducing the use of food for car fuel. In Europe I would think there is some room for French grain production to move South. The net effect in the UK will be a dramatic increase in food prices, just as we destroy our ability to pay those prices as we are currently (by act of parliament) hell bent on destroying our economy by making our industry uncompetitive with the rest of the World by switching to unaffordable power from windmills.
A series of harsh winters and one or two bad harvests and food shortages / riots and the UK will discover a near miraculous enthusiasm for fracking. The politicians fervour in their religious belief in zealot gas (co2) will undergo a similar miraculous conversion. But will it be too little too late as by then any energy intensive industry will have left UK shores and the UK economy will occupy a new position between the First World and Third World economies, that of a Second World economy.
Would it not be better to say something like:-
“The sun is giving us data, which is different from anything we have seen with modern instrumentation. By the end of SC 25, we hope to have much more data, so that we will have a better idea of precisely how the sun works, and what effects it has on world climate”
A physicist says:
January 22, 2012 at 4:10 am
Here on WUWT, Willis Eschenbach has quoted the following Freeman Dyson story: ‘When I arrived in Fermi’s office, I handed the graphs to Fermi, but he hardly glanced at them…’
There is a clear physical picture of the process calculating the sawtooth heat oscillations of the Sun.
V.
Myrrh says (January 22, 2012 at 3:24 am)
“These history re-writes are becoming sooooo tedious..”
Tsk. Who’s rewriting history, I wonder? Do not believe everything you read in Wikipedia or on Sks!
I’m sure Time magazine came late to the party in 1977 (as they no doubt will when AGW collapses) but In the early 70s there was a real fear of incoming cooler temperatures.
See, for example, this CIA report from 1974:-
http://www.climatemonitor.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1974.pdf
The summary reads “The western world’s leading climatologists have confirmed recent reports of a detrimental global climatic change.” The climate change they refer to is *cooling*. The detriment is on agriculture, etc.
And there are many similar reports from the period 1970-1974. It was only in the mid- to late-70s that much attention was given to greenhouse effects.
A physicist says (January 22, 2012 at 4:10 am)
For the first time on this blog I’m genuinely angry. If you’d read any of Freeman Dysons books or articles, you would realise his style – self-deprecatory, humorous and unaffected, perhaps a remnant of his early British understatement.
To quote this against him is crass.
Any physicist (if you are a physicist and not someone trying to self-aggrandize having failed a degree in basket weaving) would know that, and have the courtesy to acknowledge one of the greatest and most wide-ranging minds of recent scientific history.
‘a physicist’ says:
“The lesson-learned is that there have been innumerable theoretical predictions of impending
ice-ages in the pastrunaway global warming. The …predictionsthat have stood the test of time have been those that were based upon Fermi-quality theoretical modelsare always wrong.”There. Fixed.
A really remarkable article by Dr.David Archibald and it will reflect on the hits count in WUWT. Any measures to be taken or even suggested against “fossil fuels” is simply crazy.
Could you imagine a family trying to heat their house using electricity generated from solar panels or windmills?
Thanks for the helpful comments everyone! I came across an estimate of Solar Cycle 25 amplitude today, based on a physical model, in a Livingston and Penn paper:
http://www.probeinternational.org/Livingston-penn-2010.pdf
They are predicting a peak sunspot number of 7.
It’s no slur against Freeman Dyson to affirm that the science of David Archibald’s guest post falls far short of Dyson/Fermi standards.
Perhaps folks should read that Dyson quote again, and ask themselves the simple question: Does David Archibald’s post supply what the Dyson/Fermi quote specifies: either “a clear physical picture of the process” or “a precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism”?
Neither of these two Fermi/Dyson elements is evident in Archibald’s guest post. If anyone wants to argue otherwise (but so far, no one has so argued), then please do so!
LazyTeenager says:
January 21, 2012 at 11:32 pm
This is rather confusing.
Is this a claim that reduced neutrons cause or are a proxy for something that causes cooling? If this the case ,from the first graph, we should now infer that global temperatures should be below that of the 1970s. Which they are not.
And of course the neutron idea contradicts the idea that the 1970s cooling was due to the peak in post ww2 industrial aerosol emissions.
And it also contradicts the idea that the 1970s cooling was due to ocean cycles. The AMO I think is popular around here.
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You have to count ocean’s heat storage. There is lon delay of cooling because of oceans. When it cools down La Nina pattern start’s to be most common. AMO is consequense, not the cause. The cause is SUN. from 1975 to 2005 oceans gathered lot of heat, so it takes more than 7 years to cool them down.
Oh for heaven’s sake. Ranchers and farmers know quite well where heat, frost, water, and snow come from. What the Sun is doing is a poor substitute for what that rather big pond out West and the jet stream above is doing.
To convince this skeptic, the Sun’s changes in its rays (and any measure you want to use for its rays) must be shown mechanistically to be able to overpower, and change the direction of what these power houses of stored energy are doing. Show me the math, the mechanism, and the robust science to back this idea up. No more talking around what is required in order to be taken seriously by solar scientists, meteorologists, paleoclimatologists, and the like. In other words, no more wriggle matching. I have had it up to here in these lackluster attempts at solar “proof”.
So far I remain entirely unconvinced. The powerful ability of our Earth to move heat and atmosphere up and down, in and out, and here and there in short and long term time spans, and to lose as well as soak up incoming solar IR in Rhythm Jazz fashion, kicks both tiny solar changes and anthropogenic CO2 affects to the curb.
But here is the kicker. If you can convince people to believe in your solar theory, there is no argument to be made against a CO2 theory. Both have an equal chance in hell of moving water and air in a direction they would have gone anyway.
John Marshall says:
Would you please give us the link to that “Norwegian research from Svalsbad”?
David Archibald’s last line says;
“They are predicting a peak sunspot number of 7.”
That should have been the penultimate line. The last line might perhaps be;
Welcome to Hell !
I am convinced that solar cycle length, or more acccurately solar cycle frequency is a good proxy for solar activity and its effect on global climate. Considering how many potential factors influencing global climate there are (recent article at WUWT), the correlation between SC frequency and global temperature is surprisingly good. Higher frequency (greater than ~9 cycles/century, scl < ~11 years) means warming and lower frequency (longer solar cycle) means cooling. Thermal inertia (oceans, ice) also plays a big role – that's the reason the late 20th century was somewhat warmer than 1940s/50s. After and during cold periods, high SC frequency doesn't cause as much warming as after/during warm periods and vice versa. It takes time to change global climate.
On the other hand, the cooling will be much longer than the mid 20th century cooling – SC23 was the longest since ~100 years and SC24 seems to be even longer – solar cycle frequency has decreased. The cooling will really kick in after the SC24 plateau (~2013-2015) and it will be dramatic. I predict ~flat linear trend for 1990-2020, if not negative.
John Finn says:
January 22, 2012 at 1:57 am
John, look at the chart plotting HADCrut3 against CO2 beginning in 1958 found here:
http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateReflections.htm#20080927:%20Reflections%20on%20the%20correlation%20between%20global%20temperature%20and%20atmospheric%20CO2
My eyeballs tell me there was a cooling from 1958 to the mid 1970s, even as CO2 climbed.
I wouldn’t use GISS as it gets ‘adjusted’ to fit the theory on a regular basis.
None of this bodes well for Canada or Canadians. For these people to be concerned with warming is the height of idiocy. Only a extremely effective propaganda campaign could have convinced Canadians to fear beneficial warming. Now possible agricultural decline due to cooling could catch them totally unprepared. They and the people who depend on Canadian agriculture exports need to wake up FAST. Let us hope the world will never see Canadian refugees. GK
William says:
January 22, 2012 at 2:35 am
Your link to “Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock” directs to a pay-wall.
You can get the free paper at:
http://pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Journals/rahmstorf_grl_2003.pdf
Thank you for the links William.
A D-O event would be catastrophic with the worlds current population load. We have the infrastructure in most areas to stay warm, but under cold conditions, such as experienced during a D-O, we do not have the ability to grow mass quantities of food.
It makes no difference how warm you are if your stomack is empty.
It is very evident that the L&P effect is something that SC24 is experiencing. This indicates that this cycle is remarkable in itself. As far as what is to come after SC24 is anyone’s guess. Our actual knowledge base is not comprehensive enough to make credible projections.
Interesting analysis, but the underlying assumption seems to be that other significant changes in the atmosphere of the planet (i.e. the rapid buildup of greenhouse gases over the past few hundred years) will have no effect on the climate and that the sun trumps everything. This assumption seems to unproven, and so even if the sun goes into a Maunder-type minimum, it would be happening to a planet that is not the same as it was back then.
It will be all more evidence (except of course to hardcore skeptics), of the potency of the increases in greenhouse gases if, rather than go into a period of cooling, that the earth continues to warm over the next few decades. It would mean that the sun has indeed taken a back seat to anthropogenic effects.