Ap Index, Neutrons and Climate

@R. Gates:
As I watch the snow cover and feel a biting cold (reminiscent of what it was in the last turn to a cold PDO in the 1950s-60s…) and see news reports of folks trying desperately to get an Ice Breaker and fuel in to Nome (due to an earlier onset of cold then ‘expected’…) and as I watch the ’70s like drought conditions in the West with flooding in the East: I’m quite sure there will not be a ‘warmth’ problem.
We got a sample of it in 2008-9 or so, and a slight reprieve as this solar cycle matures. But that’s ending now.
And if we DO have warming going forward? Well, first off, it will need to be real warming, not the fictional warming embodied in the doctored data of HADcrut, GISTemp, and now the NCDC products (who have taken over the splice creation step as I understand the GHCN.v3 reports). It will need to show as warm winters with gentle rains, not cold snows. With a relatively flat jet stream, not the ‘loopy jet stream’ of now (shoving arctic cold down our throats). But if that DOES happen: I will count it a great blessing and be VERY thankful for good old CO2 saving the day
BTW: I happily toss out the ‘Hottest EVER!!!’ years hysterical pronouncements from GIStemp as I’ve read and run their code. It’s pretty rough and does very questionable things with data (that are themselves questionable as they come from NCDC) like fabricating a hot Arctic out of nothing at all… And HADcrut has lost their data so at best they have a ‘polite fiction’. See, some of us are old enough that we lived through times they are now re-writing (and I actually was interested in weather in the ’60s and talked to the old folks to gather their knowledge base). SO I look around an hear “hottest ever” and see “about the same as the 1950s”…
In short, when someone is caught cooking the books, you don’t trust what they say about the bank account being the ‘fullest ever’…
@John Finn:
Here’s a bit of “clue” for you. In my home town it snowed twice in my lifetime of living there. IIRC it was about 1963 and 1974 or so. Didn’t snow in the ’30s, ’40s, or ’50s. (though we DID have very heavy snow in the Sierra Nevada about 1958? ) As a kid, I talked to most folks in the town (small town and we ran a restaurant). The VERY old folks remembered when it had snowed before… way back before the World Wars…
So I’m pretty sure everyone understood your point just fine. You are ignoring the inevitable time lags and stochastic effects of weather to make a political point. Meanwhile, reality has a cycle length of about 60 years for “the usual” cycle (so we’re now having a ‘do over’ of the 1950s on that scale… just after the Very warm late ’30s / ’40s) and with some longer cycles too. One of them runs about 179 years, another runs about 1500 average (but with 1800 year nodes). As the Sun looks to be having a Grand Minimum, the fear (and it is a valid fear…) is that we’ll get what we had last time this happened, and not just a 1960s redux.
Hit the link in my prior comment for “why and how”. Orbital mechanics stirring the oceans, changing the length of day in the process, and stirring up both cold water and potentially more volcanoes. ( In 1914 Mt. Lassen erupted. As a kid I was told about it by the same Old Timers. I’ve been waiting every since, and now at least I know why… magma has tides too…) In 1800 and froze to death it was a much larger volcano. Speculative? Only a bit. There are fairly nice “wiggle matches” to work from and a decent mechanical theory as to how.
So yes, there WAS a regular and normal cold half cycle in the 1960s and 1970s and allowing for time lags it matches nicely.
@ResourceGuy:
Yup. Winners would be the net exporters with large domestic meat consumption (as they could shift to non-meat if desired) so Australia, USA, Canada (modulo that whole loss of northern growing season thing..), Argentina, Brazil. Major losers would be nations that import the bulk of their food and have a largely grain based diet already (or are at the margin of production / consumption balance): China, India, Muslim World (Egypt in particular – being non-OPEC), Korea, Japan. Europe is more of a mixed bag with places like the UK being major importers and places like France more than able to grow enough, but unwilling to swap from wheat to barley and potatoes when things get bad (we have an existence proof of that…) Then there is Russia. Major exporter in good times, but large areas of marginal production in bad times.
Basically, it will be a mess. The good news, though, is that Russia is fully aware that “Global Warming” is not happening and is planning on a 2030-2040 bottom of a very cold dip. I expect they will have stored some food by then…
IMHO, though, it’s not the cold that will matter. It will be the changed water distribution. You can easily swap from wheat to barley ( or even to buckwheat if desperate… 40 days to crop!) But there is no substitute for water. We have historical records of the collapse of empires when the water stopped in prior cold events. The Akkadian Empire fell. Old Egypt fell. Anastazi fell. More recently, France had The French Revolution and a ‘let them eat cake’ moment. In California there is a history of ‘megadroughts’ every few hundred years…. So much for “salad bowl of the nation”…
So I’d suggest farmers brush up on how to farm in flooded fields (Mississippi floods) and in droughts (West coast out to about Colorado). I have some interesting drought tolerant seeds in my seed archive for just such needs . (Tepary beans grow in the desert, for one, and there is a Hopi corn with a taproot…)
So, IMHO, the biggest issue will not be planting cold or short season crops ( as buckwheat has traditionally been used as a ‘catch crop’ in cases of failure of the main crop). It will be having no rain at all, or looking out at a field under a foot of water…
Don’t know what the weather patterns are like in Europe or Asia, but I vaguely remember that in France they had crop loses to too much rain while China had droughts. Egypt and The Levant had droughts too. We have been lulled into a false sense of comfort by our recent warm climate stability. When it turns cold, millions die and empires fall. (So yes, Gates, I really REALLY do hope that CO2 warms things, and mostly fear that it will not… “Warm is good.”)
@EvilIncandescentBulb:
I think that about sums it up…
@Carol Gebert:
No you don’t, it disrupts sleep 😉 (There was also and odd overly strong ozone level just over Fukushima a few days before their quake, too…)
@Anna V.:
The best I can figure it, we’ve been in the entry to the next glacial for about 6000 years now (at least). The trend is so slow, though, that it is not visible in any one lifetime, being easily swamped by the local (in time) variations.
So not to worry, the MWP / LIA ‘wobbles’ are about all we’ll notice, even when looking at ancient historical records. The loss of North African grain as the land cooled (and rains decreased) is a matter of Roman Empire History, but not really noticed by the Romans of today. Folks in England get their wine from France instead of growing it like they once did. Life goes on…
The record of the formation of glaciers looks like about 100,000 years of ice accumulation, then a very rapid melt. The exit is fast, the entry depends on very slow mass flow into snow and deposition.
I’m much more worried about a 60 year cycle than a 179 year event, and both of them much much more so than a 1500 – 1800 year Bond Event cycle. That paper on tides indicates our next real cold period is likely a couple of hundred years in the future (base on lunar tides / ocean overturning). We’ve got a few hundred years, most likely, before we even notice the medium scale swings. The glacial itself is just too slow to show up 😉