Guest post by David Archibald
Three wise Norwegians – Jan-Erik Solheim, Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum – have just published a paper entitled “The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24”. It is available online here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.1954v1.pdf
The authors have found that Northern Hemisphere temperature changes by 0.21°C per year of solar cycle length. The biggest response found in the temperature series they examined was Svalbard at 1.09°C per year of solar cycle length. The authors also credit me with the discovery of a new branch of science. On page 6 they state.” Archibald (2008) was the first to realize that the length of the previous sunspot cycle (PSCL) has a predictive power for the temperature in the next sunspot cycle, if the raw (unsmoothed) value for the SCL is used.” I have decided to name this new branch of science “solarclimatology”. It is similar to Svensmark’s cosmoclimatology but much more readily quantifiable.
What we use solarclimatology for is to predict future climate. Professor Solheim and his co-authors have done that for Solar Cycle 24 which takes us out to 2026. Using Altrock’s green corona emissions diagram, we can go beyond that to about 2040: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/08/solar-cycle-24-length-and-its-consequences/
The green corona emissions point to Solar Cycle 24 being 17 years long, and thus 4.5 years longer than Solar Cycle 23. Using the relationship found by Solheim and his co-authors, that means that the 0.63°C decline for the Northern Hemisphere over Solar Cycle 24 will be followed by a further 0.95°C over Solar Cycle 25. That is graphically indicated thusly, using Figure 19 from the Solheim et al paper:
The last time we witnessed temperatures anything like that was in the decade 1690 – 1700. Crop failures caused by cold killed off 10% of the populations of France, Norway and Sweden, 20% of the population of Estonia and one third of the population of Finland.
As noted above, Svalbard’s relationship is 1.09°C per year of solar cycle length. That means that it is headed for a total temperature fall of 8.2°C. The agricultural output of Svalbard and the rest of the island of Spitsbergen won’t be affected though, because there isn’t any. The biggest effect will on some of the World’s most productive agricultural lands. The solar cycle length – temperature relationship for some localities in the northeast US is 0.7°C degrees per year, which is a good proxy for the latitude of the US – Canadian border and thus the North American grain belt. Newman in 1980 found that the Corn Belt shifted 144 km per 1.0°C change in temperature. With the temperature falling 5.2°C, the Corn Belt will shift 750 km south to the Sun Belt, as shown following:
The outlook for Canadian agriculture is somewhat more dire. I expect Canadian agriculture will be reduced to trapping beavers, as in the 17th Century.
The current cold conditions in Europe resulted in more than 300 souls departing this mortal coil, and has discomforted some millions. Solheim and his co-authors note “As seen in figures 6 and 7, the Norwegian and Europe60 average temperatures have already started to decline towards the predicted SC24 values”.
References:
Newman, J. E. (1980). Climate change impacts on the growing season of the North American Corn Belt. Biometeorology, 7 (2), 128-142. Supplement to International Journal of Biometeorology, 24 (December, 1980).
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
> William says: February 11, 2012 at 11:35 am Will, do you and your extreme AGW cohorts take responsibility for the food to biofuel fiasco?
Certainly not. I haven’t advocated it, neither has RealClimate.
In the US, corn ethanol is a boondoggle to the farming lobby from corrupt politicians. It has nothing to do with GW.
@Pamela Gray (February 12, 2012 at 6:20 pm)
I advise you to voluntarily open your eyes and erase the brainwashing.
ftp://ftp.iers.org/products/eop/long-term/c04_08/iau2000/eopc04_08_IAU2000.62-now
ftp://ftp.iers.org/products/geofluids/atmosphere/aam/GGFC2010/AER/
There will never be anything anyone can do or say that will make the “uniform 0.1K” solar-terrestrial-climate narrative admissible under the data.
You may need to expand your functional numeracy to see that this is a matter of absolute logic. If so, I wish you efficient growth.
*****
William M. Connolley says:
February 13, 2012 at 12:42 am
William says: February 11, 2012 at 11:35 am Will, do you and your extreme AGW cohorts take responsibility for the food to biofuel fiasco?
Certainly not. I haven’t advocated it, neither has RealClimate.
In the US, corn ethanol is a boondoggle to the farming lobby from corrupt politicians. It has nothing to do with GW.
*****
Thanks for the Monday morning laugh! A classic example of psychological projection (for irony, look it up on Wikipedia).
Of course the CAGW industry w/its $trillions in worldwide taxpayer support isn’t subject to corruption… Hahahahahahaha.
I can’t find any reference to this paper in Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics. The linked-to pdf says it has been sent for ‘pre-publication’. Nor can I find a reference to it in the ‘in press’ section of the journal.
Has this paper been actually been published as David Archibald says? Perhaps it is it awaiting publication?
I’m assuming it hasn’t just been submitted for review?
RockyRoad:
I remember reading about one palynologist that studied soils in the Alps that had a record of glacial and interglacial transitions–she found that switching from temperate zone pollen to pollen indicative of Ice Age temperatures took as little as two to three years.
Then there was a geologist that looked at some of the sediments in several lakes somewhere in the UK to see what they indicated, and his conclusion (again, based on pollen transitions) was that the temperature swing from interglacial to glacial was as little as 8 months!
Can you point me to that information, or at least give me a little more info on it?
I don’t know if Archibald or Solheim or Stordahl or Humlum are still monitoring this thread, but if so I’d like to see an answer to the following criticisms.
The first is that the t_24 predicted temperature is nowhere properly defined in the paper. In this day and age we like things to be well defines so that they can be auditted!
The second criticism is more serious. In trying to reverse engineer t_24, I calculated, for each row of Table 1 except the first, (t_24-t_23)/beta_PSCL. I believed that this should give me something close to the difference between the cycle lengths for Cycles 23 and 22, which is 2.2 years according to the paper, or 2.9 years if minimum of Cycle 22/23 is taken as May 1996 (traditional calculation) instead of September 1996 (“adjusted” calculation).
Anyway, here are the figures I got: 3.8, 3.8, 3.8, 3.4, 3.3, 3.7, 4.5, 3.9, 3.2, 2.7, 3.2, 2.5, 4.0, 4.1. These don’t look like 2.2-2.9, and the last one predicts spectacular hemispheric cooling in HadCRUT3N. So what is going on? The paper talks about some secular linear trends, but I would expect these to decrease, rather than increase, the projected cooling in Cycle 24.
Rich.
Placeholder for notification of follow-up comments.
Rich.
The earth’s history is billions of years old. Using data collected over a few thousand years is much too short a time span to accuractly predict anything, and yet these gonifs are using data collected over a few years.
The earth was born a molten ball. It will become a cold ball. Therefore the earth is cooling. Variations from this cycle are temporary. What is so hard to understand about that?
I think we are caught in two potential temp swings. On the one hand global warming, however by how much, is real, regardless of the rising CO2. Remember, CO2 is increasing, but is anyone measuring the complete GHGs with the water vapor included? How do we know its all increasing?
That brings me to the linear trend of temp increase of about 0.5 deg C per century. This appears to have been published in several studies (~0.46 deg C per century). Its been shown that CO2 lags the global temp rise. But over the long haul, the obvious and discernible effects of CO2 are still hidden. These effects could very well dampen the proposed cooling. One paper says CO2’s effect is a case of a piggyback ride on a much larger temp changing scenario which includes the solar cycle, planet position, on and on. It is really quite early in the game here to reliably say which will be the case. More factors are emerging every year that looks, well, very interesting.
The instrumentation, if not fudged, is outstanding, I tend to believe the current or most recent readings vs. older ones. However, dots on a temp chart, even if moving upward, may not indicate global warming.