Guest post by David Archibald
The most skillful climatologist the World has seen was Hubert Lamb (1913 – 1997). He can be credited with making the first prediction of the current solar minimum. This was in 1970 in a report (Weiss and Lamb) for the German Navy.
He did it by making a reconstructed record of the average frequency of southwesterly surface winds in England since 1340. Quoting Lamb “We sense a cycle or periodicity of close to 200 years in length.” and “There may be a valuable indication of the origin of this apparent 200 year recurrence tendency, in that the sharp declines of the southwesterly wind indicated in the late 1300s, 1560s, 1740s-1770s and now, in each case fell at about the end of a sequence of sunspot cycles which built up to periods of exceptionally great solar disturbance (around 1360-80, the 1570s, the 1770s, the 1950s and more recently). The frequency maxima of the southwesterly wind, and evidence of warm climate periods in Europe sustained over several decades, all bear a similar relationship to these variations of the Sun’s activity.”
Following is Figure 11.6 from Lamb’s 1988 book “Weather, Climate and Human Affairs”:
The frequency of the southwest wind at London is shown by the solar line. A tentative forecast (broken line) is made simply by moving the whole curve 200 years to the right, i.e. the forecast implied by accepting the apparent 200 year recurring oscillation shown by the series.
Successful predictions have many fathers. Lamb’s successful prediction forty years ago was the first prediction of the current minimum and reminds us that climate cycles can be relied upon to continue to the end of time.
References
Weiss, I. and Lamb, H.H. (1970) ‘Die Zunahme der Wellenhohen in jungster Ziet in den Operationsgebieten der Bundesmarine, ihre vermutliche Ursachen and ihre voraussichtliche weitere Entwicklung, Fachlich Mitteilungen, Nr. 160, Porz-Wahn, Geophysikalisher Bertungsdiesnt der Bundeswehr.
David Archibald
February 2012
Les Johnson says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:17 pm
I see that the correlation of shifting 200 years is pretty good.
But, and I may be miss-interpreting, but do these curves show London cooling until the end of the 20th century, then warming through the 21st?
You’re absolutely right, Les; you are misinterpreting. Look again at the graph, and try reading what the units are this time! 😉
Andres Valencia says:
February 18, 2012 at 12:42 pm
This reminds me of the work by Nicola Scafetta and Girma Orssengo.
Who will get the cycles right?
Me. Please take a look on a comparison of adapted Bristlecone tree ring data in California after
H. H. Lamb (upper curve), with two GHI versions for the last 5000 years.
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/ghi_23_lamb_comp.jpg Vertical lines guided the eye to remarkable peaks.
Next millennium extension ? : http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/ghi_23_moberg_ext.gif
It’s not a trick, it’s science.
V.
Speaking of wind and the colder temperatures they brought to England and Europe this year, you can imagine how some of the British pensioners must feel who were forced to turn down the thermostats and turn into bed earlier for lack of utility funds while their government sent millions to developing countries to help “plan” for climate change mitigation.
“Foreign aid cash spent tackling climate change
Nearly £1.5 billion has been spent tackling man-made climate change by Government department responsible for fighting poverty abroad, it can be revealed……”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/9090830/Foreign-aid-cash-spent-tackling-climate-change.html
OT
There is a sudden and strong geomagnetic storm
http://flux.phys.uit.no/cgi-bin/plotgeodata.cgi?Last24&site=tro2a&
with no recent flares or CMEs detected
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/rt_plots/Xray.gif
It is looking more and more sure that the astrophysicists were correct and the climatologist and amateur chemists wrong. Solar activity is much more important to climatic change in temperature, climate circulation, and cloud formation than CO2. Now would be a good time to look at the relationship between solar activity/planetary tilt and ozone ‘holes’, if any.
A real irony is that Hubert Lamb published a major paper pulling together mounds of evidence about the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent small ice age. An even worse irony is that after a long career at the Met Office he was the founder in the 1970s of the now-discredited but whitewashed CRU at East Anglia.
Here is a link to the abstract of Lamb’s MWP paper :
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0031018265900040
MAVukcevic says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:38 pm
What is your opinion about the mild winter time in NA vs. the harsh winter in Europe? GMF changes?
It is great to see the founder of CRU, H H Lamb getting the attention he is due. (CRU only started down the propaganda road during Tom Wigley’s tenure.) A curious anticipation of the corruption climate science by the IPCC comes with a familiar sketch copy of Lamb’s sketch of English midlands climate now writ global in the First Report to show a distinct global medieval warm hump in the 12th cent — a graph much used by skeptics without due caution.
See down the page here:
http://enthusiasmscepticismscience.wordpress.com/global-temperature-graphs/
However, much as I love to see Lamb’s name in lights again (and as has already been suggested by others) David is reading more into Lamb’s projection of his own interpretation of it’s attribution. We can forgive his excitement at the find.
Many scientists were finding decadal and secular-scale climate cycles in all sorts of proxy evidence, and many long before Lamb. The link with solar cycles was more with others, like the founder of dendrochronology, A E Douglass.
See his 1909 classic: Weather Cycles in the growth of Big Trees.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0493%281909%2937%5B225d:WCITGO%5D2.0.CO;2
Back then it was mostly about precipitation. Before Lamb, E. Huntington had talked about the wax and wane of storm fronts activity into and out of the desert latitudes. Before the yanks and the poms, were the Germans. In Klimaschwankungen Seit 1700, Nebst Bemerkungen Über Die Klimaschwankungen Der Diluvialzeit (pub 1890. Climate Change since 1700) Eduard Brückner finds a global climate cycle, of variable length, but averaging around 35 years. (These cycles have some noisy anticipation of climate cycles familiar to us now.) Because in the AGW scare the history of climate science has been re-written in it’s own image (most prominently by Weart), we can anticipate more exciting finds such as this one by David.
it’s late, I’m one over the limit but . . . is this not showing the dominant effect of convection over radiation?
MangoChutney says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Or it might be as simple as “temps have risen, CO2 has risen, therefore temp is the cause of rising CO2!”
Ho ho! (At least ice cores support this latter rendition.)
Maybe Connolley believes throwing apples into the air will reverse the gravitational field.
OT, kinda.
Does anyone have a link to an article from around 2004 that reported a NASA scientist discovered a raindrop freezes from the outside in and not the inside out as was the consensus for 60 years?
I’ve searched extensively but it seems to have gone the way of the internet Twilight Zone.
TIA
Joel Shore says:
February 18, 2012 at 2:28 pm
“Here is an example of a very successful prediction:”
Did Prof. Broecker in the early 1970s, know that atmospheric carbon dioxide content followed atmospheric temperature?
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/co2_and_temperature_relationship_shown_questions_flat_ice_core_co2_graph_du/
Has there been an exponential rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content since the 1970s?
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full
What is it about the recent measured temperature of the lower atmosphere that seems not to fit with Prof. Broecker’s “very successful prediction”?” [quoting J. Shore, not W. Broecker]
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_January_2012.png
Joel Shore says:
February 18, 2012 at 2:28 pm
2 ppm is NOT “exponential”. Not in the wildest stretch of the imagination.
I could never equate the claims about 2010 being one of the warmest years ever. I live in south east Queensland – our average temperature is in the low 20s – C not F. It never snows here and frosts are rare. Summers are usually warm to hot and most rainfall falls then.
The graph on Rou Spencers site seems at odds with my recollections.
We had drought conditions for most of the 2000s ending in late 2009. Early 2009 was very hot and we had August tempeartures – late winter – in excess of 32 C.
When the drought broke regionally we had wet conditions and mild temperatures throughout 2010 and 2011 – wet and overcast predominantly for months on end.
I don’t see this fact reflected in the graphs or statements about heat extremes – 2010 and 2011 were way cooler than we are used to – especially since last century.
As we have a high average and can experience extreme hot weather I just cannot reconcile these results.
William M. Connolley says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:07 pm
[SNIP: Fine, you don’t much like Dr. Connolley. Engage him or ignore him but leave off the gratuitous insults. -REP]
“Lamb’s successful prediction forty years ago… “. Again: “FORTY YEARS AGO”.
Take that NASA!!!:-)
Another point, how easy it’s now to talk about the new solar minimum, even “grand minimum” and how difficult nearly impossible was to say the same words just few years ago.
Are “we” learning something now? (hey, NASA it’s me again!)
Maybe the word “cycle” will start to be used more often in Climatology and Solar Science from now on.
Rosco
Ditto. Hawaii was so cold that fire places and sweat suits came back into fashion until late May.
John F. Hultquist says:
February 18, 2012 at 5:46 pm
“Did Prof. Broecker in the early 1970s, know that atmospheric carbon dioxide content followed atmospheric temperature?”
Fascinating. That is a very strong correlation.
In fact, the yearly variation in CO2 with temperature suggests a relationship. The powers that be have said that the acknowledged annual sensitivity is too small to account for temperature being responsible for driving the last century’s run up in CO2. But, that conclusion ignores the low pass relationship between temperature and CO2, which will attenuate the impact of higher frequency yearly variations relative to longer term variations.
Some time ago, I made the following calculations, which I think I posted at Judith’s site. This calculation is mainly for illustriation of the attenuating effect of frequency, and is not meant to be a rigorous calculation of the CO2 residence time time-constant. The model is very likely too simple, and the values for the sensitivities are coarse. Actually, I think I calculated a time constant of about 30 years previously, and I think I was more careful and had better sources then.
CO2 Anomaly Differential Equation
dC/dt = -C/tau + k*T
Frequency Response
C(f)/T(f) = k / sqrt( 1 + (2*pi*f*tau)^2 )
Annual MLO CO2 p-p variation
About 6 ppm.
Annual Global Temperaure Variation
Maybe 1 deg C
Gain at f = 1 year^-1
6 / 1 ppm/degC := k / sqrt(1 + (2*pi*1*tau)^2)
temperature increase 1970 to 2000
About 0.6 degC
CO2 concentration change 1970 to 2000
About 40 ppm
Gain Factor
k := 40/0.6 = 67 ppm/degC
Time Constant to make it all add up
tau = (k/6)^2/(2*pi) = 20 years
Oops…
Time Constant to make it all add up
tau = sqrt((k/6)^2-1)/(2*pi)= 1.8 years
Well, the numbers came out more realistically last time. It should be about 30 years, I think, FWIW. The point is, the yearly variation/sensitivity suggests it is possible for the CO2 concentration to be entirely temperature driven.
I think maybe I assumed a 2nd order response that last time.
Again, not the point. The point is, the people who have discounted the ability of temperature alone to drive CO2 levels such as we have seen over the last century have done so for spurious reasons. There is a wide range of physically unremarkable responses which could be consistent with the short term and long term observed variations in CO2 being driven by temperature.
Lars P. says:
February 18, 2012 at 2:41 pm
“[I] wonder if we do have such data as to: what is the UV variability of the TSI and what is the TSI as measured at the ground in a certain location and not in space.”
UV is measured from orbit by SDO
http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/eve/
Joel Shore @ur momisugly February 18, 2:28 pm
And here is the abstract from that 1975 paper:
”If man-made dust is unimportant as a major cause of climatic change, then a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide. By analogy with similar events in the past, the natural climatic cooling which, since 1940, has more than compensated for the carbon dioxide effect, will soon bottom out. Once this happens, the exponential rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content will tend to become a significant factor and by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1000 years.”
WOT!!!!!! For a start, what about the remarkable similarity between the warming cycle that ended in ~1940 to that ending in about 1998. (at the so-called super El Nino spike). Yet the escalation of CO2 that can be attributed to mankind did not really get going until after 1940, and there has been a plateau or slight cooling over the last decade or so despite still accelerating anthro’ CO2. (somewhat similar to the cooling cycle after 1940, when CO2 accelerated)
But anyway, I still don’t see a non-evasive answer from you to my important question of confirmation to you last stated here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/monckton-responds-to-skeptical-science/#comment-891082
Bart:
>>
Time Constant to make it all add up
tau = sqrt((k/6)^2-1)/(2*pi)= 1.8 years
Well, the numbers came out more realistically last time. It should be about 30 years, I think, FWIW. The point is, the yearly variation/sensitivity suggests it is possible for the CO2 concentration to be entirely temperature driven.
>>
This is all very interesting. It would be better if you could post a link to where you got it right. These incoherent and contradictory posts are not too convincing.
I looked at decay of atmospheric CO2 containing C14 caused by atmospheric nuclear tests in 50 & 60s, it suggested a decay constant of about 5 years.
I think you will find there is a different time const for small amplitude variations circa 5ppm (surface water) and larger variations of the order of 100ppm which probably will involve deeper water.