From Sun and Liu 2012: all of the deep solar minima of the last millennium (Oort, Wolf, Spörer, Maunder and Dalton) correspond to periods of drought in the Qilian Mountains of the northeastern Tibetan Plateau according to this tree-ring study.
Guest post by Alec Rawls
Like the Central Asian precipitation study that Anthony posted about yesterday, this one also comes via a review by “Cold Sun” authors Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt, as translated by Pierre Gosselin.
Using tree ring width as a proxy for precipitation (about a 50% correlation over the period of the instrumental rainfall record) Chinese scientists Junyan Sun and Yu Liu found the remarkable correspondence between solar activity and precipitation seen in the graph above. As summarized by Lüning and Vahrenholt:
The Great Drought occurred during a weak period of solar activity, the so-called Spörer Minimum, which occurred from 1420 to 1570. Interestingly, almost all other periods of drought occurred during times of solar minima, among them the Oort Minimum, Wolf Minimum, Maunder Minimum and Dalton Minimum. Every time the sun goes into a slumber for a few decades, the rains on the Tibetan Plateau stay away.
A frequency analysis of precipitation curves also delivers evidence on solar cycles. Here the Gleissberg Cycle (60-120 year period) and the Suess/de Vries Cycle (180-220 years) are seen in the datasets.
Yesterday’s study, which also looked at the Tibetan Plateau but about 1400 kilometers to the west, found the opposite relation, with “Bond events” (episodes of ice rafting in the North Atlantic, which Bond identified with periods of low solar activity), corresponding to periods of higher humidity (colder and wetter) in the Taklamakan Desert. The two studies taken together seem to suggest a solar driven shift in weather patterns.
Is this support for Stephen Wilde’s theory about high solar activity pushing the polar jet stream northward? Any significant change in the jet stream would likely cause its latitudinal waves to shift as well, so even though the two Tibetan sites are at the same latitude, it is plausible that rainfall in the two locations could be oppositely affected by the sun.
In general, if solar activity is by any mechanism a powerful driver of climate then corresponding changes in weather patterns would seem to be unavoidable. This would account both for the high number of studies that find solar signals in paleo-climate proxies and for the difficulty in fitting these studies together into a larger picture. Maybe with enough more precipitation studies at enough locations a coherent map of fluctuating weather patterns will emerge.
Are there enough old Coastal Redwoods to do tree ring studies up and down a thousand miles of Pacific coast? If Redwood rings correlate well with precipitation, that could be a good place to look for shifting weather patterns. Has this already been done? The Save the Redwoods group claims to be compiling their own such database now. Maybe it will show something.
On the difficulty of finding simple relationships, note that the correlation Sun and Liu found between solar activity and precipitation in the Qilian Mountains goes wobbly over the last dozen decades. If the correspondence between low solar activity and dry weather at this location is real then it seems that the 1900 lull in solar activity was not deep enough to trigger the changed weather pattern. Precipitation was actually high across the 1900-lull, then was below average in the 1940s, 50s and 60s when the sun was particularly active.
It’s a reminder to take the remarkable coincidence between precipitation and deep solar minima in the Qilian Mountains with a grain of salt. In any one location the relationship between climate and weather is going to be noisy, which not only can obscure real relationships but can also point to false ones. Still, the evidence for a powerful solar driver of climate keeps piling up.
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The problem seems to be that climate enthusiasts want to see solar-terrestrial-climate coherence somewhere it’s NOT instead of where it IS:
http://i49.tinypic.com/219q848.png
Aggregation criteria affect spatiotemporal pattern, so with ongoing differential shifting of atmospheric & oceanic layers, reliable vision hinges on awareness of global constraints.
Pardon for asking but do can you point to any evidence that cloud seeding and anthropogenic aerosols have been so large in magnitude as to cause regional climate change in this manner? I ask because it implies a really high sensitivity to those two factors.
The Indian government has recently started to take an interest in the aerosol – monsoon relationship. Its not as simple as more aerosols/particulates cause more/less precipitation, but preliminary results indicate aerosols cause less rain in rain shadow areas.
http://www.ileaps.org/sci_conf_book/pdf/20110511124209_Mahesh_Abstract_IITM_INDIA.pdf
Although I think in western China, Soviet era agricultural practices in central Asia were more significant; more dust from the drying of the Aral Sea, ploughing the Kazhak steppes and similar, plus some contribution from industrial pollution. As I mention above, solar insolation drives the monsoon process, and aerosols reduce solar insolation, both directly and by cloud seeding.
Are these effects large enough to cause the breakdown in the 20th C precipitation – solar relationship in the study above?
I don’t know, but it would appear they could be a significant contributor.
And the models agree that aerosols suppress the monsoon.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL047268.shtml
Actually, and this the bull in the china shop, one cannot denigrate dendrochronology as a climate indicator without realizing this study proves nothing. Just as Briffa’s analysis is simply idiotic. Tree rings prove much more of an indicator of a fertile or sterile environment then a temperamental indicator. Let the botanists sort out tree rings.
Unfortunately they are also given to voicing panic because it helps them preserve ecosystems. I just wish people would just do what is environmentally correct and stop this nonsense.
Some time ago I looked at the one of the more accurate precipitation records, 150 years long data set for Oxford, UK; there was reduction 1890-1920 corresponding to decreased solar activity at the time, but again similar reduction occurred in the1980s-90s when the solar output was high.
However one more interesting aspect is a very strong 43 year repetition pattern not known in the SSN.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/ORR1.htm
Mosher writes:
Only if it is the tiny changes in TSI that are driving climate. For such a miniscule forcing to account for observed temperature changes climate sensitivity would have to be so high as to make climate highly unstable. Any volcano would send us into a glaciation. After all, the variation in TSI is estimated to provide 1/40th the temperature forcing of changes in CO2 over the past 150 years. (That’s from AR5).
But nobody who is looking at a solar explanation for global temperature variation is thinking that the main actor is TSI. They are hypothesizing much larger forcing effects, as might come from changes in the amount of clouds, as in Svensmark’s GCR-cloud theory, or from the UV-shift, as with Stephen Wilde’s ozone/jet-stream theory.
Such mechanisms sometimes get called “solar amplification mechanisms,” but that is a misnomer. The forcing effects that are hypothesized are indeed a substantial multiple of the forcing effect of TSI, but they do not come from amplifying TSI. They work through other channels entirely. A better term would probably be to call these “indirect solar effects,” rather than amplifying mechanisms.
The indirect solar hypotheses allow that these forcings themselves may be large, not needing to be multiplied up in order to account for observed warming. It doesn’t take much of a change in clouds to have a huge effect on radiative forcing (as compared to forcing from changes in TSI and CO2). So no, a solar driver of climate does NOT imply high climate sensitivity.
Alec Rawls says: May 16, 2012 at 12:43 am
Good comment Alex. The “high sensitivity” (should have been defined as “climate sensitivity to solar variance”) statement was wrong, but I had no time to reply and you did a better job anyway.
Further, if solar variation is a primary driver of global temperature, directly or indirectly, then climate sensitivity to CO2 should be quite low, and we can toss out all the nonsense and data fabrication about aerosols causing the cooling from ~1940-1975, and the fabricated aerosol data being used to force every climate model to hindcast with greater (phony) coherence to actual measurements.
Furthermore, we can toss out all the nonsense about increased atmospheric CO2 causing catastrophic global warming.
And finally, we can toss out all the scoundrels and imbeciles who have caused our society to squander a trillion dollars of scarce global resources on their false global warming scare.
What we have is high climate sensitivity but in a NEGATIVE direction.
A strong negative response gives a very stable, INSENSITIVE system as regards total energy content for the system.
Instead of a change in system energy content one sees instead a redistribution of energy within the system causing changes in energy flow rates through the system.
The change in flow rates and the concomitant circulation changes needed to deal with the thermal attributes of human sourced CO2 is miniscule compared to that observed routinely from the system response to solar and oceanic variations.
The circulation changes from MWP to LIA and LIA to date involved latitudinal distances of 1000 miles or so. Any shift from human CO2 would be indiscernible.
Alec Rawls says:
and
Steven Mosher
Geomagnetic effect in the Antarctic originated by the solar activity in percentage terms is about 40 greater than the changes in the TSI
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-dBzA1.htm
When confronted with this finding our resident solar scientist, checked the data, and finally concluded that ‘correlation must be spurious’, which plainly is most unlikely.
Geomagnetic effects directly impacts Circumpolar current flow, the primary pump of the world’s oceanic conveyor belt , by induction process of telluric currents, well known to the geophysists .
Analogous process is active in the Arctic-North Atlantic
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-NAP.gif
which correlates well with the Loehle’s temperature reconstruction http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LLa.gif
Very interesting but take he Chinese studies w/ a grain of salt too.
After all, it is also possible for Chinese scientists to be politically influenced by what their gov’t wants to believe as well. Maybe their grants are awarded to look for non-GHG explanations. Used to be we would be much more suspicious about non-western science and communist science than that from the West.
another interesting study with regard to solar influence …
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1460.html
@ur momisugly Phillip Bradley (635 pm)
It indicates no such thing. The pre-1950 correlation is just as likely to be worse. The calibration period is ALSO the period of greatest CO2 fertilization, and that works in the opposite direction from aerosols. A good regression model would account for ALL the explanatory variables so their effects could be isolated. But it doesn’t look like the authors here did that. I suspect they just did a basic, bivariate, OLS regression, because proving the correlation between tree ring width and precipitation wasn’t the point. They more or less ASSUMED the correlation was there, based on a cursory nod to a simple regression model with WEAK correlation, then set about proving that rainfall must have decreased during solar minimal, even though the more obvious cause of decreased tree ring width during those periods was the KNOWN (not supposed because of a weak correlation) temperature decrease during the solar minimal.
I am going to toss in this study from India on monsoons since they are south of the area under discussion and Stephen Wilde has come up.
Study from 2002:
Another study 2004
And another study 2005 that pulls a bunch of data together.
There are several more studies of the solar influences on the Indian Monsoon. Since the monsoon is literally life or death to the people of India, this is one area of science they do not play games with. It is too critical.
If Stephen Wilde had a multitude of grad student slaves like the Climate Team does, I am sure he could do a vast literature search and pull out the studies already done that would support his theory that the jet stream moves as a result of solar influence. I certainly keep tripping over them and I am not even looking for them. Heck I have seen the evidence of a change in the jet stream pattern in my neck of the woods. I check the pattern at least two or three times a week since an accurate prediction of rain is critical to my business.
Bill says: @ur momisugly May 16, 2012 at 2:22 am
….Used to be we would be much more suspicious about non-western science and communist science than that from the West.
____________________________
And that is quite telling a statement is it not. Seems Lysankoism has now infected science the world over.
“originates from the stratosphere through modulation of the upwelling in the equatorial troposphere, which produces a north-south seesaw of convective activity over the Indian Ocean sector during summer.”
The key difference from my proposal is that I say one can look at the entire globe and describe a pole / equator seesaw in each hemisphere which is responsive to changes in the mix of particles and wavelengths from the sun.
Changes in the slope of the height of the tropopause between the equator and poles allows the surface air pressure pattern to slide to and from beneath the tropopause in order to alter the rate of energy flow through the system and thereby maintain the equilibrium temperature in the face of ANY forcing factors.
The stratosphere temperature is the key. To get poleward shifting when the sun is active one needs a higher tropopause at the poles which means a cooling stratosphere towards the poles when the sun is more active and that proposition is contrary to current climatology but consistent with recent data concerning a reverse sign solar effect above 45km as noted by Joanna Haigh and others.
Gail Combs says:
……….
Two main sources of the Arctic’s polar jet-stream pattern interference are the Icelandic and Aleutian lows.
– Downwelling of warm waters (releasing several hundreds of W/m2 of energy) in the Nortwest Atlantic (south west of Iceland, North Atlantic Drift Current) mainly in the winter affecting Eurasian land mass.
– Upwelling of cold waters near the Aleutian archipelago (North Pacific, Alaska and California currents) affecting North America.
Their effect is strongest in the winter months, while insolation is low, and both lows weaken in the summer months as the insolation increases. Here is an article from people who need to know and are in the know (not the MetOffice): http://www.theweatherprediction.com/weatherpapers/077/index.html I recommend a careful read.
This is main reason why the most of the CET warming is due to the winters while there were 300 years of flat summers.
These lows are well known to the meteorologists (but most likely not so well to the climatologists)
Gail, there’s NO QUESTION that equator-pole gradients and consequent westerly pumping variations are tied to the solar cycle:
http://i49.tinypic.com/219q848.png
Just a few minutes ago I found YET ANOTHER way to isolate this pattern (now approaching 3 dozen). The solar-terrestrial-climate weave IS ROBUST.
Challenge to the community:
Update your solar-terrestrial-climate narratives TO BE CONSISTENT WITH OBSERVATION.
I’m severely short on time & resources, but sensible, serious parties who are actually willing AND ABLE to carry out the calculations are welcome to ask for help.
Best Regards to All.
Stephen Wilde says:
May 16, 2012 at 9:15 am
“originates from the stratosphere through modulation of the upwelling in the equatorial troposphere, which produces a north-south seesaw of convective activity over the Indian Ocean sector during summer.”
The key difference from my proposal is that I say one can look at the entire globe and describe a pole / equator seesaw in each hemisphere which is responsive to changes in the mix of particles and wavelengths from the sun…..
___________________________________
I understand that Stephen, however all of these regional studies can be looked at as concrete data supporting a piece in a jigsaw puzzle and yours as the completed puzzle. That is why I suggest a gaggle of research slaves to put that complex puzzle together as solid data supporting your theory.
Steven Mosher says:
May 16, 2012 at 9:29 am
Nice try Phillip.
I love the way you guys lose your skepticism and embracing your inner confirmation bias.
BTW, anybody ask these guys for their code and data?
_____________________________________
Steve McIntyre has had no problem getting the data from the Russians and yet can not get the Americans or the Brits to cough up the codes and data.
Steve McIntyre writes:
Yesterday, I received updated Yamal data (to 2005) from Rashit Hantemirov, together with a cordial cover note…
Unfortunately I do not have the computer or statistic skills to follow up on this data from China and India.
pat says:
May 15, 2012 at 8:04 pm
our published aussie CAGW study of the day:
========================
“A Sydney researcher, Jason Evans, ran a series of climate models and found above average sea surface temperatures throughout December 2010 increased the amount of rainfall across the state by 25 per cent on average.”
Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/environment/weather/ocean-temperature-made-queensland-floods-worse–study-20120516-1ypvy.html#ixzz1v3TnyqCv
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Enough said.
“That is why I suggest a gaggle of research slaves.”
If only 🙂
Stephen Wilde says:
This seems rather different from my earlier impression of Stephen’s theory. Here he seems to be saying that the shape of the troposphere responds internally as necessary to alter energy flows so as to maintain temperature (a strongly negative temperature feedback). I thought the idea was that the UV shift with high solar activity altered the distribution of ozone in the atmosphere, thereby altering the pattern of atmospheric warming which alters the shape of the troposphere which alters the rate of cloud formation. How do these two fit together? If tropospheric shape and jet stream location respond to adjust energy flows, how can they be driven by solar activity? If they work to maintain temperature, how can solar activity drive temperature?
“How do these two fit together?”
An active sun draws the air circulation poleward to allow more energy into the oceans. In the process skewing the balance between El Nino and La Nina events in favour of El Nino over periods longer than the 60 year Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation.
At the same time the movement poleward of the air circulation allows a faster rate of energy transfer through the system.
The faster throughput prevents an increase in system energy content.
So, high solar activity allows BOTH more energy into the system and faster energy out of the system.
Low solar activity lets less energy into the system AND slower energy out of the system.
When the equatorial air masses expand due to more energy into the oceans, the activity along the ITCZ intensifies (Willis’s Thermostat Hypothesis) to feed those wider and more intense subtropical high pressure cells. There is an increase in convective overturning and more radiative heat loss from clearer equatorial skies.
Also, when the mid latitude jets move more poleward they have a narrower, more direct track around the planet but they get faster with more intense cyclogenesis concentrated in a smaller area. Another increase in convective overturning.
The opposite when solar activity is low.
The system energy content remains much the same during the warming and cooling phases (apart from some variation in ocean heat content) but the regional distribution of polar and equatorial air masses changes with climate consequences for the regions most affected and that happens to be the mid latitudes.
In the mid latitudes there will be changes in the dominant wind direction.
During a global warming spell, at about 45 degrees north and south, the frequency of air flows from an equatorial direction will increase and during a cooling spell the frequency of flows from a polar direction will increase.
Western Europe is about the best example. Lots of south and west winds when the globe is warming and lots of north and east winds when the globe is cooling.
In the short term the diagnosis is confounded by irregularities in the air flow caused by landmass distribution, the degree of jetstream zonality or meridionality and by chaotic variability but over multiple decades the effects are obvious as per the multitude of papers showing a link between regional weather / climate changes and the levels of solar activity.
The actual energy content around which the system dances is set by atmospheric pressure on the ocean surface but that is another story.
Alec Rawls
and
Stephen Wilde
Below van Allen radiation belt is the ionosphere, created when UV radiation from the Sun strips electrons away form the atoms forming ionized plasma. This polarized plasma follows Earth rotation creating horizontal ionospheric currents known as the polar electrojets (magnetic poles) , the equatorial electrojet (magnetic equator).
Polar (auroral) electrojets
http://www-ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/papers/solwind_magsphere/fig18.gif
are particularly strong, cause geomagnetic storms and induce telluric currents into any conducting material from highly saline ocean currents to the lithosphere at depths of 300 or more km. You can find more in this article from Stanford University:
http://www-star.stanford.edu/~vlf/ejet/electrojet.html
Equatorial electrojet is linked by NASA to the equatorial storms, and is active in the ENSO region.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2006/space_weather_link.html
or if you are adventures enough see my article
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC20.htm
So UV has an effect on the Earth’s climate, not directly but through a complex indirect ionospheric currents and associated geomagnetic effects.
vuk,
Thanks for the extra detail. I’ve left the precise manner in which the solar variations affect the temperature profile of the atmosphere rather vague at the moment because I don’t know enough about the vast range of solar effects up there. However I’m sure that the solar wind and electromagnetic effects have an influence on the way the solar effects are distributed. In particular charged material is always directed to the poles along the magnetic field lines.
All we need for the observed effects is differential responses between equator and poles which then gives the required seesaw movement in the atmospheric heights.
Thanks to Stephen and Vuc for these clarifications of their ideas. I’ll keep this stuff on my radar screen.
Question for Vuc. It seems that the direction in which the telluric currents impel the circumpolar current must not switch when the sun’s polarity switches (every eleven years) or the current would keep shutting down. Does it switch when the earth’s magnetic field flips?