Note: the original title Solar Neutrons and the 1970s cooling period was unintentionally misleading as Dr. Svalgaard points out in comments:
What produces Solar Neutrons?
the title of the post is misleading. The cosmic rays are protons, not neutrons, and are not produced by the Sun, but by supernovae in the Galaxy. The ‘neutrons’ are produced in the Earth’s atmosphere when cosmic ray protons collide with air. Neutron Monitors can detect those ‘secondary’ neutrons.
I meant to convey the modulation effect of the sun’s magnetic field on cosmic rays, and hence neutrons. So I’ve truncated the title to: Neutrons and the 1970s cooling period – Anthony
Guest post by David Archibald
The world’s most eminent climatologist was Professor Hubert Lamb, who founded the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Professor Lamb was guided by the principle that if a climatologist is to project future climates, he must understand what has happened in the past. In that vein, to understand the cool period coming post solar maximum of Solar Cycle 24, it is apposite to examine the last period of cooling that the Earth experienced. This was the 1970s cooling period. The CIA report on climate written in August, 1974, A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems, summarised it in these terms:
“Since the late 1960s, a number of foreboding climatic predictions have appeared in various climatic, meteorological and geological periodicals, consistently following one of two themes.
· A global climatic change was underway.
· This climatic change would create worldwide agricultural failures in the 1970s.
Most meteorologists argued that they could not find any justifications for these predictions. The climatologists who argued for the proposition could not provide definitive causal explanations for their hypothesis. Early in the 1970s a series of adverse climatic anomalies occurred:
- The world’s snow and ice cover had increased by at least 10 to 15 percent.
- In the eastern Canadian area of the Arctic Greenland (sic), below normal temperatures were recorded for 19 consecutive months. Nothing like this had happened in the last 100 years.
- The Moscow region suffered its worst drought in three to five hundred years.
- Drought occurred in Central America, the sub-Sahara, South Asia, China and Australia.
- Massive floods took place in the Midwestern United States.
Within a single year, adversity had visited almost every nation on the globe.”
There was a 1970s cooling period – the CIA left a record of it, and by some measures, the 1970s was the coldest decade of the 20th Century. This is one of those measures:
This is Figure 3 from a paper by Suckling and Mitchell in 2000 which examined variation of the C/D climatic boundary under the Koppen climate classification system for the central United States during the 20th Century (courtesy of Gail Combs).
The C/D boundary is the boundary between mild winters and cold winters. For the average of the 1970s, the C/D boundary was 200 km south of where it was for the rest of the century. Given that the Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1976 saw a sudden warming, analysis at a finer time resolution is likely to show a much larger move south for the first half of that decade.
What was the signature of the 1970s cooling period in the instrumental record? In terms of the changes in space weather that might have caused that cooling, what was different about the early 1970s was that the neutron count rose back to near-solar minimum levels relatively early in Solar Cycle 20:
If neutron count is a significant determinant of climate, what is happening now? That is shown in the following graph which inverts the neutron count and plots it against F10.7 flux:
F10.7 flux is preferred to sunspot number because it can’t be adjusted by the “sunspot fiddlers” amongst us. What this graph shows is that:
1. there is about a one year lag in neutron count from the F10.7 flux.
2. the divergence between the F10.7 flux and neutron count in the early 1970s.
It looks like F10.7 flux has peaked for Solar Cycle 24 and therefore the neutron count should start climbing again. The current count is not much higher than the pre-Solar Cycle 23 minima in the record.
The Ap index is currently 3.6 which is lower than the minimum monthly levels for pre-Solar Cycle 23 minima. For the last thirty years, the Ap index has been broadly tracking the F10.7 flux apart from the 1970s cooling period:
In the graph above, the Ap Index is shown as 11 month-smoothed. In the big picture, the Ap index did start rising from the mid-19th Century at about the same time that the glaciers started retreating in 1859. In the early 1970s though, the Ap index had a significant departure from the F10.7 flux and the neutron count. If a higher Ap index is associated with warming, then countervailing effects were much stronger than the high Ap index in the 1970s.
Both the neutron count and Ap Index are now quite close to solar minimum levels in the modern instrumental record, suggesting that they will be particularly weak when the fall of Solar Cycle 24 begins. The question then will be how far south the Koppen C/D boundary will move and what will that do to the Corn Belt growing season? As this figure shows, the Corn Belt is a movable feast:
Meanwhile, the fall of Solar Cycle 24 is upon us. This graph following kindly provided by Mike Williamson show the rise of solar cycles 18 to 24 from the month of minimum. Solar Cycle 24 is the bottom line and appears to be already in a steep decline.
Reference
Suckling, P.W. and Mitchell, M.D. 2000. Variation of the Koppen C/D climate boundary in the central United States during the 20th century. Physical Geography 21: 38-45.
@Anthony
> So I’ve truncated the title to:
> Neutrons and the 1970s cooling period
Why not “Galactic Cosmic Rays and the 1970s cooling period”? A more apt title because GCR’s are what the discussion is really about. … and neutron counters are not a necessary component of all GCR detectors:
For example, http://www.hardhack.org.au/geiger_muller_detector Here a stack of 3 GM tubes arranged vertically serves as a muon coincidence detector to help discriminate between terrestrial and cosmic radiation.
Walter Dnes says:
January 4, 2013 at 4:19 pm
What you want is an estimate of the Power Spectral Density. The FFT can be used for this, but it requires special manipulations to reduce the variability induced by noise in the measurements. Simply performing an FFT on the data will probably just give you a bunch of uninformative hash, as the FFT is inherently limited in dealing with noisy data.
The best book I know of is the one listed at the top here. I do not know if any of the less expensive ones by the same authors contain the same material or not. You may be able to search for others. A general web search on “estimation of the psd using the fft” brings up lots of hits as well.
There are other methods for PSD estimation which do not rely on the FFT as well, but they are often not as flexible, and generally require some a priori knowledge of what you are expecting to find.
sunsettommy says:
January 4, 2013 at 4:44 pm
The cycle 14 cycle had numerous identifiable peaks at fairly regular intervals but cycle 24 does not have it as plainly shown to date.
You would have said the same about cycle 14 at the beginning of cycle 14.The peaks in cycle 24 is still to come. The cycle already shares a characteristic with cycle 14, namely the asymmetry between north and south.
“””””…..
lsvalgaard says:
January 4, 2013 at 3:57 pm
sunsettommy says:
January 4, 2013 at 3:16 pm
But that second peak of this cycle….. hmmm…..
Solar cycle 14: http://www.solen.info/solar/cycl14.html hmmm… how many peaks? …
Multiple peaks are normal.
george e smith says:
January 4, 2013 at 3:17 pm
Many Thanx Leif; too many years since I studied radio-carbon dating. I knew it was 14N that produced 14C, but couldn’t remember the reaction, other than I recall it was some sort of double event, with something metastable formed in between.
And it doesn’t seem to me that free neutrons are chugging around the universe, burdened with a 12 or 14 minute, or whatever it is these days, half life.
I’m used to high energy neutrons kicking out protons. Well we used to make 14 MEV neutrons, by bombarding heavy ice with deuterons. Didn’t seem to me that protons could make alpha particles out of atmospheric gases; but then I guess some of them (primary protons) have about enough energy for a missing bolt off a space ship.
george e smith says:
January 4, 2013 at 5:02 pm
And it doesn’t seem to me that free neutrons are chugging around the universe, burdened with a 12 or 14 minute, or whatever it is these days, half life.
You get them in the debris by hitting 14N or 16O with protons.
Re FFT isn’t there an excel data analysis app for this ?
@Walter Dnes
> Can anybody here do and interpret a Fourier analysis (specifically a FFT)?
>… My Google searches have returned mostly electrical circuit design and
> analysis hits.
The Wolf sunspots series are a popular example in many texts on time series analysis. Here’s a fairly good one, based on SAS. Look at example 6.2.5 which does a periodogram on the Wolf series (which should also look a lot like your radio flux series):
http://opus.bibliothek.uni-wuerzburg.de/volltexte/2011/5648/pdf/2011_March_01_times.pdf
This same Wolf dataset is included in other stats packages too, e.g. R and MATLAB.
Thanks Dr A… its nice to see some theory and observation in practice.
Leif: “They are not predictions based on theory or anything like that, but simply a fit of a standard solar cycle to current data, so a ‘forecast’ may be a better word, and will by definition always fit current data.”
Then how did he come up with “biggest solar cycle in 400 years” before 23 was over. And why did Dikpati agree with him based on her model that she touted to be 98% accurate?
And shouldn’t you be telling him what to name his curves instead of me?
Leif: “We figured out back in 1978 how to predict solar cycles and have predicted every single one since correctly.”
Who are we? Are you talking about you? By every single one, are you talking about 3?
Now, if you are talking about “we”, as in your profession, this table shows that everything from 185 to 42, as well as every possible value in between, was predicted for 24.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/SC24/May_24_2007_table.pdf
Tilo Reber says:
January 4, 2013 at 7:25 pm
Then how did he come up with “biggest solar cycle in 400 years” before 23 was over. And why did Dikpati agree with him based on her model that she touted to be 98% accurate?
You are confusing two things. Hathaway made his true prediction before the cycle began by looking at a peak in what we call ‘recurrence’. see slides 24-26 of http://www.leif.org/research/Predicting%20the%20Solar%20Cycle%20(SORCE%202010).pdf
Once the cycle gets going, he can adjust the prediction [which now becomes a ‘forecast’] by fitting it to the observed course of the cycle as it unfolds.
Tilo Reber says:
January 4, 2013 at 7:42 pm
Who are we? Are you talking about you? By every single one, are you talking about 3?
From our sunspot prediction paper [the ‘et al.’ is ‘we’]:
“Schatten et al. [1978] pioneered the use of the solar polar magnetic field as a precursor ondicator. Because the poloidal field is an important ingredient in seeding the dynamo mechanism, the polar field precursor method appears to be rooted in solid physics. … As we approach minimum and the new cycle gets underway, the solar polar field precursor method improves markedly (cycle 21: observed 165 vs. predicted 140 ± 20; cycle 22: 159 vs. 170 ± 30 [Schatten and Sofia, 1987]; cycle 23: 121 vs. 138 ± 30 [Schatten et al., 1996]). The improvements also result from the use of actually measured polar fields rather than proxies. It is a strength of the polar field precursor method that the predictions improve in this manner. This paper suggests a novel way of applying the polar field precursor well before sunspot minimum.”
Cycle 24 is a very important cycle for testing our method, as it is so different from the several previous cycles. It seems that cycle 24 is confirming the validity of the procedure.
In response to Leif Svalgaard’s comment:
lsvalgaard says:
January 4, 2013 at 2:05 pm
BobG says:
January 4, 2013 at 1:40 pm
My impression from some of your comments in the past is that you believe GCRs may cause some cooling but you are not thinking it is a major contributor to climate? Is this correct?
My thinking is that GCRs are an even smaller contributor than CO2 and friends, thus not major. The Laschamps excursion is one of the reasons for this belief http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012E%26PSL.351…54N
William: Paper that indicates the earth’s geomagnetic field abruptly reversed 41 kyears ago.
Dynamics of the Laschamp geomagnetic excursion from Black Sea sediments
Investigated sediment cores from the southeastern Black Sea provide a high-resolution record from mid latitudes of the Laschamp geomagnetic polarity excursion. Age constraints are provided by 16 AMS14C ages, identification of the Campanian Ignimbrite tephra (39.28±0.11 ka), and by detailed tuning of sedimentologic parameters of the Black Sea sediments to the oxygen isotope record from the Greenland NGRIP ice core. According to the derived age model, virtual geomagnetic pole (VGP) positions during the Laschamp excursion persisted in Antarctica for an estimated 440 yr, making the Laschamp excursion a short-lived event with fully reversed polarity directions. The reversed phase, centred at 41.0 ka, is associated with a significant field intensity recovery to 20% of the preceding strong field maximum at˜50 ka. Recorded field reversals of the Laschamp excursion, lasting only an estimated ˜250 yr, are characterized by low relative paleointensities (5% relative to 50 ka). The central, fully reversed phase of the Laschamp excursion is bracketed by VGP excursions to the Sargasso Sea (˜41.9 ka) and to the Labrador Sea (˜39.6 ka). Paleomagnetic results from the Black Sea are in excellent agreement with VGP data from the French type locality which facilitates the chronological ordering of the non-superposed lavas that crop out at Laschamp-Olby. In addition, VGPs between 34 and 35 ka reach low northerly to equatorial latitudes during a clockwise loop, inferred to be the Mono lake excursion.
William: Look at the temperature graph in this paper. Think of the glacial/interglacial cycle. Imagine Canada and the US states covered with a 2 mile thick ice sheet, 22 times.
The 41 kyr world: Milankovitch’s other unsolved mystery by Maureen E. Raymo et al.
http://rsai.geography.ohio-state.edu/courses/G820.01/WI05%20climate%20history/2002PA000791.pdf
[1] For most of the Northern Hemisphere Ice Ages, from approx. 3.0 to 0.8 m.y., global ice volume varied predominantly at the 41,000 year period of Earth’s orbital obliquity. However, summer (or summer caloric half year) insolation at high latitudes, which is widely believed to be the major influence on high-latitude climate and ice volume, is dominated by the 23,000 year precessional period. Thus the geologic record poses a challenge to our understanding of climate dynamics.
You need additional information to form a hypothesis. The geomagnetic field intensity dropped by a factor of five during the Laschamp geomagnetic reversal, 41 k years ago. (Svensmark’s’mechanism saturates. There is negative feedback to resist the oceans freezing, leading to an ice house earth.)
Note the glacial/interglacial cycle periodicity was 41 k years before increasing to 100 k years.
The geomagnetic field intensity increases by a factor of 2 to 3 during the interglacial period, as compared to the cold glacial period. There is a cycle of 100 k years and 41k years in both the geomagnetic field data and planetary temperature data. The geomagnetic field specialists spent roughly 10 years fighting about the cause of that correlation. As they had no cause (change is too fast and is periodic) they arguable about the validity of the observation. They landed more or less on agreement that the observation is correct.
The higher the geomagnetic field intensity during the interglacial period, the warmer the interglacial period. The 100 k year cycles have the strongest intensity geomagnetic field.
You need the missing mechanism to form a hypothesis. Try to picture the mechanism rather than assuming it is not possible. Assume a solar magnetic cycle restart is causing the abrupt changes geomagnetic field changes. Take my word that there are dozens of confirmed mature astronomical observations that confirm the mechanism. If that does not work, pretend, use your imagination. Play a game. Within the parameters of the game try to see how the pretend sun could cause what is observed. This a cyclic phenomena.
If that does not work, Let’s keep watching solar cycle 24 and look for evidence to validate or invalidate the hypothesis.
The tilt of the planet and eccentricity of the earth’s orbit at the time of the solar cycle restart and the timing of perihelion all modulate – or perhaps the word control would be more appropriate- the resultant of the restart.
Leif: “Hathaway made his true prediction”
Got ya. His “prediction” was wrong. His subsequent “forcasts” were simply extended curve fits based on known SC development patterns and available data.
Now, when you say that he “long ago saw the light”, do you mean that he long ago figured out that his “prediction” was wrong; or that he long ago figured out that his prediction method was wrong or that he long ago figured out that Shatten et al were correct?
And by the way, what did Dikpati figure out about her “98 percent accurate” model?
William says:
January 4, 2013 at 8:07 pm
Try to picture the mechanism rather than assuming it is not possible. Assume a solar magnetic cycle restart is causing the abrupt changes geomagnetic field changes.
I have been thinking about this for forty years. And there is no such thing as a ‘solar magnetic cycle restart’. It never stopped to begin with.
Tilo Reber says:
January 4, 2013 at 8:45 pm
Now, when you say that he “long ago saw the light”, do you mean that he long ago figured out that his “prediction” was wrong; or that he long ago figured out that his prediction method was wrong or that he long ago figured out that Shatten et al were correct?
All of the above.
And by the way, what did Dikpati figure out about her “98 percent accurate” model?
She is as unrepentant as ever. But you don’t hear much from her now.
Reblogged this on The Next Grand Minimum and commented:
The most interesting information is the shift in the corn belt as the climate cools.
If the sun has no planetary influence upon it, then the Sun has no planets.
Sparks says:
January 4, 2013 at 9:39 pm
If the sun has no planetary influence upon it, then the Sun has no planets.
Perhaps not worth a comment, but let me make one anyway. A strong test of the hypothesis would be to see if the [many] stars for which we have observed planets show magnetic cycles synchronized with their planets. None have been found.
Proud to be useful, Leif. It seems, though, that you don’t understand the origin and the meaning of the expression you used. If I were you, I’d be concerned about brushing up my English. But I am not you, fortunately.
Brass monkeys
According to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_monkey_%28colloquial_expression%29
Supposed etymology
It is often stated that the phrase originated from the use of a brass tray, called a “monkey”, to hold cannonballs on warships in the 16th to 18th centuries. Supposedly, in very cold temperatures the “monkey” would contract, causing the balls to fall off.[14] However, nearly all historians and etymologists consider this story to be an urban legend. This story has been discredited by the U.S. Department of the Navy,[15] etymologist Michael Quinion, and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).[16]
They give five main reasons:
The OED does not record the term “monkey” or “brass monkey” being used in this way.
The purported method of storage of cannonballs (“round shot”) is simply false. Shot was not stored on deck continuously on the off-chance that the ship might go into battle. Indeed, decks were kept as clear as possible.
Furthermore, such a method of storage would result in shot rolling around on deck and causing a hazard in high seas. Shot was stored on the gun or spar decks, in shot racks—longitudinal wooden planks with holes bored into them, known as shot garlands in the Royal Navy, into which round shot were inserted for ready use by the gun crew.
Shot was not left exposed to the elements where it could rust. Such rust could lead to the ball not flying true or jamming in the barrel and exploding the gun. Indeed, gunners would attempt to remove as many imperfections as possible from the surfaces of balls.
The physics does not stand up to scrutiny. The contraction of both balls and plate over the range of temperatures involved would not be particularly large. The effect claimed possibly could be reproduced under laboratory conditions with objects engineered to a high precision for this purpose, but it is unlikely it would ever have occurred in real life aboard a warship.
Re: some useful idiots
Welcome to ‘world of useful idiots’.
Two world foremost experts in the science of the Earth’s magnetism are:
Dr. Andrew Jackson of ETH Zurich & Dept Earth Sciences, Leeds University
and
Dr. Jeremy Bloxham of Dept Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
They published data for historical variability of the Earth’s magnetic flux.
World Data Center for the sunspot index: Solar Influences Data Analysis Center (SIDC)
They publish annual sunspot data.
M. A. Vukcevic currently is not associated with any science institution, researches data as a hobby.
Vukcevic used spectral analysis and noted two major components of the Jackson-Bloxham data.
He also assigned magnetic polarity to SIDC sunspot data (sunspot cycles alternate the magnetic polarity)
By simply putting together two time sequences, and comparing the result to the North Hemisphere temperature anomaly following graphic representation is obtained:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Sun-Earth.htm
It is noted as Geo-Solar Oscillation as a reference to the two sets of data used.
useful idiots indeed !
RE:vukcevic says:
January 5, 2013 at 2:59 am
……….
Dr. Svalgaard states:
‘Solar and the Earth’s magnetic fields are not related, do not interact and must not be combined together’.
Human vocal cords and a piece of still wire in a piano, are hardly related, do not interact, but both generate sound vibrations, but when combined in a human ear produce the most pleasing oscillations
Solar and Earth’s magnetic field variability may or may not be related, may or may not interact, but when combined by the ocean it appears that they produce the Atlantic Multidecadal oscillations.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Sun-Earth.htm
Alexander Feht says:
January 5, 2013 at 1:06 am
But I am not you, fortunately.
And I’m not you, fortunately. If I were, I would be ashamed as you should be.
vukcevic says:
January 5, 2013 at 2:59 am
Solar and Earth’s magnetic field variability may or may not be related, may or may not interact, but when combined by the ocean it appears that they produce the Atlantic Multidecadal oscillations
As we have discussed so many times any such appearance is just that, an appearance. Nothing to do with reality.
I am continuously amazed (and amused) that you guys keep looking at obscure solar data & others and keep arguing about it, whereas if you were to look at maxima you would have a very good proxy for energy coming in.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
according to this graph we are in a 88 year solar cycle and we will will drop about -0.3K in the next 8 years or so.
Please plant your food accordingly i.e. 140/3 = 45 km more south.
[snip]