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.
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As solar cycle 24 progresses, it will be interesting to see what happens to the solar large scale magnetic field, if the magnetic field strength of individual newly formed sun spots continues to decline.
I will have more comments if there is observational evidence of a deeper than expected solar magnetic cycle minimum. I believe based on the geomagnetic paleo record and related analysis that it is possible for the solar magnetic cycle to be interrupted.
This is an interesting summary of the Solar 24 observational anomalies.
http://www.leif.org/research/Disappearance-of-Visible-Spots.pdf
The following are some comments concerning GCR changes and planetary temperature changes.
Svensmark’s mechanism is a charge based mechanism. GCR strike the earth’s upper atmosphere creating MUONs which in turn create multiple ions. There are multiple papers with observational and theoretical analysis to support the assertion that ions affect cloud formation rate, cloud albedo, and cloud lifetime. If GCR was the only phenomena that could affect ions in the atmosphere and Svensmark’s mechanism was correct, low level planetary cloud cover should track GCR.
If GCR was the only mechanism that affected ions in the atmosphere therefore there would be an increase in low level clouds when GCR is high (GCR is high when there is a low solar magnetic cycle and weak solar heliosphere), which results in more sunlight reflected off into space, colder planet.
Planetary cloud cover closely tracks GCR levels from 1978 to 1993. Post 1993, planetary cloud cover is reduced, even when GCR is high. There needs to be a physical explanation as to what is reducing planetary cloud cover, inhibiting the GCR mechanism.
I presented a review paper by Tinsley that discusses all known ion mechanisms. There is a second ion mechanism, elecctroscavenging. Tinsley’s electroscavening mechanism is a variation of Svensmark’s mechanism. Solar wind bursts create a space charge differential in the ionosphere which creates a current which affect cloud formation. The solar wind bursts disturb the geomagnetic field.
There are long term measurements of the geomagnetic field disturbances “AP”. AP is correlated with the solar wind bursts. I presented a paper that noted the late 2000 temperature changes correlated with changes in AP. There is another paper by Enric Palle that notes variation of cloud cover in the latitude region of 40 degree to 60 degree for the period. The 40 to 60 degree latitude region, is where changes would be expected, as that region is most strongly affected by electroscavenging.
As David Archibald’s graph illustrates, Ap was high during the 1970 cooling period, during a period when GCR was high. If Tinsely’s electroscavening mechanism was correct, it would be expected that the solar wind bursts would remove the cloud forming ions, in the 1970s.
As I noted there appears to be a third solar mechanism that affects ions in the atmosphere. The hypothesized third solar mechanism is required to explain the cyclic large scale abrupt changes to the geomagnetic field (intensity of the geomagnetic field abruptly change – excursions, periodicity roughly 6,000, to 8,000 years, however orbital parameters affect the resultant – and tilt of the geomagnetic field axis abruptly changes by 10 to 15 degrees –archeomagnetic jerks, periodic roughly 400 years) and explains why volcanic eruptions increase during solar minimums and explains why very large volcanic eruptions correlate with deep solar magnetic cycle minimums.
If there is planetary cooling or evidence of an interruption to the solar magnetic cycle I will have additional comments concerning the hypothesized third mechanism.
William says:
January 5, 2013 at 5:24 am
it is possible for the solar magnetic cycle to be interrupted
I have asked you before, what do you mean by ‘interrupted’?
Svensmark’s mechanism was correct, low level planetary cloud cover should track GCR.
Except they don’t http://www.leif.org/research/Cloud-Cover-GCR-Disconnect.png
lsvalgaard says: January 4, 2013 at 2:33 pm
You sound rather desperate to me. And pissed to.
________________________________
I see the old Leif is making a return. It was much better, Leif, when you rose above it all.
.
lsvalgaard says:January 5, 2013 at 6:06 am
Svensmark’s mechanism was correct, low level planetary cloud cover should track GCR.
Except they don’t http://www.leif.org/research/Cloud-Cover-GCR-Disconnect.png
Leif I respect you for the time you put in here, but you answered William with the same tangential sort of non-answer we often get from the true believers. William said”Planetary cloud cover closely tracks GCR levels from 1978 to 1993. Post 1993, planetary cloud cover is reduced, even when GCR is high. There needs to be a physical explanation as to what is reducing planetary cloud cover, inhibiting the GCR mechanism.”
William says there is no correlation after the early 90s, but there was prior. Your graph shows they track in direction if not in magnitude until 2004. How does this address the question of a third unknown variable that William presents?
Dr. Svalgaard, are there any good solar physics textbooks available? Thanks.
Interesting, moderators, that you don’t snip Leif when he calls other people “idiots.”
Well, as you say, live with it.
David
Your point is also shown perhaps on the running 11 year average sunspot number [SIDC] graph as shown on the CLIMATE4YOU web page under the Sun subsection, illustration # 5 or fourth graph. Ever dip [5 in total] in the running 11 year average sunspot number, including the 1970’s can be matched with a global temperature drops. Five coincidences in a row ?, possible but doubtful in my mind . Only global SST cycles have a comparable match in pattern except the period 1940-1980 period . I cannot comment on the mechanism that is at work here but there is a link that needs to be further researched. Even with the new DERIVED SUNSPOT NUMBERS the pattern seems to be unchanged. We are at a low level of sunspot numbers like we had 100 years ago, like the 1910’s and 1920’s and record cold winter spells in Russia, eastern Europe, Alaska and even UK speak to this same pattern of temperatures.
http://www.climate4you.com
Meanwhile, consequences of the weak Solar cycle are upon us: look, what is happening in India and China.
David Archibald is on to something. Facing the obvious consistent pattern, the scientist’s task is to investigate it and to find a mechanism that causes it. Endlessly repeating textbook truisms is useless. Personally attacking everybody who dares to think outside the textbook is ugly and stupid.
Steve Keohane says:
January 5, 2013 at 8:44 am
Leif I respect you for the time you put in here, but you answered William with the same tangential sort of non-answer we often get from the true believers….
William says there is no correlation after the early 90s, but there was prior. Your graph shows they track in direction if not in magnitude until 2004. How does this address the question of a third unknown variable that William presents?
It is generally the mark of a spurious correlation that it breaks down when new data becomes available. To invent a new mechanism to deal with the fact that the correlation went away does not seem reasonable. Then what will happen when that new one eventually also fails? Perhaps a fourth unknown variable can be called upon to restore the correlation, and then a fifth, etc.
But to reply with something more specific, I’ll offer this http://www.leif.org/EOS/swsc120049-GCR-Clouds.pdf which has already been mentioned.
Eric Chief Lion says:
January 5, 2013 at 8:47 am
Dr. Svalgaard, are there any good solar physics textbooks available? Thanks.
Yes, much depends on the level you want. Here are three good ones [in increasing difficulty]
Jack Eddy: The Sun, the Earth and Near-Earth Space: A Guide to the Sun-Earth System
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sun-Earth-Near-Earth-Space/dp/0160838088
Kenneth Lang: The Sun from Space
http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Space-Astronomy-Astrophysics-Library/dp/3540769528
Dermott Mullan: Physics of the Sun
http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Sun-Pure-Applied-ebook/dp/B005H6L3NU
Silver Ralph says:
January 5, 2013 at 8:26 am
It was much better, Leif, when you rose above it all.
I am only human…So I slip up once in a while.
Some frosty relations around here, I see.
Cold enough to “freeze the nuts off a steel bridge”?
This solar cycle will not start declining before ~2014/15. The exact timing of the maximum is of course somewhat arbitrary, but one can always take annual values – they only have one peak. The global cooling, associated with the very weak SC 24 (will be much longer than the average, maybe longer than 13 years) will be very rapid. The scene is set.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif
http://i1159.photobucket.com/albums/p623/Oefinell/15yrLR.jpg
Zero 30-year linear trend by ~2020.
herkimer says:
January 5, 2013 at 8:52 am
Yes, temperature dips, and sea level falls, during solar minima. The breakover between rising and falling is a F10.7 flux of 102. What we will enter after solar maximum by May 2013 will be like continuous solar minimum in terms of the experience of the last three human generations. The oceans will shed heat until a new equilibrium is reached.
What are the mysteries that are left to us? One is knowledge of the physical basis of the Friis-Christensen and Lassen relationship.
David Archibald says:
January 5, 2013 at 2:32 pm
What are the mysteries that are left to us? One is knowledge of the physical basis of the Friis-Christensen and Lassen relationship.
That ‘relationship’ is spurious and has been debunked too often to count.
lsvalgaard says: To invent a new mechanism to deal with the fact that the correlation went away does not seem reasonable.////// Oh you mean like dark matter .. or my fav, alternate universes where all the stuff that goes through black holes ends up. Do you even pay attention to current theory? LMAO
William says:
January 5, 2013 at 5:24 am
I presented a review paper by Tinsley that discusses all known ion mechanisms. There is a second ion mechanism, elecctroscavenging. Tinsley’s electroscavening mechanism is a variation of Svensmark’s mechanism. Solar wind bursts create a space charge differential in the ionosphere which creates a current which affect cloud formation. The solar wind bursts disturb the geomagnetic field.
Looking into that will be interesting. Not to dismiss such but just to add a note regarding cloud cover data, though:
Planetary cloud cover closely tracks GCR levels from 1978 to 1993. Post 1993, planetary cloud cover is reduced, even when GCR is high.
While there certainly is more than GCR change alone going on as an influence, often cloud cover is reported from ISCCP data, which has problems for recent years, discussed in http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/further-attempt-to-falsify-the-svensmark-hypothesis/
There is much more similarity in cosmic ray trends and cloud cover variation in recent years when not using ISCCP data.
Dr. Spencer did an illustration of cosmic ray flux versus shortwave radiation reflected, the latter being largely an indication of low cloud cover, over recent years:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/05/indirect-solar-forcing-of-climate-by-galactic-cosmic-rays-an-observational-estimate/
There is also the general matter of if Hansen’s GISS, the headquarters of the ISCCP, can be counted on to not make severe adjustments to cloud cover trend data like they do with the separate topic of temperature data. (For instance, as a simple illustration, http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/fig1x.gif showed the 5-year mean of U.S. temperature in the high point of the 1980s was 0.4 degrees Celsius cooler than such in the 1930s, but the same is made less than 0.1 degrees apart in http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.D.gif in later changes to the data).
Without high reliance on trusting the ISCCP’s data, patterns include those in the following:
http://s13.postimage.org/ka0rmuwgn/gcrclouds.gif
(enlarging upon click)
pkatt says:
January 5, 2013 at 3:02 pm
>i>my fav, alternate universes where all the stuff that goes through black holes ends up.
I think you got that one a wee bit wrong, but go ahead, many people believe weird things, so why not you.
As for the alleged planetary tidal influence on solar flux, I think there is a “put up or shut up” test. How does this sound? The strongest tidal differences should occur when Jupiter and Saturn are aligned, versus when they are 90 degrees out of phase. According to the nineplanets dot org solar system data page http://nineplanets.org/data.html
Jupiter’s orbital period is 4332.71 days
Saturn’s orbital period is 10759.50 days
Jupiter “laps” Saturn every 1/((1/4332.71) – (1/10759.5)) = 7253.66 days
The periodicity should be half of that, i.e. 3626.83 days, because tidal influences can add up when they’re on opposite sides of the sun, as well as on the same side. Does such a periodicity show up in the analysis of the solar flux data… Yes or No?
The effects are very different if Jupiter and Saturn are on opposite sides or the same side.of the sun. A key number is the Jupiter Saturn beat of 19.859 yrs (7253.66 days) Some here may note for example that 3 such beats are about equal to a complete PDO warming and cooling cycle.
For a complete discussion of the sun planetary beats and associated torques see Fairbridge and Sanders. “,The Suns Orbit AD 750-2050 : Basis for New Perspectives on Planetary Dynamics and Earth Moon Linkage.” in Climate – History,Periodicity and Predictability p446 Van Rostrand Reinhold Co. 1987
(See esp table 26-1 p452 )
This table will provide days of endless imaginative speculation and calculation for the inquiring minds posting on this thread.
Oh yes sorry Leif, Oh you’re right.. its dimensions, not universes.. cause that is so much less weird right? String theory anyone????????
Hnery@Walter Dnes
To explain weather cycles, before they started with the carbon dioxide nonsense they did look in the direction of the planets, rightly or wrongly.See here.
http://www.cyclesresearchinstitute.org/cycles-astronomy/arnold_theory_order.pdf
To quote from the above paper:
A Weather Cycle as observed in the Nile Flood cycle, Max rain followed by Min rain, appears discernible with maximums at 1750, 1860, 1950 and minimums at 1670, 1800, 1900 and a minimum at 1990 predicted.
(The 1990 turned out to be 1995 when cooling started!)
Please note: indeed one would expect more clouds/condensation (bigger flooding) at the end of a cooling period and minimum flooding at the end of a warm period. This is because when water vapor cools (more) it condensates (more) to water (i.e. more rain).
Now put my sine wave
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
next to those dates?
1900- minimum flooding : end of warming
1950 – maximum flooding: end of cooling
1995 – minimum flooding: end of warming
So far, I do not exclude a gravitational or electromagnetic swing/switch that changes the UV coming into earth. In turn this seems to change the chemical reactions of certain chemicals reacting to the UV lying on top of the atmosphere. This change in concentration of chemicals lying on top of us, i.e. O3, HxOx and NxOx, in turn causes more back radiation (when there is more), hence we are now cooling whilst ozone & others are increasing.
@Dnes
>As for the alleged planetary tidal influence on solar flux,
> …Jupiter “laps” Saturn every 1/((1/4332.71) – (1/10759.5))
> = 7253.66 days
> The periodicity should be half of that, i.e. 3626.83 days
Interesting proposition. Theoretically, the difference in tidal pull should create some kind of signal. I think even Dr. Svalgaard would agree to that. But there are two problems:
1) The resultant differential pull would be very small and perhaps undetectable.
2) A solar cycle has a period of roughly 11 years or 4015 days, whose spectral peak would probably mask tiny peaks nearby in the spectrum (Yes, I know that the true believers claim the entire 11-year cycle is due to such tidal tugs).
But, in any case, it’s worthy of a small experiment. So I downloaded the Pentiction data here …
ftp://ftp.geolab.nrcan.gc.ca/data/solar_flux/monthly_averages/solflux_monthly_average.txt
… and converted it to comma-separated form, after removing the top title line, (but not the column headings which are useful)
The resulting file, which I called sflux.dat, can then be processed in just 2 lines of R to yield a periodgram showing the spectral peaks.
x=read.csv(‘sflux.dat’, header=T)
p=spec.pgram(x$Adjflux,pad=400,xlim=c(0,.015),tck=1)
Here is the resulting periodgram, with frequencies calibrated in reciprocal months (since the input data is monthly). I used the xlim parameter to zoom into the range 0..0.015 to get a better look at the spread of peaks. The two peaks of interest should show up at the following x values
solar cycle period ~ 1/(11*12) = 0.007575758
TIDAL DIFF PERIOD ~ 1/(3626.83/30)= 0.008271686
http://i45.tinypic.com/rqz14i.png
As you can see the results are indeterminant because the solar cycle peak is very broad and covers 0.007 past 0.008, so any tinier peaks are masked.
Perhaps more selective spectral methods, such as maxent or MUSIC might help resolve any hidden peaks. But they’re hard to manage and are notorious for generating spurious peaks.
😐
lsvalgaard says:
January 4, 2013 at 10:19 pm
“… 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.”
I would be more surprised if you said that any stars with magnetic cycles had been found and measured to be synchronized with their planets, as the first extrasolar planets to be found were announced in 1992 and the first was orbiting a pulsar, at this early stage the technology has not yet matured enough and with only 21 years of collecting data on other extrasolar planets and the star they orbit, I think it is far to early to be making judgments on what future observations will show. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, You have to observe and collect data first.
You may be interested to know that it’s a learning process for me and many other enthusiasts, recently I’ve become fascinated with the Suns orbital period at it’s equator being equal to the relative mass of Uranus and it’s unusual orientation and spin, add to this the interaction of Jupiter which comes between Uranus and the Sun approximately every 11.87 years and we now a factor of timing involved related to the length of sun spot cycles, I would have thought that this timing is very important in Solar physics, yet some (including yourself) have been very dismissive off the bat, tho appear to accept a process that has led to many failed predictions such as your comments above about Hathaway.
The other recent observation I have made recently, and may only be just rediscovering, is that Neptune may only be orbiting our sun indirectly and may in fact be orbiting our solar system as a whole as the center of it’s orbit, which approximately once every 164.90 years perturbs the orbit of Uranus and as above where I mentioned the timing, this also effects the length of sun spot cycles, The mechanics involved for sun spot intensity is the perturbation of the suns natural magnetic field lines running from the north and south magnetic poles, as the Mass of Uranus holds the sun, Jupiter pulls on these magnetic field lines around it’s orbit until the magnetic poles flip and the process continues but in the opposite direction of the magnetic field lines as the north and south poles have now flipped, which will begin winding the cycle down to solar minimum where the process begins again according to the original timing properties.
Sparks says:
January 7, 2013 at 7:07 am
You have to observe and collect data first.
This have been [and is being] done. See the list of stars on slide 19 of http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202011%20SH34B-08.pdf [and that list is not complete]. Close-in planets have very short oribtal periods, so one does not need decades of observations to detect cycles.
Sparks says:
January 7, 2013 at 7:07 am
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
It very often is. If you expect [based on theory or guess] that a certain effect should be there and when you actually look and see nothing [absence of evidence], then that is usually [and rightfully] taken as evidence of absence.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 7, 2013 at 8:47 am
“It very often is. If you expect [based on theory or guess] that a certain effect should be there and when you actually look and see nothing [absence of evidence], then that is usually [and rightfully] taken as evidence of absence.”
Very True, I’d like to see more evidence of the observation, before we conclude [absence of evidence].
If you consider the factors I’ve mentioned in the above comment and consider how we actually measure the Mass of the sun and the planets, Can you say there is no plausible reason to investigate it further?
Hypothetically, if you were to go about looking for supportive evidence, how would you proceed?
It would be very interesting to hear your thoughts on this.