Russian Scientists say period of global cooling ahead due to changes in the sun

I notice a lot of confirmation bias in the comments. As if one pronouncement from a Russian observatory is the final word. And you call yourself skeptics!
Well, I only see a couple of “I told you so” – and a lot more “yes, but” in these comments, so I think maybe it is your own bias that is being confirmed, Tom.
Many people here have discussed the very low cycle 24 numbers, including the good Dr Svalgaard (who’s point is not that there is no minimum, but that the maximum was exaggerated). There have been many who have put a stake in the ground about what this means for temperatures as well, but they have had to argue for this (and still do, regularly). This is a very argumentative topic here on WUWT (and long may it remain so) but confirmation bias? No, that doesn’t fly at all.

I can imagine that only a few (Russia and Canada- any others?)would even consider building an ice breaker. An ice maker? well maybe the other 97% would consider that…When the ice cometh, these two countries, both forsakers of the Kyoto Dodo, will be the only ones that will be able to travel in the arctic by sea. Certainly UK will be too busy de-icing its offshore windmills. Germany is likely to build a few eventually, though. Spain is too busy working on its green (gangrene) economy.
http://www.ccg-gcc.gc.ca/vessel-procurement/polar-icebreaker

In reply to:
Elliot Kennel says:
April 29, 2013 at 7:50 am
Is there a publication that makes this prediction, or is this just an opinion expressed by the scientist?
William,
There are hundreds of individual published papers that layout the theory (there is cyclic climate change in the paleo record and each and every time the climate changes there is an accompanying change to the solar magnetic cycle) and the mechanisms (by which solar magnetic cycle changes modulate planetary climate), however, there is a very vocal group that are stating catastrophic warming at a volume and consistency that drowns out or intimidates anyone connecting the dots to predict global cooling.
The paleoclimatic record shows cycles of warming followed by cooling Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and the more sever Heinrich events. The D-O cycles have a periodicity of 1450 years plus or minus a discrete change of 500 years (i.e. 950 years, 1450 years, and 1950 years).
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper.
The late Gerald Bond has able to track 23 of the D-O cycles/Heinrich events through the current interglacial and into the last glacial phase.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
http://rivernet.ncsu.edu/courselocker/PaleoClimate/Bond%20et%20al.,%201997%20Millenial%20Scale%20Holocene%20Change.pdf
A Pervasive Millennial-Scale Cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and Glacial Climates
http://rivernet.ncsu.edu/courselocker/PaleoClimate/Bond%20et%20al%201999%20%20N.%20Atlantic%201-2.PDF
http://www.climate4you.com/
William: This paper provides the observational evidence to support the assertion that the last Heinrich event 12,900 years before present at which time the planet went from interglacial warm to glacial cold when insolation at latitude N65 in June and July was at maximum with 90% of the cooling occurring in less than a decade correlates with an unknown massive change in C14 which correlates with a solar magnetic cycle change.
Reduced solar activity as a trigger for the start of the Younger Dryas?
http://www.falw.vu/~renh/pdf/Renssen-etal-QI-2000.pdf
William: The following is more information concerning how unusual the 20th century period of high solar activity was and what to possibly expect if the sun moves abruptly into a deep minimum.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0385
Grand minima and maxima of solar activity: New observational constraints I.G. Usoskin, S.K. Solanki, and G.A. Kovaltsov
…We present an updated reconstruction of sunspot number over multiple millennia, from 14C data by means of a physics-based model, using an updated model of the evolution of the solar open magnetic flux. A list of grand minima and maxima of solar activity is presented for the Holocene (since 9500 BC) and the statistics of both the length of individual events as well as the waiting time between them are analyzed…. …Solar activity on multi-millenial time scales has been recently reconstructed using a physics-based model from measurements of 14C in tree rings (see full details in Solanki et al. 2004, Usoskin et al. 2006a). The validity of the model results for the last centennia has been proven by independent data on measurements of 44Ti in stony meteorites (Usoskin et al. 2006b). The reconstruction depends on the knowledge of temporal changes of the geomagnetic dipole field, which must be estimated independently by paleomagnetic methods. Here we compare two solar activity reconstructions, which … …the more recent work of Korte & Constable (2005) may underestimate it. Thus we consider both models as they bound a realistic case. We note that the Yang et al. (2000) data run more than 4000 years longer and give a more conservative estimate of the grand maxima. See figure 3 in this paper. It shows that solar activity in 20th century particularly in the last half of the 20th century was the highest in 12,000 years and more importantly the duration of the high period was the longest in 12,000 years.
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years by S. K. Solanki, I. G. Usoskin, B. Kromer, M. Schussler & J. Beer
Here we report a reconstruction of the sunspot number covering the past 11,400 years, based on dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations. We combine physics-based models for each of the processes connecting the radiocarbon concentration with sunspot number. According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode. Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades. (William: The authors considered total solar irradiation TSI which is not the major mechanism by which the sun modulate planetary temperature. The mechanism is modulation of low level and high level clouds. During both Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle and the Heinrich events the mechanism is inhibited as the solar magnetic cycle is interrupted. (i.e. Galactic cosmic rays increase however there is not an increase in planetary clouds.))
William: This paper notes that roughly 10 years ago the magnetic field strength on newly formed sunspots started to decay linearly. Based on Eugene Parker’s analysis the magnetic ropes – the magnetic ropes are hypothesized to form at the solar tachocline and then rise up through the convection zone to form sunspots on the surface of the sun – require a minimum field strength to avoid being torn apart in by turbulence in the convection zone. The authors of this paper note there are no sunspots on the surface of the sun that have a magnetic field strength that is less than 1500 gauss. It the trend continues the sun will have no sunspots in around 2017.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1
Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field
strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the
NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope. … …This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25.
We reported in Penn & Livingston (2006) that a time series of this magnetic field data showed a decrease in the umbral magnetic field strength which was independent of the normal sunspot cycle. Also, the measurements revealed a threshold magnetic field strength of about 1500 Gauss, below which no dark pores formed. A linear extrapolation of the magnetic field trend suggested that the mean field strength would reach this threshold 1500 Gauss value in the year 2017.
William: This paper explains two of the mechanisms ion mediated cloud nucleation (changes to the strength and angle of the solar heliosphere modulate GCR. GCR strike the earth’s atmosphere and create ions) and electroscavenging (solar wind creates a space charge differential in the ionosphere which removes cloud forming ions).
http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/pdf/Atmos_060302.pdf
Atmospheric Ionization and Clouds as Links Between Solar Activity
and Climate by Brian A. Tinsley and Fangqun Yu
The ionization at cloud level that determines the rate of electroscavenging and IMN is influenced by space particle fluxes as illustrated in Figure 3.1. These inputs are in the form of GCR; MeV electrons precipitating from the radiation belts with associated X-ray bremsstrahlung; the bulk solar wind plasma with its embedded magnetic fields that determines the horizontal distribution of potential across the polar cap ionospheres; and occasional energetic solar proton events. The latter occur too infrequently to have a significant effect on climate, and are not illustrated. The GCR flux is responsible for almost all of the production of ionization below 15 km altitude, that determines the conductivity in that region. The MeV electrons and their associated X-rays produce ionization in the stratosphere, and affect the conductivity there.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
Sudden climate transitions during the Quaternary
According to the marine records, the Eemian interglacial ended with a rapid cooling event about 110,000 years ago (e.g., Imbrie et al., 1984; Martinson et al., 1987), which also shows up in ice cores and pollen records from across Eurasia. From a relatively high resolution core in the North Atlantic. Adkins et al. (1997) suggested that the final cooling event took less than 400 years, and it might have been much more rapid. … …The event at 8200 ka is the most striking sudden cooling event during the Holocene, giving widespread cool, dry conditions lasting perhaps 200 years before a rapid return to climates warmer and generally moister than the present. This event is clearly detectable in the Greenland ice cores, where the cooling seems to have been about half-way as severe as the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene difference (Alley et al., 1997; Mayewski et al., 1997). No detailed assessment of the speed of change involved seems to have been made within the literature (though it should be possible to make such assessments from the ice core record), but the short duration of these events at least suggests changes that took only a few decades or less to occur.

“Smithy says:
April 29, 2013 at 11:12 pm”
You need to study the coriolis effect a bit more closely, as Pamela quite rightly points out is a factor.

This paper connects the solar magnetic cycle changes to the cyclic warming and cooling in the paleoclimatic record.
http://cio.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/1999/QuatSciRevvGeel/1999QuatSciRevvGeel.pdf
“The role of solar forcing upon climate change”
When solar activity is high, the extended solar magnetic field sweeps through interplanetary space, thereby more effectively shielding the Earth from cosmic rays and reducing the production of 14C. Low solar activity lets more cosmic rays enter the Earth’s atmosphere, producing more 14C. So the 14C record is a good proxy for the solar radiant output (Bard et al., 1997).
However, explaining the observed changes in 14C concentration by production-rate variations alone is too simple an assumption, the more so when rapid 14C concentration changes appear to be coincident with significant changes in climate. … …However, if we observe sudden, major 14C increases like the ones starting at c. 850 cal. BC and at c. 1600 AD (about 20 per mil), it is hard to imagine any change in the global carbon cycle that can bring about such a drastic fast change, simply because there is no reservoir of carbon with higher 14C concentration available anywhere on Earth. Even a sudden stop of the upwelling of old carbon-containing deep water could not cause the sudden (within decades) 14C concentration increases that are documented in the dendrochronological records. So, if we observe that such a sudden 14C increase, which must be caused by a production increase, is accompanied by indications for a change towards colder or wetter climate, this may indicate that solar forcing of the climate does exist. In theory, increased production of cosmogenic isotopes can also have a cause of cosmic origin such as a nearby supernova (Sonnett et al., 1987). We consider this scenario unlikely, and note here that events such as the 850 cal. BC peak are present in the dendrochronological curve with a periodicity of about 2400 years (Stuiver and Braziunas, 1989; see below).
“A number of those Holocene climate cooling phases… most likely of a global nature (eg Magney, 1993; van Geel et al, 1996; Alley et al 1997; Stager & Mayewski, 1997) … the cooling phases seem to be part of a millennial-scale climatic cycle operating independent of the glacial-interglacial cycles (which are) forced (perhaps paced) by orbit variations.”
“… we show here evidence that the variation in solar activity is a cause for the millennial scale climate change.”
Last 40 kyrs
Figure 2 in paper. (From data last 40 kyrs)… “conclude that solar forcing of climate, as indicated by high BE10 values, coincided with cold phases of Dansgaar-Oeschger events as shown in O16 records”
Recent Solar Event
“Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) “…coincides with one of the coldest phases of the Little Ice Age… (van Geel et al 1998b)
Periodicity
“Mayewski et al (1997) showed a 1450 yr periodicity in C14 … from tree rings and …from glaciochemicial series (NaCl & Dust) from the GISP2 ice core … believed to reflect changes in polar atmospheric circulation..”
William:
There is however a missing piece to the mechanism. The geomagnetic field abruptly changes also abruptly changes when there are climate changes. As this paper notes, the geomagnetic field intensity also modulates the amount of galactic cosmic rays (mostly high speed protons) that strike the earth’s surface. (The GCR create heavy electrons MUONs which in turn create ions in the atmosphere. Ions increase the effectiveness of low level cloud formation, effect the lifetime of low level clouds, and effect the albedo of low level clouds in a manner that cools the planet when there are more GCR all else being equal.)
The geomagnetic specialists have in the last 10 years found the geomagnetic field is cyclically and abruptly changing and that the changes correlate with planetary climate change. This change is anomalous as there is no liquid core based mechanism that can change the geomagnetic field as quickly and as often as the record shows it has changed. The observed rapid cyclic geomagnetic field changes are a paradox in that there is no physical explanation for what causes them if the explanation is limited to a liquid core mechanism.
Planetary climate change correlates with these rapid unexplained geomagnetic field changes and as the above paper notes solar magnetic cycle changes correlate with the climate changes, over and over again.
Now what is curious or I guess expected as it appears we are going to experience a Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle or a Heinrich cycle, is the North magnetic field drift velocity suddenly in the mid 1990 increased in velocity from 15 km/year (it has been moving at 10 to 15 km per year for the last 150 years) to 55 km to 60 km years.
It appears the sun is causing first part of the climate change and is causing the abrupt changes to the geomagnetic. If this assertion is correct, something is fundamentally incorrect with the assumption concerning the origin of the solar magnetic cycle and something fundamental related to the sun.
If I understand the mechanisms the planet will cool significantly (Svensmark’s mechanism will start to work again when the North magnetic pole drift velocity starts to slow.)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/16/earths-ionosphere-drops-to-a-new-low/
Boundary Between Earth’s Upper Atmosphere And Space Has Moved To Extraordinarily Low Altitudes, NASA Instruments Document
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010EO510001/pdf
What Caused Recent Acceleration of the North Magnetic Pole Drift?
The north magnetic pole (NMP) is the point at the Earth’s surface where the geomagnetic field is directed vertically downward. It drifts in time as a result of core convection, which sustains the Earth’s main magnetic field through the geodynamo process. During the 1990s the NMP drift speed suddenly increased from 15 kilometers per year at the start of the decade to 55 kilometers per year by the decade’s end. This acceleration was all the more surprising given that the NMP drift speed had remained less than 15 kilometers per year over the previous 150 years of observation…. ….Why did NMP drift accelerate in the 1990s? Answering this question may require revising a long-held assumption about processes in the core at the origin of fluctuations in the intensity and direction of the Earth’s magnetic field on decadal to secular time scales, and hints at the existence of a hidden plume rising within the core under the Arctic.
http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/home/files/Courtillot07EPSL.pdf
Are there connections between the Earth’s magnetic field and climate? Vincent Courtillot, Yves Gallet, Jean-Louis Le Mouël, Frédéric Fluteau, Agnès Genevey
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/BardPapers/responseCourtillotEPSL07.pdf
Response to Comment on “Are there connections between Earth’s magnetic field and climate?, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 253, 328–339, 2007” by Bard, E., and Delaygue, M., Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., in press, 2007
Also, we wish to recall that evidence of a correlation between archeomagnetic jerks and cooling events (in a region extending from the eastern North Atlantic to the Middle East) now covers a period of 5 millenia and involves 10 events (see f.i. Figure 1 of Gallet and Genevey, 2007). The climatic record uses a combination of results from Bond et al (2001), history of Swiss glaciers (Holzhauser et al, 2005) and historical accounts reviewed by Le Roy Ladurie (2004). Recent high-resolution paleomagnetic records (e.g. Snowball and Sandgren, 2004; St-Onge et al., 2003) and global geomagnetic field modeling (Korte and Constable, 2006) support the idea that part of the centennial-scale fluctuations in 14C production may have been influenced by previously unmodeled rapid dipole field variations. In any case, the relationship between climate, the Sun and the geomagnetic field could be more complex than previously imagined. And the previous points allow the possibility for some connection between the geomagnetic field and climate over these time scales.
William: The geomagnetic excursion correlate in time with the Heinrich events which correlate in time with both the termination of the glacial period and the termination of the interglacial period. (The solar magnetic cycle restart can reinforce or attempt to reverse the current state of the geomagnetic field depending on the orbital parameters (depends on whether the Northern or Southern hemisphere is pointing toward the sun at perihelion.) at the time in which the solar magnetic cycle restarts.)
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/416/1/gubbinsd4.pdf
Is the geodynamo process intrinsically unstable?
Recent palaeomagnetic studies suggest that excursions of the geomagnetic field, during which the intensity drops suddenly by a factor of 5 to 10 and the local direction changes dramatically, are more common than previously expected. The `normal’ state of the geomagnetic field, dominated by an axial dipole, seems to be interrupted every 30 to 100 kyr; it may not therefore be as stable as we thought. We have investigated a possible mechanism for the instability of the geodynamo by calculating the critical Rayleigh number (Rc) for the onset of convection in a rotating spherical shell permeated by an imposed magnetic field with both toroidal and poloidal components.

Bruce Cobb

Greg House says:
Might well be the same sort of unscientific crap as “global warming”.
We need to stop believing and start asking for evidence.

The two are in no way comparable. There is plenty of evidence for the sun being the major driver of climate, so it isn’t a question of belief. However, it’s a young science, and certainly much more study is needed. Certainly the oceans play a key role as well. What we do know, however, is that man’s effect on climate pales in comparison. C02 plays a role, but a minor one, as shown by the fact that C02 follows what climate does, not the reverse.

Have to agree with Greg here. One can’t condemn the ‘alarmists’ for jumping onto a few 10ths of a degree change upwards as a sign of impending doom whilst promoting a possible few tenths down as an equally valid sign of impending doom.
The alarmists have 15u EM on their side. On that at least most of us can agree. What The Sun will do next seems to be a ‘stick you finger in the air and place your bet’ kind of prediction. There is no ‘predictive science’ behind those ‘bets’. Sure, somebody will be right but only because everybody in the field has placed a bet on every possible horse in the race. Barring disaster, somebody will look like a winner when the race is over. Hardly Science though is it?
Lonnie E. Schubert

@stas peterson
Fusion as an answer to our energy problems is a pipe dream. ITER is a project that outlived its usefulness a decade ago. It is a political effort. Fusion is 20 years away, as it has been for over 60 years now.

Have to disagree. Are you suggesting that the first time anybody wondered about putting a Human on the Moon was somehow the point at which we should mark the beginning of ‘The Space Race”? We couldn’t do it in the 13thC because we didn’t have the technology.
We have known that Fusion is very real since we detonated the first Hydrogen Bomb. It may well be decades before our technology can deal with the engineering problems. Or not. But that shouldn’t stop us from exploring that particular avenue. I find your attitude even more strange given the subject of the TLP.

In reply to:
Sharpshooter says:
April 30, 2013 at 3:50 am
Quote: “Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger…the best place to start is with a carbon tax. A phased-in carbon tax of $20 to $25 a ton could raise around $1 trillion over 10 years, as we each pay a few more dimes and quarters for every gallon of gasoline…It’s the only way to revive the country and a moribund Republican Party.” NYSlimes columnist Thomas Friedman,
Howdy.
Your comment is off topic for this thread but important to be discussed in the context of ‘climate’ change policy. I feel therefore that I should response as the topic is germane to the climate change fiasco which is a key reason why the EU and the US economies are failing. (There is no free money to spend on green scams and there is an economic cost to spend money on green scams.)
P.S. Please do not response. Let’s discuss this issue in another more appropriate thread.
Best wishes,
William
Thomas Friedman is a blowhard who promotes half baked dot.com like schemes which if implemented will destroy our economy.
A US trillion dollar carbon tax will kill the remaining primary and brown industry (industry that requires power inputs) in the US and send those jobs over to Asia (i.e. US consumers still want and purchase the products that require energy to produce. The change is those products and goods will not be produced in the US.) The US has an intrinsic competitive advantage over Asia and the EU due to lower energy costs. The EPA and Obama administration are trying their very best to negate our low cost energy advantage.
The idiotic ‘climate’ change and ‘green’ scam fiascos have brought the EU to the edge of economic ruin. It is truly astonishing that they have managed to create a ‘climate’ crisis that does not exist and then have legislated policies that will kill all remaining primary industry and brown industry in Europe. In the excitement to jump on the bandwagon basic analysis was not done to work out the carbon impact or the economic impact of those policies. There is a net increase carbon dioxide emissions as the products and goods that were produced/manufactured in the EU countries are now produced/manufactured in Asia and the ‘green’ scams are so inefficient that the net carbon emission from each Kw of energy produced is almost unchanged. The resultant of the EU policy will and is therefore a doubling of energy prices in the EU which are already the highest in the Western world, a net significant in loss of jobs, and an increase in total world carbon dioxide emission.
Lose-lose-lose.
The EU and US crisis is the economy, not warming climate change. It is difficult to imagine what the response would be to cooling climate change. Let’s wait until there is unequivocal observation evidence of cooling to discuss.
The ‘green’ scams are certainly a significant reason why the EU economy is failing. The EU it appears is winning the race to transform their countries into third world countries.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22353726
Unemployment in the eurozone has surged to a fresh record high, while inflation has fallen to a three-year low, boosting expectations that the European Central Bank will cut interest rates.
Unemployment in the 17 countries using the euro hit 12.1% in March, up from February’s 12%, according to official figures from Eurostat.
In total, 19.2m people are now out of work in the region. Greece and Spain recorded the highest unemployment rates in the eurozone, at 27.2% and 26.7% respectively, while Austria, at 4.7%, and Germany, at 5.4%, had the lowest rates. Youth employment, defined as those under 25, hit 3.6 million in the eurozone. In Greece, 59.1% of under-25s were unemployed as of the end of January, while in Spain, 55.9% were unemployed.

Lonnie E. Schubert says April 30, 2013 at 5:32 pm
…
(ECAT comes to mind.) …

Better take a closer look; that one is shipping to select customers …
.

vukcevic:
At May 3, 2013 at 2:50 am you say

In the two latest solar threads there is disconcerting absence of Dr. S.

Yes, I noticed that, too.
He is a valued member of the ‘WUWT community’. Does anybody know if he is OK?
Richard

Greg House says:
April 30, 2013 at 3:48 pm
3×2 says (April 30, 2013 at 9:29 am): “The alarmists have 15u EM on their side. On that at least most of us can agree.”
============================================================
Yeah, “most of us”, the consensus fiction once again.
No, the do not have 15u EM on their side. “Trapped” radiation can nor affect the temperature of the source (the IPCC “greenhouse effect”), this is physically impossible.

Much as I admire your confidence I still see nothing more here than a 50/50 bet. My point was that the alarmists have at least proposed a physical mechanism. All I see here is a bet that, at the end of the current ‘neutrality’, temps will fall. Well I can guarantee one of two outcomes … up or down.