Guest essay by David Archibald
Wiggle-matching has been used by the best. Hubert Lamb, considered to be the most meticulous climatologist of all time, used wiggle-matching in this wind data graph he published in 1988:
He had plotted up 600 years of wind data at London, noted a 200 year periodicity and copied the line 200 years to the right to make a forecast.
One of the puzzles of the last 300 years of climate is the temperature drop of 1740. It came out of the blue after a number of warm years in the 1730s. There is nothing in the Be10 record or the volcanic record to suggest a cause.
It came a couple of years after the peak of a fairly strong solar cycle. The event of 1740 attracted the attention of Briffa and Jones in their 2006 paper “Unusual Climate in Northwest Europe During the Period 1730 to 1745 Based on Instrumental and Documentary Data”. From the abstract of that paper,” This study focuses on one of the most interesting times of the early instrumental period in northwest Europe (from 1730–1745) attempting to place the extremely cold year of 1740 and the unusual warmth of the 1730s decade in a longer context.” The only conclusion that they came to was climate might vary more than is commonly accepted.
So what does that period up to 1740 wiggle-match with? It matches with the warmth of the last 30 years:
The graph above shows the Central England Temperature (CET) record from 1703 to 1745 as the blue line. Plotted on it is the CET record from 1978 to 2012. Normally when you align 34 year lengths of temperature records you don’t get any correlation. The correlation on this particular matchup is 0.112. The statisticians amongst us can argue over whether or not anything can be read into that. If something can be read into it, we only have to wait two years to experience the consequences. The spike down is also prominent in the de Bilt record:
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I’ve been having an intuition for the past year or two that a sharp global temperature drop is coming. This is basically because I think the Pranksters on Olympus are in charge of world events; that their main motive is to provide endless demonstrations of “what fools these mortals be” by whacking hubristic know-it-alls with cosmic custard pies; and that climatologers have painted big bullseyes on themselves.
I like the intuition, because it would put a big arrow in the alarmist elephant and bring it to its kness, never to rampage again, even if temperatures were eventually to recover most of the way from the dip (as they did after 1740). A big dip would show that the percentage of variation that occurs naturally is much higher than the models assume. It would dramatically violate the 95% certainty band of the IPCC’s forecasts for upcoming years in a dramatic way—and, by extension, turn the implication of the 97%-consensus claim from a validation of cli-fi (“they can’t all be wrong”) to an indictment of it (“they’re all full of it—the whole field is pseudoscience”). And it would also greatly unsettle “the science” and the supposed certainty the alarmists have that there are no unknown unknowns. Once the alarmist narrative has been thrown off-stride and flustered, it will lose its political and social momentum. (If they play the ocean acidification card, the world’s reaction will be, “fool me once . . .”)
This chart of the CET’s 1740 dip-event shows the sort of dip that would match my outlandish intuition. I think that, even if the mathematical correlation is poor, the “set up” (to use a stock traders’ term about how “the stars are lining up”) looks good, by eyeball. Here’s how I figure it:
The eighteenth century line shows nine peaks before the crash in 1740. There are seven peaks in the modern-period line up to the present. There is only one outright clash in the lines: in 1712-13, when there was a peak, but where the modern period’s line dips. There is a less-than perfect match-up for the years 1728-38, where there are three peaks and two dips (in a warming trend), vs. the modern period’s long warm plateau. Another imperfect match is the modern period’s more severe dip in “1738.” Other than that, my eyeball is impressed with the startling general correlation of the rips and dips.
So I suspect the Pranksters are giving us a heads-up that 2014 & 2015 will be very chilly. (If Intrade were still in business, I could get long odds if I bet that way. UK residents can probably get such odds via bookmakers like William Hill.)
Some anecdotal evidence that agrees with the idea that 1740 was unusually cold in the British Isles is that in 1742, a Dublin landlord, John Mapas, commissioned the construction of a large obelisk at the top of Killiney Hill – an expensive suburb of Dublin in Ireland, with spectacular views of Dublin Bay. The motivation he gave was to provide employment for many of the poor people who had been badly affected by the famine brought about by the unusually harsh winter of 1740/1741. This is the pre-potato famine that David Archibald refers to in this post. Ireland also suffered unusually harsh winters in 2009/2010 and 2010/2011…
If any of you have ever visited Dublin, you will probably have seen the obelisk. It’s visible from most places along the coast-line that are south of the city.
Two years to a 1740-type event?
Not quite, it’s 3.5yrs to a 1838 event, aka Murphy’s Winter, with a very long and cold spring in 2016 coming too. The best analogue of 1740 is 1919, with the cold shots starting January and May 1740, having heliocentric analogues 179yrs and ~1 month later, from February and June 1919: http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/tcet.dat
In five years of forecasting for temperature deviations from average in the UK, I don’t see much lag between a particular heliocentric configuration, changes in solar metrics, changes in Arctic pressure and hence jet stream position, and the resulting change in temperature and weather type for the UK. A week at the most unless there’s a very persistent block.
rogerknights says:
June 19, 2013 at 3:43 am
Another way of looking at the 1740 dip is that the chaotic climate system was dropping toward the ice age attractor but for some reason did not escape the ‘Holocene interglacial attractor’. If we have another such event perhaps with a slightly different set of variables, the climate system may escape the Holocene interglacial attractor and be captured by the ice age attractor,
@Stephen Fisher Wilde and @J’ai
The effect of a zonal/meridonal jetstream over the UK was seen last year with continual rains and poor weather and harvest problems. Although the rain has not been as continual the UK is still having poor weather and harvest problems. This we can attribute to a blocking / omega high around Greenland. Now in history we cannot go back to look for anticyclones over Greenland what we can do is look for reports of extended poor weather and harvest problems that shows the existence of a blocking high and stationary Rossby waves in the jetstream. The poor weather and continual rain is normal when the climate changes from warm to cold. It happened just the same way at the end of the Medieval Warm Period as the climate moved into the Little Ice Age. From the book “The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization” By Brian M. Fagan –
“Seven weeks after Easter in A.D. 1315, sheets of rain spread across a sodden Europe, turning freshly plowed fields into lakes and quagmires. The deluge continued through June and July, and then August and September. Hay lay flat in the fields; wheat and barley rotted unharvested. The anonymous author of the Chronicle of Malmesbury wondered if divine vengeance had come upon the land: “Therefore is the anger of the Lord kindled against his people, and he hath stretched out his hand against them, and hath smitten them.” Most close-knit farming communities endured the shortages of 1315 and hoped for a better harvest the following year. But heavy spring rains in 1316 prevented proper sowing. Intense gales battered the English Channel and North Sea; flocks and herds withered, crops failed, prices rose, and people again contemplated the wrath of God. By the time the barrage of rains subsided in 1321, over a million-and-a-half people, villagers and city folk alike, had perished from hunger and famine-related epidemics. Giles de Muisit, abbot of Saint-Martin de Tournai in modern-day Belgium, wrote, “Men and women from among the powerful, the middling, and the lowly, old and young, rich and poor, perished daily in such numbers that the air was fetid with the stench.” People everywhere despaired. Guilds and religious orders moved through the streets, the people naked, carrying the bodies of saints and other sacred relics. After generations of good, they believed that divine retribution had come to punish a Europe divided by war and petty strife.”
This was ‘The Great Famine’ of the 1300’s
Of course then the majority of people were Christian so they believed that they had angered God, Nowadays the majority religion is Warmist, so the belief is that we have angered Gaia by our CO2 emissions.
No doubt an extended cold snap would somehow be blamed on CO2 and CAGW.
It would be no less credible than the current fear-mongery.
The Daily Telegraph report on the UK Met Office meeting yesterday included this gem attributed to the happily named Prof. Belcher:-
“We do not know how much is down to natural cycles and how much is down to climate change.”
The inference, for the great unwashed, is that climate change is not natural.
Jai,
Blocking highs occur all the time…everywhere. They form almost unpredictably (at least can’t be predicted more than a couple weeks in advance) and they eventually disappear and/or move almost unpredictably. You can watch any global pressure weather map and see them all over the globe. They last from weeks to a couple of years and vary in ‘intensity’ over a wide range.
When they stick around for several months, they might make the news as colder than normal weather in one location or warmer than normal weather at another. Recently, some persistent ones have caused the current cold weather in northern Europe and some heat waves in central Europe and Siberia. When they happen over the 75% of the planet occupied by water they don’t show up in the weather news…despite how severe or persistent they may be.
Jai, blocking highs are normal and have always occurred. The ‘news’ is recently making them appear as climate related disasters which they not. They are merely perturbations in the random weather patterns that have always taken place. I know of no studies that have made them worse over the last 100 years versus the previous 10,000 years.
So go long Wheat and gas stocks?
GlynnMhor says:
June 19, 2013 at 5:09 am
No doubt an extended cold snap would somehow be blamed on CO2 and CAGW.
It would be no less credible than the current fear-mongery.
It already has! 😀
The year 1740 may have been a global or Northern Hemisphere wide cold event.
CLIMATE4YOU web page has these bits of news about a very severe winter in the US MASSACHUSETTS back in 1740/1741[ and again 1747/1748. (Perley 2001).]
Not only was the winter 1740-1741 characterised by very low temperatures, but also by huge amounts of snow. People in the region saw this winter as the most severe since the European settlement began. There was 23 snow storms in all, most of them being strong. On 3 February about a foot of snow fell, and about one week later there were two more storms, filling the roads in Newbury, Massachusetts, up to the top of fences. Snow depths of about 3 metres were reported from some places.
If the temp. drops in 2015, you can be sure that global warming will cause it and not the sun. 😉
herkimer says:
June 19, 2013 at 6:15 am
The winter of 1740 rates its one entry in the climate history of New England:
http://www.colonialsense.com/Society-Lifestyle/Signs_of_the_Times/New_England_Weather/1740-1_Winter.php
Silly denialists… it was the faulty smog controls on the 1739 SUVs….
Greg Goodman (June 19, 2013 at 3:08 am) wrote:
“I’m still trying to understand why CO2 at Mauna Loa seems so closely linked to AO.”
Interannual variations of all indices are coupled globally.
David
It looks to me that this 1740 cold spike year was perhaps the typical temperature drop that happens around and after an El Nino event. If the El Nino event was a major one , which the reconstructed PDO records actually show for about that time , then the temperture drop can also be significant . El Nino events also set up negative AO conditions which allow extra amount of cold Arctic air to come further south.It looks like this could also be the trough of a 60 year climate cycle . If you measure back 60 year intervals from1970 , you end up at about 1740. We are heading into the trough of a 60 year climate cycle currently , the bottom of which may be a decade or two away yet.
Figures 8 & 10 here:
http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/SPARC/SPARC2000_new/PosterSess3/Session3_3/Georgieva/doklad.htm
“Ronan says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:03 am”
I lived in southern Ireland, Waterford, in very very “wet” weather conditions between 1977 – 1981. Not sure how that relates to the potato blight, but “damp weather”, was a factor in history teachings back then if I recall correctly.
Is there a download link to the London wind data?
Year 2000 was the Peak of Solar output for a while. The surface of the core of the Sun will now need to “recharge” its Hydrogen before the Sun’s output will increase. The center of the core of the Sun in not where fusion takes place; it is where the waste products from Hydrogen burning fall. Note that every Sun sequence ends with Iron in the core: not Hydrogen. We are a long way from an Iron Core, but we are in a natural 350 to 400 year cycle of Hydrogen burning then replenishment. This cycle appear to behave like a “sawtooth”. A gradual rise to the peak, then a sudden drop: repeat.
Watch the Gulf of Mexico to see the averaged effects of the reduced Solar output. As the Gulf of Mexico cools, the Gulf Stream will cool and slow, therefore, England and Europe will not get Atlantic Ocean heat. The result will be a frozen England and Europe.
England is located ~at 55N Lat. This is where Hudson Bay, Canada, is located in North America. Trust me, there are only two temperatures there: cold and colder, winter and deep winter.
David
You could be right that we will have a colder winter by 2015. Here is how I see it however.
The minimums of the longer solar cycles are deeper and more severe or colder than the short ones. There are 50- 60 and 110-120 years and even longer climate cycles that emerge from sun/ocean interface. The 50- 60 year climate cycle which seems to be oceans driven and consist of alternating 30 years cooler weather and 30 years of warmer weather. We just came out of the 30 year warm cycle and are now heading into 30 years of colder weather. The 110-120 climate cycles which seem to correlate with periods of low solar sunspot activity last troughed around 1890, 1780, 1670 and 1560.These periods can be clearly seen in the CET graphs of Tony Brown and the WUWT web page Significant cooling followed these dates in the past. We are now entering the start of the trough period of this longer 110-120 year climate cycle which tends to be colder than the typical 30 year cool cycle trough. The current decade is also about 200 years since the Dalton Minimum or the end of the 200 year solar cycle which again tends to be deeper and colder than the 60 year or 100-120 year minimums , Thus the winters MAY be getting progressively colder for the next several decades. The 2013/2014 winter MAY be colder than the last winter and the subsequent winter 2014/2015 may be colder still. The winters MAY stay cold for the next several decades.
gymnosperm says: June 18, 2013 at 11:08 pm “Jai, To the best of my understanding melting ice would release enthalpy of fusion, warming the ocean”
When I put an ice cube into my glass of water, I expect it to cool the water.
I don’t think it looks like a dragon at all. It looks more like a bunny rabbit.
Patrick says:
June 19, 2013 at 7:22 am
I lived in southern Ireland, Waterford, in very very “wet” weather conditions between 1977 – 1981. Not sure how that relates to the potato blight, but “damp weather”, was a factor in history teachings back then if I recall correctly.
In general, Ireland is wet, so I’m not surprised! We’re right on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, and so get a lot of rain.
But, you’re right about the (more infamous) 1840s potato famines being mainly due to particularly “damp weather” causing potato blight. Potato blight doesn’t seem to have reached Europe until the 19th century, however. Instead, the 1740-41 famine seems to have been mostly cold-related, rather than rain-related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Famine_(1740-41)
Indeed, one of the pleasant aspects of the 2009/10 and 2010/11 cold winters was that it was actually much drier – just a lot colder than we’re used to. Plus, we don’t usually get much snow, so it was quite pretty.