From the GWPF and Dr. Benny Peiser
“Weakest Solar Cycle In Almost 200 Years”
The sun is acting bizarrely and scientists have no idea why. Solar activity is in gradual decline, a change from the norm which in the past triggered a 300-year-long mini ice age. We are supposed to be at a peak of activity, at solar maximum. The current situation, however, is outside the norm and the number of sunspots seems in steady decline. The sun was undergoing “bizarre behaviour” said Dr Craig DeForest of the society. “It is the smallest solar maximum we have seen in 100 years,” said Dr David Hathaway of Nasa. –Dick Ahlstrom, The Irish Times, 12 July 2013
The fall-off in sunspot activity still has the potential to affect our weather for the worse, Dr Elliott said. “It all points to perhaps another little ice age,” he said. “It seems likely we are going to enter a period of very low solar activity and could mean we are in for very cold winters.” And while the researchers in the US said the data showed a decline in activity, they had no way to predict what that might mean for the future. –Dick Ahlstrom, The Irish Times, 12 July 2013
“We’re in a new age of solar physics,” says David Hathaway of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, who analysed the same data and came to the same conclusion. “We don’t know why the Gleissberg cycle takes place but understanding it is now a focus.” As for when the next Maunder minimum may happen, DeToma will not even hazard a guess. “We still do not know how or why the Maunder minimum started, so we cannot predict the next one.” –Stuart Clark, New Scientist, 12 July 2013
Those hoping that the sun could save us from climate change look set for disappointment. The recent lapse in solar activity is not the beginning of a decades-long absence of sunspots – a dip that might have cooled the climate. Instead, it represents a shorter, less pronounced downturn that happens every century or so. –Stuart Clark, New Scientist, 12 July 2013
A number of authors think it is probable that the sun is headed for a grand minimum similar to the Maunder-Minimums of 1649-1715. That may already manifest itself in 2020. There have been studies that attempt to project the impacts on global temperatures. Included here is a study by Meehl et al. 2013. The authors look at an approximately 0.25% reduction in Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) between 2020 and 2070: They fed this into a climate model. Result: global temperatures could drop around 0.2-0.3 degrees Celsius with local peak values of up to 0.8°C, especially in the middle and upper latitudes of the northern hemispheres. –Frank Bosse, NoTricksZone, 14 July 2013
When the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show on the road. Global warming became climate change so as to be able to take the blame for cold spells and wet seasons as well as hot days. Then, to keep its options open, the movement began to talk about “extreme weather”. Those who made their living from alarm, and by then there were lots, switched tactics and began to jump on any unusual weather event, whether it was a storm, a drought, a blizzard or a flood, and blame it on man-made carbon dioxide emissions. –Matt Ridley, The Australian, 10 July 2013
For those of us who don’t usually take much notice of what the Sun is doing (but are interested in where the truth may be) where is there a graph or data regarding sunspots counted by eye/rudimentary telescope only – as was done in days of old? Can someone provide a link – thanks. I assume the count is much more precise now, so are we comparing apples and oranges?
10Be data from Greenland ice cores is highly suspect proxy for solar activity:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET&10Be.htm
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/DM.htm
Tom Jones says:
Good grief, guys, it’s only curve-fitting with no model for the underlying physics. Believe anything you want, but pretending to know is nonsense.
Rhoda R. says:
Tom Jones: Curve fitting maybe, but these people are making predictions – speculation and short term predictions based on theories that they feel better explain what drives climate than does the ‘CO2 is evil’ theory. Good for them.
neilo says:
I’ve a question to all those who doubt that curve-fitting yields no meaningful results (because it doesn’t take into account the underlying physics):
How is it that “curve fitting” applications such Demand Solutions (a software package that analyses at least 18 months of sales figures for any given product) can produce reasonably accurate forecasts – forecasts that are good enough to “bet your business” – and yet the same form of analysis isn’t good enough for solar predictions?
……………………………………………………………………………
Tom Jones has made a dead accurate — and useful — observation (although I didn’t really like “Green, green grass of home”). If there is no understanding of the underlying physics then, for all anyone knows, the observed cyclic phenomenon may simply be a small part of a much larger cycle with variations we have never experienced and cannot predict. Indeed, it may be a linear process with localised cyclic patterns. If we don’t understand the process then we can have no certainty that the observed pattern will be maintained.
Maybe ‘Demand Solutions’ does a good job over two to five years, but do you imagine that its creators would dare to vouch for its accuracy over a century? Yet some of our climatologists fearlessly presume to extrapolate identified short-term trends in phenomena that they clearly do not understand. They create models using large computers and secret algorithims based on pattern analysis, then make long-term, continually modified, predictions that need to be close enough to be lucrative … sorry, alarming … yet far enough in the future to enable them to safely retire before they can be held to account . The consistent failure of these models is ongoing proof of the GIGO theory.
Sir Isaac Newton had no idea how gravity worked, although he did sterling work in describing its behaviour. Newton frankly confessed his ignorance. The modern tendancy to profess great knowledge about poorly understood phenomena smells more strongly of shamanism than science.
LS —
This chart, offered by Svensmark, shows a good correlation between cosmic ray count and low cloud cover:
http://theresilientearth.com/files/images/Cosmic_rays_and_cloud_cover-marsh.jpg
It’s all detailed in his research and summarized in his and Nigel Calder’s book: “The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change”.
Nir Shaviv has a chart going back 500 million years that shows a good inverse correlation between cosmic ray flux and temperature. Low cloud production is the suspected source of this correlation:
http://www.sciencebits.com/files/pictures/ice-ages/fig5.jpg
From Nir Shaviv’s site:
“The cosmic ray link between solar activity and the terrestrial climate. The changing solar activity is responsible for a varying solar wind strength. A stronger wind will reduce the flux of cosmic ray reaching Earth, since a larger amount of energy is lost as they propagate up the solar wind. The cosmic rays themselves come from outside the solar system. Since cosmic rays dominate the troposphere ionization, an increased solar activity will translate into a reduced ionization, and empirically, also to a reduced low altitude cloud cover. Since low altitude clouds have a net cooling effect (their “whiteness” is more important than their “blanket” effect), increased solar activity implies a warmer climate. Intrinsic cosmic ray flux variations will have a similar effect, one however, which is unrelated to solar activity variations.”
GreGG says:
July 16, 2013 at 1:17 am
This chart, offered by Svensmark, shows a good correlation between cosmic ray count and low cloud cover
Is contradicted by the actual data: http://www.leif.org/EOS/swsc120049-Cosmic-Rays.pdf
e.g. Figure 5. “the current satellite cloud datasets do not provide evidence supporting the existence of a solar-cloud link”
Vuk
“but in no way it is indicated as the Maunder type minimum”
Why would it when you have included only two frequencies? There are more.
http://virakkraft.com/SunspotFFT.jpg
The new Maunder is starting now.
If the climate does start cooling there will probably be some Greens working on a theory to explain how human activity influences the sun!
lgl says:
July 16, 2013 at 1:31 am
——————–
Vuk
“but in no way it is indicated as the Maunder type minimum”
——————–
“http://virakkraft.com/SunspotFFT.jpg
The new Maunder is starting now.”
——————–
That well may be, but it is also worth remembering Von Neumann’s with four parameters I can fit an elephant…
The Sun is not acting “bizarre”ly. The Sun’s just doing what the Sun does best. That we are clueless about its behaviour is a completely different matter.
Vuk
You are probably right with adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine (and some framework) you could create an elephant, but you would need an awful lot of different combinations of the four.
In the case of solar frequencies only one combination of frequencies and phases will reproduce the past so why would it change right now?
Heh, I love the ‘so perhaps there is hope’ at the end of Leif’s abstract.
==============
Jimbo says:
July 15, 2013 at 5:52 pm
“What IF we enter another Little Ice Age. What will Warmist climate scientists say? What will they blame? Co2? Cow fart methane? Soot? (see Hansen and Chinese coal despite earlier blaming soot for most of the global warming up to 2000). Rest assured they HAVE TO blame man. If they fail on co2 as the main driver of climate, they will slowly shift gear (thinking no one is looking) and try some other con job. Don’t fall for their crap.”
Statist scientists will always promote a bigger government to fix any problem, and produce theories that, if they were correct, show that bigger government is needed. Then they will start falsifying data to delay the moment that the theory is reconized as false, like the warmist scientists do with past temperature records, or social engineers with their survey data. Or that Parmesan woman with her butterfly population data. It’s a pattern. The primary medium for the promotion of this pretend science is Nature.
So if you want to know what the statists want to achieve next, read Nature.
Good grief, guys, it’s only curve-fitting with no model for the underlying physics. Believe anything you want, but pretending to know is nonsense.
Well said, sir. Took the words right out of my mouth. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Correlation is not causality. Numerology is not science.
The human brain, however, struggles with strongly nonlinear chaotic systems. It insists on oracles, on prophets, on a linearized mythology that provides for it the illusion of knowledge and control. The hardest words (apparently) for any person engaged in this entire debate, on either side, to utter appear to be:
I don’t know!
Models ain’t got no skill, disagree with themselves, disagree with each other, and disagree with the actual climate in details great and small. The problem is the most difficult one ever tackled by humanity, with critical physics input from the magnetohydrodynamics of the barely understood Sun, the fairly well known orbital parameters of the Earth, two intimately coupled hydrodynamic systems hovering around temperatures where latent heat of evaporation and fusion (of water) dominate over mere heat capacity, with a fundamental heating and cooling mechanism that involves full-spectrum radiative coupling to pretty much everything from the penetration depth of the surface (including the oceans) to the top of the atmosphere as well as macroscopic phenomena associated with clouds, ice, desert sands, and vegetation, all set on a spinning, tilted ball with a bizarre pattern of continents and mountains shaping both atmospheric and oceanic flow that is changing sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, pelted with meteors great and small, and punctuated by outflows of molten rock, gas, and ash that periodically belch enormous quantities of “stuff” into the atmosphere at arbitrary locations on its surface.
Here, look, I’ll help everybody out. I’ll be the Oracle that we all so desperately need. Oh Great Oracle, will the future climate get warmer or cooler over the next 87 years?
(The Oracle pauses, takes a deep swig from his large, foamy, drinking horn, takes a deep hit from the mysterious smoke swirling up out of curious devices laid out at his feet, belches a mix of carbon dioxide and smoke and replies)
Yes!
[This is the one certainty of climate science. The climate over the entire range of our ability to infer it via proxies great and small is never precisely stationary, fluctuating over a range of at least degrees K on a century plus timescale. So I am dead serious. It is very unlikely that the global average temperature in 2100 — whatever that particular measure “means” — will be exactly what it is today. It could be a degree warmer. It could be a degree cooler. It could be a degree warmer or cooler entirely independent of what CO_2 does in the meantime, especially if one confines one’s attention to just, say, the northern hemisphere.
Now ask me if I want to bet on which one. ]
rgb
SVAALGUARD
You say that the sunspot number may drop to levels not seen since the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) when we had extended periods of zero sunspots. You also say that “We do know something about what cooling to expect from a Maunder Minimum and that it rather small,”. The average CET winter temperature during part of the Maunder Minimum that we have temperature records for ,namely 1659-1715, was 3.2C. The average CET winter temperature today is about 4.2 C. It was 3.1 C in 2011. However during the Maunder Minimum , about 40% of the time they had much colder winters with an average winter temperature of 1.7 C. This is colder than 2010 which had 2.4 C and more like 1979 which had 1.7C This is in the range of the 70 th coldest winters in terms of ranking A similar period of very low or zero sunspots was around 1810. The winter of 1814 was the second coldest winter since 1659. UK has recently broken 4 major cold records, one of which goes back to that period, like December 2010 which was the 2nd coldest winter since record keeping started in 1659. Personally I don’t think the past coolings during zero sunspots were ‘rather small’ I think we do know that it will cool but I agree with you that we do not know how much it will cool because of different conditions to day . See the CET record below.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-curious-case-of-rising-co2-and-falling-temperatures/
gopal panicker says:
July 15, 2013 at 7:33 pm
the difference in solar insolation between a normal maximum and minimum in the sunspot cycle is only 0.5%
Only about 0.1% [five times smaller]. But you are correct about the much larger effect due to the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit. However, that effect is strictly cyclic and averages out to the same every year.
Its future expectation averages out to be the same, or nearly so (it too is modulated by very slow orbital change mechanisms) but at the same time one is effectively driving a chaotic system with a periodic/annual hammer compared to the decadal feather of solar cycle variation. It is therefore a capital (but common) mistake to assume that one can linearize it out and ignore it merely because — on a featureless, spinning, grey ball — it would be “the same every year”.
All it would take is a small systematic lag or lead of e.g. cloud albedo heterodyning with the 90 W/m^2 orbital insolation variation due to eccentricity to produce a mechanism for long term, systematic gain or loss. And since we do not understand and cannot predict factors/features in the decadal oscillations, in particular ENSO, that very likely set up the scale for lagged or leading systematic co-variation (and even if we could, there are likely other neglected nonlinear couplings we cannot predict or anticipate of equal magnitude and long term effect) we most definitely cannot dismiss orbital eccentricity as a major driver of the meso-scale climate by mentally “averaging” it on an annual basis and asserting that it is therefore a null contributor.
I actually think that orbital eccentricity is very likely the ignored elephant in the room. As you note, TSI variation from solar variation itself is quite small (although the same issues of lead/lag and coupling with albedo or circulation phases applies). The variation in CO_2 forcing is modest — if the theories predicting the variation are correct in the first place (they involve moderately controversial questions as to just what happens at the wings of the absorptive bands and whether or not it is net warming or cooling and if so (either way) by how much, dogma being net warming but there is damn-all observational evidence in the climate system itself for this AFAIK. In fact, all other sources of TSI variation put together are modest compared to the annual variation in TSI from orbital eccentricity — two orders of magnitude modest.
The nonlinearity of the effect of this variation on the climate (in interaction with the spinning, ocean laden, cloud covered ball etc) is illustrated by the fact that if anything global temperatures countervary with this 45 W/m^2 annual “anomaly” around the mean. I suspect that truly understanding this — which is really a rather remarkable thing, if you think about it — is the key to beginning to understand the climate for real. And I don’t mean an heuristic explanation — I mean a quantitative explanation. I try to think of driven anharmonic oscillator models that countervary with their second most important driver (primary is diurnal, and obviously temperatures DO vary on a lagged diurnal scale so there is no phase inversion there) and come up blank, although I’m sure that with the right nonlinearity and driving it is possible. But it is certainly a puzzle that I never hear discussed or acknowledged.
rgb
I think I’ve never heard so loud
The quiet message in a cloud.
And wouldn’t it be very nice
If it’s always been about the ice?
=====================
herkimer says:
July 16, 2013 at 5:33 am
“We do know something about what cooling to expect from a Maunder Minimum and that it rather small”…The average CET winter temperature during part of the Maunder Minimum that we have temperature records for, namely 1659-1715, was 3.2C. The average CET winter temperature today is about 4.2 C.
So you have discovered global warming…
The temperature difference between solar max and solar min is about 0.1C. So if we were constantly at a solar minimum [during a Maunder Minimum] the global temperature is thus expected to be 0.1C lower [this is a rather small effect, I would say]. If the temperature difference is larger, then that only shows that other factors than the Sun is at play.
RGB and Leif
You don’t have to ” understand” the system to make perfectly good and useful forecasts. (See my earlier comment above) The modellers and those with a physics or maths background are approaching the problem backwards.
You don’t need to know what the drivers are initially. Start with the low frequency Milankovitch events .Then look for progressively shorter frequency quasi – periodicities in the temperature data itself a la Scaffetta. This will carry you a good way and point to the principal components in the driving mechanisms. for further investigation. For a more detailed discussion check my blogpost at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-state-of-climate-wars-june-2013.html
Maybe magnetic field line re-connection is part of the answer. The frequency of the these re-connections is associated with heat.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130715164909.htm
Roy Jones says:
July 15, 2013 at 2:17 pm
“When the changes in the sun’s output make the earth cooler the greenhouse gas theory/dogma means that we can counter the cooling by increasing CO2 emissions; so to save the earth we need to abolish taxes on fuel and energy.
I’m tempted to join the consensus, or have I missed something.”
You obviously aren’t a politician, nor have you learned to think like one. They will be more likely to spend billions of tax dollars (and force electric utilities to spend billions more) sequestering CO2 deep in the earth, and then will raise taxes even more so that they can build additional infrastructure that feeds the sequestered CO2 back into the atmosphere.
It will never occur to them to just let the utilities inject the CO2 directly, and it will certainly never occur to them that they should abolish a tax of any kind, much less a tax on energy.
In fact, if global cooling becomes apparent, the same sort of hype will occur, resulting in government-mandated global cooling policies that are as costly as the government-mandated global warming policies. Furthermore, both policies will then be implemented simultaneously, a politician’s dream. Then they can feed additional dollars to whichever side is squealing the loudest at any particular moment in time. The last option they would ever consider is cutting dollars from either side, for that is where the campaign contributions lie. This “ideal” situation would actually double the number of contributions they can generate.
Dr Norman Page says:
July 16, 2013 at 7:00 am
point to the principal components in the driving mechanisms for further investigation.
‘Further investigation’ is always nice, but curve fitting to not-understood cycles has no real predictive power.
Leif
I’m confident that it has more predictive power than the IPCC and Met office models on which the whole AGW scare and Western government policies are based.
Dr Norman Page says:
July 16, 2013 at 7:31 am
I’m confident
“The easiest one to fool is yourself”
With the coming cooling will be the Carbon Cultists’ last gasp, called Manmade Global Weather Change. And the changes will, no doubt be rather severe. The problem for them will be explaining just how “carbon” morphs from warming the climate to causing longer, colder and snowier Winters, cooler, wetter Springs, and shorter Summers. Oh wait, they won’t. They’ll just concentrate on the “weird” weather.
hahahaha! ok then. . .
I will be more clear so that you can understand it.
the little ice age ended abruptly just during the minimum of solar cycle 13 according to this handy WUWT graphic:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/image62.png
If, as you all seem to think, the extreme several hundred year little ice age was caused by solar activity, why did the little ice age end several decades before the sung reverted to its more recent values?
and what has happened since then that makes you think we will be going back into little ice age territory, given that this is our current state (please compare with WUWT graphic above)
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land/13/1880-2013?trend=true&trend_base=10&begtrendyear=1905&endtrendyear=2012
and really, what is the difference when we are talking about an average incidenct incoming solar radiation level that is varying by less than half a watt (on average) between the lower activity levels and todays values. Note: this is on AVERAGE over a period of 30 years, not comparing minimums to maximums or some other such b.s.
Here is what the recent values look like (maximum)
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20030320/sun4m.jpg
as you can see the average (1990s) TSI value is approximately 1366.45 W/m^2
(ACRIM Composite)
and the most recent cycle which has an average trough to peak value of 1365.8 W/m^2
http://www.pmodwrc.ch/tsi/composite/pics/comp06_d41_62_1302.png
which gives you a TOTAL variation of .0475% or .000475
and THAT is going to make us go from today to another little ice age???
Forget the fact that scientific studies have already proven that the incoming Infra Red (yes, the stuff that provides about 50% of the sun’s total warming energy) does not have a measurable derease in incoming intensity (rather it is simply a magnetic field effect)
http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2009/27/aa12318-09/aa12318-09.html
“This correlation allows an unambiguous reconstruction of TSI back in time, provided the open solar magnetic field can be determined from e.g. geomagnetic indices or cosmogenic radionucleides. Since the solar UV irradiance has no long-term trend, the mechanism for the secular change of TSI must differ from the effect of surface magnetism, as manifested by sunspots, faculae, and network which indeed explain well the intra-cycle variability of both total and spectral irradiance.”