Guest essay by David Archibald
There is now consensus that the Sun has now entered a quiet period. The first paper from the solar physics community predicting the current quiet period was Schatten and Tobiska’s 2003 paper “Solar Activity Heading for a Maunder Minimum?”. To date, Solar Cycle 24 has shown similar maximum SSN amplitudes to that of Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum:
Figure 1: Solar Cycle 24 relative to the Dalton Minimum
But what comes beyond that? Predicting the amplitude of Solar Cycle 24 was big business in the solar physics community with a total of 75 forecasts. There is only one forecast of the amplitude of Solar Cycle 25 to date. That forecast is Livingstone and Penn’s prediction of a maximum amplitude of seven. The first forecast, by Libby and Pandolfi, of the current quiet period is now over 40 years old. The fact that Libby and Pandolfi’s prediction got the detail of temperature changes to date right gives great credibility to it. Written in 1979, they forecast a warming trend for the rest of the 20th century followed by a cold snap that might well last throughout the first half of the 21st century. Specifically, Dr Libby is quoted by the Los Angeles Times as saying,
“we see a warming trend (by about a quarter of 1 degree Fahrenheit) globally to around the year 2000. And then it will get really cold – if we believe our projections. This has to be tested.” How cold? “Easily one or two degrees,” she replied, “and maybe even three or four degrees.”
The Libby and Pandolfi forecast was based on isotope ratios in tree rings and dates from a time before the corruption of tree ring science.
One commercial consequence of lower solar activity is that satellites will last longer in their orbits. Another is that agricultural production in the mid-latitudes will be affected. One of the most productive agricultural regions on the planet is the Corn Belt of the United States. Modern corn hybrids are tuned around maximizing the yield from the growing conditions experienced in the Corn Belt over the last 30 years with Growing Degree Days (GDD) to maturity ranging from 2200 to 2700. GDD is calculated from the day of planting by adding the maximum and minimum daily temperature in Fahrenheit, dividing by two and then subtracting 50 to produce the result. If the overnight minimum is less than 50°F, 50°F is used. The maximum is capped at 86°F as corn plants don’t grow any faster above that temperature. Daily temperature records for the Corn Belt start about 1900. The following graph shows the accumulation of GDDs for the periods 1901 – 1910 and 2001 – 2010 for Whitestown just northeast of Indianapolis in the southeast end of the Corn Belt:
Figure 2: Cumulative GDD for Whitestown, Indiana 1901 – 1910 and 2001 – 2010
The graph assumes a common planting date of 27th April. The blue lines are the years 1901 – 1910 and the red lines are the years 2001 – 2010. They all stop on the date of first frost. Most of the growing seasons last decade had plenty of heat to get to maturity with up to 1,000 GDD in excess of the requirement at 2,500 GDD. A century before, the margin of safety was far less. Normal first frost for Whitestown is 10th October. A century ago the earliest frost was five weeks before that on 3rd September, 1908. Similarly, in the latter period the earliest date to get to 2,500 GDD was 15th August. In the earlier period the last date to get to 2,500 GDD was almost six weeks later at 28th September.
Farmers can adjust the type of crop they grow to suit their climatic expectations. Yield is directly proportional to GDD though as shown by the following graphic of corn and soybeans:
Figure 3: Yield relative to GDD (CHU) for Corn and Soybeans Source: Andy Bootsma, 2002: Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Eastern Canada
If a farmer plants a 2,200 GDD corn crop in the expectation of a cool or short season and the season turns out to have been capable of growing a 2,500 GDD, then he has foregone about 12% of the value of the later maturing variety. If he plants a 2,500 GDD variety and the season falls short though, most of the value of the crop will be lost. Wheat and barley require about 1,600 GDD and 1,400 GDD respectively. The highest wheat yield in Indiana in 2012 was 74 bushels/acre whereas the highest corn yield was 159 bushels/acre. Another factor in predicting grain output is the ability to switch to winter wheat in which a crop is planted in early September, germinates and then lies dormant under the snow blanket until the following spring.
A study in the 1980s of the effect of lower temperatures on Canadian wheat production found that a 1°C decrease would reduce the frost-free period by 15 days and that a 2°C decrease would not allow the crop to ripen before the first frost. Canadian wheat farmers have assured me though that they could switch to winter wheat and have a higher yield. In Manitoba, for example, the yield might be 71 bushels per acre for winter wheat compared to 51 bushels per acre for spring wheat. Growing winter wheat is riskier than spring wheat in that a hard frost before the first snow could kill the crop.
A further complication in trying to determine what the coming decline in temperature will do to grain production is that the area of the Corn Belt approximates to the region that was scraped flat by the Laurentide ice sheet. After the Wisconsin Glacier receded, the glaciated soils of the Midwest that are primarily north of Interstate 70 were covered with several feet of wind-blown loess deposits that came from the Great Plains that lie east of the Rockies. In Northern Illinois for example, in an area north of I-80, six to eight feet of loess deposits overlie glacier till. These soils are all primarily silt loam, silty clay loam, clay loam and clay. The water holding capacity of these soils are about 2 inches per foot. The counties in the Corn Belt with the highest productivity have deep fertile soils. Most of these soils were covered with prairie grass that over time raised the organic matter levels to between 2% and 5%. The resulting biological activity that developed in these soils made them very productive. These counties are also watered by natural rainfall that results from the Gulf of Mexico Pump. As the weather fronts move from west to east across the Rockies, we have the Great Plains that are mostly arid, but by the time the fronts reach eastern Nebraska, the moisture from the Gulf of Mexico is sucked north by the counter-clockwise flow of air that rotates around the low pressure fronts and drops the rain on the Midwest when it hits the cooler air from the north. Therefore the Corn Belt has the optimum combination of soil type, temperature and moisture. As growing conditions shift south, the soil types won’t be as good.
Friis-Christianson and Lassen theory enables us to predict temperature for a solar cycle if we know the length of the solar cycle preceding it. Thus Solheim et al have been able to predict that the average global temperature over Solar Cycle 24 will be 0.9°C lower than it was over Solar Cycle 23. Polar amplification also plays a part such that Svalbard, for example, in winter will experience a 6°C decline in temperature. Work on temperature records in the northeast United States suggest that the temperature decline in prospect for the Corn Belt is 2.0°C for Solar Cycle 24.
We can cross-check this expectation against modelled historic Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) data. Lean et al produced a reconstruction of TSI back to 1610. That is shown in Figure 4 following. Also shown is Livingstone and Penn’s prediction for Solar Cycle 25 amplitude converted to TSI by scaling against the Maunder Minimum. Shaviv in 2008 found empirically that a 1 watt/m2 change in TSI was associated with (as opposed to cause directly) in a 0.6°C change in global average temperature. A fall in solar activity to levels reached in the Dalton Minimum, as per Lean’s data, would result in a decline of global temperature of 1.2°C, a little more than what Solheim’s group is projecting. Solar Cycle 4, the cycle preceding the Dalton Minimum, was 13.6 years long, about a year longer than Solar Cycle 23. Libby and Pandolfi’s prediction of a temperature decline of up to 4°F translates to 2.2°C. Through TSI, this would require a fall of 3.7 watts/m2 which is greater than the range in Lean’s modelled data for the period since 1610. This may mean that Libby and Pandolfi are correct and Lean’s model needs adjusting.
Figure 4: Projecting the decline in Total Solar Irradiance
Working through the effect on GDDs, a return to TSI conditions of the Dalton Minimum can be expected to reduce US corn production by perhaps 20% to 25%. This equates to the increase in corn production over the last ten years from mandated ethanol. US grain and soybean production of about 500 million tonnes per annum is sufficient to feed 1.2 billion vegetarians. The amine profile of wheat can be approximated by a diet of 70% corn and 30% soybeans, otherwise those things are fed to animals at about a 25% protein conversion efficiency. Corn and soybeans would be the diet of involuntary vegetarianism. The rest of the world does not have the luxury of US agriculture’s latent productivity.
Figure 5: US Corn and Wheat Prices 1784 to 2013
Figure 5 shows the effect of the low temperatures of the Dalton Minimum on corn and wheat prices in the United States. The absolute peak was associated with the eruption of Mt Tambora. Also evident is the period of high and volatile prices associated with the cold temperatures of the mid-19th century.
Figure 6: Major wheat exporting countries
A return to the climatic conditions of the Dalton Minimum is likely to take Russia, Kazakhstan and the European Union out of the export market. The other countries will have some reduction in wheat available for export. Colder is also drier and thus a number of major grain producers such as India and China, currently largely self-sufficient, will experience shortfalls from their requirements.
Figure 6: Imports and exports of grain by continent
Figure 6 above shows net exports of grain by continent with the Arab countries as a separate region. Those countries are the biggest grain importing block on the planet. Soybeans are not included in this graphic. China has become the major soybean importer at 60 million tonnes per annum. In terms of protein content, that equates to about 180 million tonnes of wheat per annum. The Chinese convert those soybeans to animal protein in the form of pig meat.
Countries in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region have been in the news recently. Further detail on their import dependency is shown in Figure 6 following.
Figure 6: MENA region domestic and imported grain by country
In Figure 6, the population size of each country is shown by the size of the bar. The blue component of the bar shows how much of each country’s grain requirement is grown domestically and the red component denotes the imported share. Countries are shown from west to east as per the map. A proportion of the Egyptian population already suffers from malnutrition. A current wheat prices, it costs about $1 per day to keep someone fed in terms of bulk grain. The oil exporting countries in the graphic can afford to feed their populations, with some countries feeding others as well. Saudi Arabia has been keeping Yemen above water and more recently took on Egypt too.
Figure 7: An animal model of population growth and collapse
All the countries of the MENA region have seen their populations grow to well in excess of their inherent carrying capacity. A combination of deteriorating climate and ongoing world population growth can be reasonably expected to cause a spike in grain prices to levels last seen in the 19th century. It is also possible that sufficient grain may not be available at any price in some regions. Populations models from the animal kingdom provide some guidance as to how events might unfold. A good example is the snowshoe hare and lynx of North America. The snowshoe hare population collapses to less than 10% of its peak on a roughly ten year cycle, followed by the lynx. Taking the example of Egypt, the current population is twice the level that can be supported by its grain production. If the food supply to that country falls below the minimum required to maintain public order, then the distribution system for diesel and fertiliser will break down and domestic grain production would also be affected.
The starving populations of Egyptian cities will fan out into the countryside and consume whatever they can chew which will include the seed grain. That will ensure that domestic grain production will collapse. The population of Egypt might fall to 10% of its carrying capacity which would be 5% of its current level. Any starvation in the MENA region is likely to trigger panic buying by other governments in the region and beyond with consequent effects on established trade patterns.
UPDATE:
The Excel spreadsheet for the Whitestown data used in this essay is here Whitestown-all-years (.xlsx file)
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As per typical, they don,t like bad projections. Only like projections that match their religion.
Australian projections for the flux are 100 or less for the next 8 years!
They don,t want to open their eyes and see that the Sun has an effect on us. It has only been 100 years, that the world has not experienced wide range famines! Watch the fall in Dr. Spencer,s global temperatures!
Just as well CO2 is rising since it increases yields and reduces water requirements of many crop plants!
Interesting article, but I’m as skeptical of catastrophic global cooling as I am of catastrophic global warming.
Although likely just somewhat compensated for by other measures (like less diversion of corn to ethanol), an industrialized country like the U.S. will never starve since even greenhouse agriculture with plastic sheeting is possible if needed (not quite as expensive as it sounds since yield per unit area is much increased over outdoors, increasingly done with tomato production for instance). Of course, parts of the third world are already food insecure, so…
TSI isn’t quite the right metric to focus on, though. The bigger difference between the Maunder Minimum and now is that, unlike how cosmic ray flux varies by just several percent in a ~ 11 year solar cycle, it was tens of percent different back then. (Whether external forcings will return to quite that level in coming decades is uncertain but appears very much a possibility so far). Such is part of the picture and explanation of climate history over recent centuries and decades, shown with the derivative of sea level rise and much else in http://s24.postimg.org/rbbws9o85/overview.gif
(Of course, I’ve posted such before, but very few people actually ever *read* in terms of clicking and looking; that even the anti-sun posters here never have dared engage it is illustrative, though, of how much it contains inconvenient facts they don’t like people’s attention drawn to).
I’m puzzled by Fig 4 which is the historic TSI. I can accept that the older numbers could be less reliable, than recent numbers. (we used 1353 when I was in school).
This is the first plot of TSI that I have seen that wasn’t extremely noisy, and also the first I have seen, that apparently monitored TSI over the annual earth orbital radius changes.
OK, I’l accept that some noise filtering process was used to remove the typical noise I have seen in satellite graphs.
Now here is the mystery; please explain.
The amplitude of the annual cycling for the modern warm period, is clearly significantly higher than the amplitude during the earlier period in the 1850 to 1910 period. yet the value differs by about 1 w/m^2; less than 0.1%
So how it do dat ??
This is not peak food. This is the effect of temp. on food production, which can have serious effect depending on how cold it gets.
george e. smith says:
September 8, 2013 at 12:29 pm
“The amplitude of the annual cycling for the modern warm period, is clearly significantly higher than the amplitude during the earlier period in the 1850 to 1910 period. yet the value differs by about 1 w/m^2; less than 0.1%”
Figure 4 in this article incorrectly states 1 W/m^2 per 0.6 degrees Celsius while strangely attributing that particular number to Dr. Nir Shaviv. Actually, Dr. Shaviv estimates around 1.7 W/m^2 change is required per 0.6 degrees Celsius. He observes how cosmic ray modulation (affecting cloud seeding) makes historical W/m^2 variation far more than TSI variation alone. Dr. Shaviv’s specific estimate, as shown on his website at http://www.sciencebits.com/OnClimateSensitivity , is (0.35 +/- 0.09) K / (W/m^2) … which, aside from the uncertainties, is an estimate of 1 / 0.35 W/m^2 per degree Celsius, so around 2.9 W/m^2 per degree Celsius.
Unlike TSI which varies less, cosmic ray flux has been estimated as around 30% different during the Maunder Minimum from mid 20th century values, as shown in the Kirkby plot within http://s24.postimg.org/rbbws9o85/overview.gif (which also shows matches of cosmic ray forcing to variation in sea level, humidity, cloud cover, and temperature — enlarging on further click).
Totally not buying it. You will have to retract your post one of these days and be counted among the folks who saw a correlation and thought “CAUSE” without bothering with a plausible mechanism. Plus, you can grow wine grapes in Tibet though its very cold up there with a short growing season. Adaptation will happen when intrinsic parameters once again send the mercury south.
The analysis of the potential climatic impact of a shift in the solar output is interesting, though like all climate inputs, the solar changes noted are but one of a number of factors that influence the effects felt or experienced in terms of local or regional weather.
The outcomes predicted in the final paragraph, however, are rather too Ehrlich-like: “The starving populations of Egyptian cities will fan out into the countryside and consume whatever they can chew which will include the seed grain. That will ensure that domestic grain production will collapse. The population of Egypt might fall to 10% of its carrying capacity which would be 5% of its current level.”
Ehrlich’s original predictions of imminent planetary doom came at a time when the world was gripped in a cooling cycle. His predictions for the effect of “weather changes” (rather than “climatic changes”, which came into vogue later), were the imminent collapse of countries such as India. Roger Pielke Jr. has a copy of Ehrlich’s 1974 Senate testimony to that effect – see: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.ca/2013/09/1974-ehrlich-and-holdren-senate.html . (According to that testimony, by the way, we ran out of oil 13 years ago…).
That a cooling/drying phase would likely impact grain production is true: what that will translate into in geo-political terms and regional population effects will very much depend on human responses to the challenge.
It is of interest to compare this cooling forecast with the more conservative one (done by a different method than the useless modelling approach) in the latest cooling update at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
here are the conclusions- note item 9
“To summarise- Using the 60 and 1000 year quasi repetitive patterns in conjunction with the solar data leads straightforwardly to the following reasonable predictions for Global SSTs
1 Continued modest cooling until a more significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 – 0.15
5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 – 0.5
6 General Conclusion – by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial – they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and more CO2 would help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !!
The Solar Cycles 2,3,4 correlation with cycles 21,22,23 would suggest that a Dalton minimum could be imminent. The Livingston and Penn Solar data indicate that a faster drop to the Maunder Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures might even be on the horizon.If either of these actually occur there would be a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.
How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method doesn’t lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigour for the uninitiated and in relation to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up.This is where scientific judgement comes in – some people are better at pattern recognition and meaningful correlation than others.A past record of successful forecasting such as indicated above is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure – say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that certainty drops rapidly.I am sure,however, that it will prove closer to reality than anything put out by the IPCC, Met Office or the NASA group. In any case this is a Bayesian type forecast- in that it can easily be amended on an ongoing basis as the Temperature and Solar data accumulate.
Whoooo-oooo
This is frightening – if the assumptions are granted.
Auto
Look folks, this is a classic case of a false positive. One cycle is faster than the other. Therefore through chance alone a shorter weather pattern variation cycle (cold snaps) will occur in the time frame of a longer “spotless Sun” period (IE slightly before, during, or slight after) and have no teleconnections with the spotless Sun whatsoever. Yet, there will be tons of folk who will swear they have found a bullet proof correlation just waiting for a smarter person to come along and find the teleconnection mechanism.
Horse apples are being fed to gullible people. Just like the CO2 scare.
A recent article in Environmental Science & Technology by Keeler, et. al (10.1021/es402181y) discussed the Federal Agency Models (DOE/USDA/EPA) for achieving RFS2 target production volumes. This includes 16B gal/yr of corn ethanol and 16B gal/yr of cellulosic biofuels (mostly CE ethanol). Corn ethanol will be directly impacted by reduced yield as GDD’s drop. Models were expecting increased corn yield as has been happening for the last few decades. A drop in yield will throw all these models off by quite a bit. CE yields are based on multiple crops, but mixed prairie grasses and corn stover are the primary feedstocks for these yet to be build CE fuel processing plants. (Note that the massive land area needed to grow energy crops will be taken from pasture land making beef prices rise.) The DOE anticipates 527 such plant are needed to produce sufficient fuel to meet the RFS2 requirements. These plants will cost between $200MM to $400MM each necessitating a capital investment of up to $210B. This level of funding will be hard to come by in today’s financial market.
All these investments, plans and projections will be thrown in the trash heap of history if the projections in this article even partly come to pass. So if we fail to meet RFS2 mandates, count on the government to do exactly the wrong thing to keep fuel production on target (if it can even be done). I expect the food-for-fuel issue to become more of a polarizing issue in the near future.
corraltion/causation ..you may be wrong, you may be right, but we can make one prediction : all prediction will fail.
I found this 2003 paper a while back: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0312244
It furthers some research started by Royal Astronomer Sir William Hershel in 1801.
Abstract:
The database of Prof. Rogers (1887), which includes wheat prices in England in the Middle Ages, was used to search for a possible influence of solar activity on the wheat market. We present a conceptual model of possible modes for sensitivity of wheat prices to weather conditions, caused by solar cycle variations, and compare expected price fluctuations with price variations recorded in medieval England.
We compared statistical properties of the intervals between wheat price bursts during years 1249-1703 with statistical properties of the intervals between minimums of solar cycles during years 1700-2000. We show that statistical properties of these two samples are similar, both for characteristics of the distributions and for histograms of the distributions. We analyze a direct link between wheat prices and solar activity in the 17th Century, for which wheat prices and solar activity data (derived from 10Be isotope) are available. We show that for all 10 time moments of the solar activity minimums the observed prices were higher than prices for the correspondent time moments of maximal solar activity (100% sign correlation, on a significance level < 0.2%). We consider these results as a direct evidence of the causal connection between wheat prices bursts and solar activity.
Willis Eschenbach says:
September 8, 2013 at 10:16 am
Willis, send me an email and I will send you the Excel file.
As I said in the post, the agricultural response will be complicated. Farmers could switch to winter wheat and actually produce more tonnes of a lower quality product. We would get the protein but we wouldn’t be able to make good bread out of it. Corn and soybeans are the most profitable crops in the Corn Belt. You can switch to lower GDD varieties and you produce less. A 20% to 25% reduction is close to the mark in my opinion.
I recommend looking at Joe Bastardi’s weekly weather show at Weatherbell. The far northeast of the US is going to have its shortest growing season ever from last snow to first frost.
Ric Werme says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:43 pm
“I found this 2003 paper a while back: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0312244
Good find.
Speaking of similar topics, I always liked the following observation from Bond et al 2001:
“Over the last 12000 years, virtually every centennial time scale increase in drift ice documented in our North Atlantic records was tied to a distinct interval of variable and, overall, reduced solar output. A solar influence on climate of the magnitude and consistency implied by our evidence could not have been confined to the North Atlantic.” ( http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/spring2006/Mar1/Bond%20et%20al%202001.pdf )
William Abbott says:
September 8, 2013 at 9:54 am
“Yes David, peak food and peak oil. Somehow we will manage to increase yields if the temps turn downward. Look at the yield growth over the last sixty years. Just like oil; we will keep finding new techniques that make your static models fail.”
Doug Proctor says:
September 8, 2013 at 10:29 am
Pamela Gray says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:02 pm
“Totally not buying it.”
Good debating points by naysayers but when all the hype is about temps going the other way, we may be a little late in making the right choice on selection of colder varieties and planting grapes and the like – it isn’t an instant-returns game. Do y’all believe that the UK, Brussels and the like are sitting there comfortably with their 100million tonne cold weather seed ready to go. No, its probably against the law to experiment with it – even in the US Departments it is a disciplinary matter to even talk about such a thing I’m guessing from recent bans on employees criticizing the IPCC.
Cold weather strains have long-ago been made into bread or diesel and we are overly stocked with hot seeds. Ya know the agriculture colleges and farmers are busy developing growing seed that resists perennial wildfires, drought and tropical pestilence. Archibald may be over-cautioning everyone about a cooling, but the theory of what-goes-up-must-come-down did get a boost from the past decade’s CO2 -Thermageddon falsifications and making windmills into plowshares does take a little time. Oh all will be fine after the 5 years of turnaround in our farming practices but a few Egyptians could die while we retool.
David — I was with you until the last two paragraphs — relating to standard population dynamics of predator/prey relationships. Human populations have not historically shown this type of response to hard times — buffered by humans ability to think and plan their way out of harm’s way.
Only plagues, before modern medicine, and communism have been successful at knocking back human populations to any great degree — so far.
Corn and other grain to ethanol mandates are nothing less then a crime rising to the level of genocide. Regardless of the level of accuracy of this gloomy forecast, how would you like to be the Egyptian Mother unable to feed her child on her meager income because some elite in the USA has decreed that so much ethanol must be produced and used as motor fuel. Remember that death by starvation is a slow process. The emotional pain of the Mother (and Father) is UNCAUCULATABLE. Is it any wonder they hate us so!
While correlation is not causation, the absence of a known causation is not proof that one does not exist. In fact it is correlations that precipitate scientific investigation, or at least should do so.
With regard to the solar climate link, as great or as small as it may be (and I favor the former), does cause and effect have to be synchronous. The lack of, or periodic departure from synchronicity appears to be the reason why some poo bah this link.
Having been involved in data collection in the environmental field I have consistently found that departures from a specific pattern or cycle are regular events simply because an effect may be subject to several causes. In fact I would be extremely suspicious of an data that showed a purely arithmetic association, at least in the field where I worked. Sililarly I would expect a degree of stochasticity to exist in any solar climate link.
However I will observe the next decade with interest.
Doug Proctor says:
September 8, 2013 at 10:29 am
A little more rigor please Doug. When I started out in this field in 2005, the attitude of the sceptic community was that global warming was happening but it would be a lot milder than what the warmers were predicting. I said,”No its not. The Sun controls climate and all we have to do is figure out what the Sun is going to do.” At that stage, the spread in Solar Cycle 24 predictions was 50 at the bottom end to 190 at the top end. The literature said that that range would be a difference in 2.0 degrees C on Earth. Nobody was taking any notice at the time of those bottom end forecasts which turned out to be very close to the mark. And the Earth is now cooling in response.
Forward seven years and we now have the situation in which the only forecast extant for Solar Cycle 25 is of a maximum amplitude of 7. This is a Maunder Minimum-type number though the term Maunder Minimum implies perhaps 50 years of such low numbers. That forecast is backed up by Schatten and Tobiska’s 2003 paper. And a Finnish tree ring study. And Libby and Pandolfi.
What I like about the 1974 CIA report is that they state what has been forgotten – “the Earth has , on the average, enjoyed the best agricultural climate since the eleventh century.” What humanity has enjoyed for the last 100 years is a once in a thousand years event. It is not the normal condition. We are returning to the normal condition. The question is – what will it be like? That is what this post is about. Quantifying the fall and its consequences.
etudiant says:
September 8, 2013 at 10:38 am
The [range] available to farmers is 1400 GDD barley at one end to 2700 GDD corn at the other. We already have the cold tolerant varieties. You will produce less directly in proportion to GDD and it might be a different grain.
Ancient Egypt according bible, stored grain. Perhaps they should store grain, again.