Guest post by Alec Rawls
Nice hype by Matt Drudge, whose three linked quotes are all from the BBC’s one brief paragraph of text, but the accompanying video (full transcription below) is more substantial, with scientists talking about the likelihood of an extended Maunder Minimum type period low solar activity and the cold temperatures that coincided with the Maunder Minimum during the 1600’s.
Professor Richard Harrison from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is clear about the correlation [at 1:57]:
The Maunder Minimum of course was a period of almost no sunspots at all for decades and we saw a really dramatic period where there were very cold winters in the northern hemisphere. It was a period where you had a kind of mini ice-age. You had a period where the Thames froze in winters and so on. It was an interesting time.
BBC science correspondent Rebecca Morelle doesn’t shy away from the possible implications today:
So does a decline in solar activity mean plunging temperatures for decades to come?
Best of all is Dr. Lucie Green from University College in London, who describes the unsettled state of the science [at 3:35]:
It is a very very complex area because the sun’s activity controls how much visible light the sun gives out, but also how much ultraviolet light and x-rays that the sun emits and they create a web of changes up in the earth’s atmosphere producing effects that actually we don’t fully understand.
Green then wraps up the segment by declining to suggest that anthropogenic warming can be expected to outweigh solar cooling:
… on the one hand we’ve got perhaps a cooling sun, but on the other hand you’ve got human activity that can counter that and I think it is quite difficult to say actually how these two are going to compete and what the consequences then are for the global climate.
The weak link is solar physicist Mike Lockwood who makes irrational and unsupported claims about solar activity only affecting regional climate and not having a global effect.
The BBC voice-over sets up Lockwood’s unsupported speculation:
BBC: Less solar activity means a drop in ultraviolet radiation. Mike Lockwood says this seems to affect the behavior of the jet stream. The Jet stream changes its pattern. This ends up blocking warm air from reaching Northern Europe. This causes long cold winters, but what about global temperatures as a whole?
Lockwood [at 5:03]: One has to make a very clear distinction between regional climate and global climate. If we get a cold winter in Europe because of these blocking events it’s warmer, for example, in Greenland, so the average is almost no change, so it is a redistribution of temperature around the North Atlantic.
As Stephen Wilde has been pointing out for years, the wider meanders in the polar jet that seem to be associated with low solar activity can be expected to cause a net increase in cloudiness which would increase the earth’s albedo, having a global cooling effect. The jet stream follows the boundry where cold polar air slides beneath and pushes up warmer temperate air, creating storm tracks. Not only do wider meanders create longer storm tracks but the resulting cloud cover occurs at lower latitudes, where the incidence of incoming solar radiation is steeper, making the albedo reflection stronger.
Snow cover albedo effects would likely also be global, not just regional. A warmer Greenland has almost zero marginal albedo effect: it’s 98% white anyway. But a snow covered Europe and North America will reflect away a lot of sunlight. Also, the important thing over large parts of Asia and North America will not be temperature—it’s always going to be cold enough to snow during the Siberian winter—but the extent of the storm tracks, so that cloud and snow albedos both increase with the amplitude of the jet stream meanders, as seems to have been the pattern with the current solar lull. Here is a graphic showing the 21st century’s high average snow anomalies (from Rutgers, via Brett Anderson at Accuweather):
Lockwood is up against the paleologic evidence as well. He is suggesting that, while the Little Ice Age may have been induced by low solar activity, it was a northern-hemisphere-only event, but recent studies indicate that it was a global climate swing, as was the Medieval Warm Period.
Overall though, a very good report from the BBC. Have the recent revelations about top level BBC collusion with green propagandists reduced the power of the warming alarmists to censor other views? In any case, it is good to see them do some real reporting.
Full transcript (not provided by the BBC – is this unusual? – so I transcribed it myself)
BBC voice-over: The wonder of the northern lights reminds us of the intimate connection we have with our star. The aurora borealis happens when the solar wind hits the earth’s upper atmosphere, but many of these displays may soon vanish. Something is happening to the solar activity on the surface of the sun: it’s declining, fast.
Professor Richard Harrison, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory [0:28]: Whatever measure you use, it’s coming down, the solar peaks are coming down, for example with the flares. It looks very very significant.
Dr. Lucie Green, University College London [0:36]: The solar cycles now are getting smaller and smaller. The activity is getting less and less.
BBC: There is a vast range of solar activity: sunspots, intensely magnetic areas seen here as dark regions on the sun’s surface; solar winds and uv light radiate toward the earth; flares erupt violently and coronal mass ejections throw billions of tons of charged particles into space. Solar activity rises and falls in 11-year cycles and right now we are at the peak, the solar maximum, but this cycle’s maximum is eerily quiet.
Harrison [1:18]: I’ve been a solar physicist for 30 years. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. If you want to go back to see when the sun was this inactive, in terms of the minimum we’ve just had and the peak we have now you’ve got to go back about a hundred years, so this is not something I’ve seen in my lifetime, it’s not something that a couple of generations before me have seen.
BBC: The number of sunspots is a fraction of what scientists expected, solar flares are half. Richard Harrison is the head of space physics at the Rutheford-Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. He says the rate at which solar activity is falling mirrors a period in the 17th century where sunspots virtually disappeared.
Harrison [1:57]: The Maunder Minimum of course was a period of almost no sunspots at all for decades and we saw a really dramatic period where there were very cold winters in the northern hemisphere [not only the northern hemisphere – A.R.] . It was a period where you had a kind of mini ice-age. You had a period where the Thames froze in winters and so on. It was an interesting time.
BBC: Rivers and canals froze across Northern Europe. Paintings from the 17th century show frost-fairs taking place on the Thames. During the “great frost” of 1684 the river froze over for two months, the ice was almost a foot thick. The Maunder Minimum was named after the astronomer who observed the steep decline in solar activity that coincided with this mini ice-age.
BBC science correspondent Rebecca Morelle [2:46]: The Maunder Minimum came at a time when snow cover was longer and more frequent. It wasn’t just the Thames that froze over. The Baltic Sea did too. Crop failures and famines were widespread across Northern Europe. So does a decline in solar activity mean plunging temperatures for decades to come?
Dr. Lucie Green [3:04]: We’ve been making observations of sun spots which are the most obvious sign of solar activity from 1609 onwards and we’ve got 400 years of observations. The sun does seem to be in a very similar phase as it was in the run-up to the Maunder Minimum, so by that I mean the activity is dropping off cycle by cycle.
BBC voice-over: Lucie Green is based at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the North Downs. She thinks that lower levels of solar activity could affect the climate, but she’s not sure to what extent.
Green [3:35]: It is a very very complex area because the sun’s activity controls how much visible light the sun gives out, but also how much ultraviolet light and x-rays that the sun emits and they create a web of changes up in the earth-atmosphere producing effects that actually we don’t fully understand.
BBC voiceover: Some researchers have gone way further back in time, looked into the ice sheets of particles that were once in the upper atmosphere, particles that show variations in solar activity. Mike Lockwood’s work suggests that this is the fastest rate of solar decline for 10,000 years.
Professor Mike Lockwood, University of Reading [4:20]: If we look at the ice core record we can say, “okay so when we’ve been in this kind of situation before, what’s the sun gone on to do,” and based on that, and the rate of the current decline, we can estimate that within about 40 years from now there’s about a ten or twenty, probably nearer a 20% probabilility that we will actually be back in Maunder Minimum conditions by that time.
BBC: Less solar activity means a drop in ultraviolet radiation. Mike Lockwood says this seems to affect the behavior of the jet stream. The Jet stream changes its pattern. This ends up blocking warm air from reaching Northern Europe. This causes long cold winters, but what about global temperatures as a whole?
Lockwood [5:03]: One has to make a very clear distinction between regional climate and global climate. If we get a cold winter in Europe because of these blocking events it’s warmer, for example, in Greenland, so the average is almost no change [a completely unsupported conjecture that is at odds with reason and evidence A.R.], so it is a redistribution of temperature around the North Atlantic.
Morelle: The relationship between solar activity and weather on earth is complicated but if solar activity continues to fall could the temperature on earth as a whole get cooler? Could there be implications for global warming?
Dr. Lucie Green [5:38]: The world we live in today is very different to the world that was inhabited during the Maunder Minimum. So we have human activity, we have the industrial revolution, all kinds of gases being pumped into the atmosphere, so on the one hand we’ve got perhaps a cooling sun, but on the other hand you’ve got human activity that can counter that and I think it is quite difficult to say actually how these two are going to compete and what the consequences then are for the global climate.
BBC: So even if the planet as a whole continues to warm, if we enter a new Maunder Minimum the future for Northern Europe could be cold and frozen winters for decades to come, and we won’t even have bountiful displays of the northern lights to cheer us up.
Unmentionable says:
January 20, 2014 at 9:12 pm
Same applies for 99.9% of the interior of the Sun where there’s no direct surface expressions of phenomena below. Such ‘knowledge’ is indeed based upon theoretical interpretation alone.
I think you have no idea about the meanings of theory and observation. An example: we observe at the Earth a certain neutrino flux. As we can determine the direction from where the neutrinos come we note that that is direction to the Sun. From that we know that the Sun is the source. Now, you could argue that perhaps the neutrinos come from another source and it is only a coincidence that they seem to come from the Sun. I consider such a view perverse. We can measure the energy distribution of said neutrinos and from our knowledge of nuclear reactions deduce the temperature of the matter where the neutrinos are generated. This is a direct measurement of the temperature of the interior. Now, there could be some unknown process that redistributes the energy, destroying our measurement of the ‘real’ temperature. I consider such a view to be perverse as well, especially since the measured temperature matches that which determines the directly measured sound speed. To claim that those are ‘shadows’ only, is also perverse, and so on. People who cling to such perversities usually have an ulterior motive for doing so, like ‘I distrust models because their implications clash view my worldview’ or perhaps something even more nefarious.
AGW mucked around historical climate records and derailed climate studies and funding of valuable programs, into a cul-de-sac of AGW consensus building that very reason. Namely people believed the models and theories must be right, and that the anti-thesis, or null hypothesis was the perversity, so tried to counter-productively enforce acceptance of it, despite its unconfirmed basis as unsettled modelling, pretending to be settled science. Or in your terms it’d be perverse to not buy into the model?
I don’t care to try and account for your self-selection of what constitutes ‘perverseness’ to you (nor your apparent borderline paranoia or in-built presumption with regard to the above comments for your “ulterior motive” fantasy), but I do know how to distinguish between a direct confirmation and a theoretical supposition that was merely derived from and indirect and remote observation.
Unmentionable says:
January 20, 2014 at 9:58 pm
but I do know how to distinguish between a direct confirmation and a theoretical supposition that was merely derived from and indirect and remote observation.
Apparently, you do not know this as the examples I have shown you [there are many more] are direct observations and not theoretical suppositions.
I’m pleased to hear you’ve managed to dispense with all that tedious theoretical interpretation of remote non-confirmed observations and jumped directly to belief system. That’s quite an accomplishment, it must be wonderful to have 100% confidence and none of that messy interpretation stuff.
lsvalgaard says:
January 19, 2014 at 8:52 am
The Sun is not a detonating hydrogen bomb. Its energy production is comparable to that of a compost heap
Hello Leif, please, when you get a compost heap producing megawatts/m^2 output at its surface, please let me know, in such case I would have a serious business proposal for you.
At this moment I don’t have for sale nothing more than a nice old castle in Europe for very reasonable price, maybe you could be interested?…
And until the compost revolution in energetics will happen and with all the respect I’m still not too sure even 1.13×10^28 cubic meters of compost heaps (- amount even being perhaps astronomically massiver than is the sphere where in fact the thermonuclear reactions are really going on in the Sun and even if it would somehow not kill itself and/or became the first compost class star, I mean perhaps before it would descend beyond the event horizon) would have the thousands of degree temperature at its visible surface. Not speaking about its interior – where I somehow would bet the conditions for you would be quite simmilar as if you detonate a hydrogen bomb next block, only they will last billions of years, unfortunately you’ll not have much chance to enjoy the warmth, because your life I would bet would last not longer than in the case of the next block small hydrogen bomb nuclear mishap…
So it somehow occurs to me the energy production per mass unit in a compost heap perhaps could be astronomically smaller than that in the Sun. But of course, I’m not a solar scientist, so I don’t really know what’s the beef.
Nevertheless a compost fermentation somehow to this days I never was able to see produce temperatures, energy radiation density and spectras of the kind the Sun arguably produces by the nuclear reactions in its core. But maybe I’m too empirical and barmy to believe in ETs only when I have chance to talk to them and therefore I was never able to invent the compost bulb.
A comparison of the Sun to a compost heap, however in certain sense maybe factual, looks to me like a bit inadequate oversimplification which has not much a base in useful reality nor helps to understand the nature of the processes going on in the Sun – at least not to me.
But it sometimes happens the Wikipedia doesn’t help so.
As you can check the energy output per square meter of the solar surface is perhaps over 15 megawatts and I note that’s really way above the places where the energy in the Sun is really produced – a distance you perhaps barely could be able to walk through in whole your life even at the old cold Earth…
Never mind, a small heap from old wise heapie say with just 1 megawatt/m^2 output would be enough for me, really, I don’t need much, just tell me where it is, how are you doing it and how I can make it last for just couple of decades (the billions would be anyway too wasty for me) – the castle could be yours 😉
Unmentionable says:
January 20, 2014 at 10:48 pm
it must be wonderful to have 100% confidence and none of that messy interpretation stuff.
It helps to know what one is talking about.
tumetuestumefaisdubien1 says:
January 20, 2014 at 11:25 pm
So it somehow occurs to me the energy production per mass unit in a compost heap perhaps could be astronomically smaller than that in the Sun.
Even you could do the math. Here is one way: solar energy output http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_luminosity 3.939×10^26 W, solar mass http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_mass 1.98855×10^30 kg. Energy release per kg: E = 3.939×10^26/1.98855×10^30 = 0.0002 W/kg. Since not the whole Sun is involved, but only perhaps a fifth, you can increase E by five to get 0.001 W/kg so even you can see that the energy production per unit mass in the Sun is astronomically smaller than that in a compost heap. Per unit volume the Sun does better as the matter at the center is 10 times more dense that gold, but still the compost heap wins out. Can I have that castle now?
helps to understand the nature of the processes going on in the Sun
The understanding is that the mutual electrostatic repulsion between protons is so strong that it only very rarely is overcome resulting in fusion, meaning that fusion is a very inefficient process. Only because the Sun is so big does the extremely feeble energy release rate add up to something.
Unmentionable said January 20, 2014 at 9:58 pm;
AGW was at the dawn a product of professional politics and diehard activism. Al Gore and James Hansen intellectually copulated on the floors of Congress … and it went down the scientific from there … scientifically speaking.
What we see with AGW, is not a case of the limitations of the methodologies (which do certainly exist), but of the purposeful misuse of the tools of science as political weapons.
Your characterization works only for the blind following the blind.
tumetuestumefaisdubien1 said @ur momisugly January 20, 2014 at 11:25 pm;
That nicely summarizes your basic difficulty.
Models & modeling are not about duplicating, replicating or even simulating reality. “Oversimplification” is the essential (but sometime counter-intuitive) skill that yields a quality, useful model.
Smoking Frog said @ur momisugly January 20, 2014 at 1:32 pm;
You said it. HAL-9000 didn’t. That makes it your baby, not his. Child-support payments fall to you; not him, or us.
You shouldn’t to be a deadbeat (intellectual) dad.
The same persistence that is parching the US West Coast is building ice on the Canadian Shield. Let us hope this is not as bad as it looks.
James at 48 said January 21, 2014 at 8:09 am;
Seasonal snow & ice are not bad. They are an agriculture & environmental asset in many situations … and especially so in low-precipitation regions like central Canada and the Prairies.
Perennial snowpack, however, causes rapid ecological damage. A single summer with persistent snow on the ground starts the process, and in a very few years everything is dead.
We don’t have to let that happen, though. We have the technology to get rid of snow that threatens to last too long into the summer growing season.
But to be most effective, we must not wait. Having plant-life on the ground is itself a big part of keeping the area snow-free in the summer. If we let the snow kill the ground-cover (‘arguing about it’), that’s a big setback.
We should be ready to move “promptly” with aerial soot-dusting, etc. We have all the parts & pieces laying around handy. It’s just a matter of being prepared – between the ears – to make the move in a timely way.
lsvalgaard says:
January 21, 2014 at 6:06 am
Unmentionable says:
January 20, 2014 at 10:48 pm
it must be wonderful to have 100% confidence and none of that messy interpretation stuff.
It helps to know what one is talking about.
___
Your self-satisfaction and intellectual arrogance is common, but surprising. I find your assertion that you directly know what happens deep inside the Sun, sans any form of theoretical interpretation, as absurd as it’s clearly false. You’ve leave no choice but to dismiss you.
Unmentionable says:
January 21, 2014 at 8:49 am
You’ve leave no choice but to dismiss you.
Just like the people who did not want to look through Galileo’s telescope to verify for themselves what he saw. Willful ignorance is of the worst kind.
And BTW, we do interpret the direct observations theoretically, because data without theory are barren and do not lead to understanding. The proof that we have some understanding comes when the divers direct observations tie together in a coherent theoretical framework. The important point is that direct, remote observation is possible.
Unmentionable said January 21, 2014 at 8:49 am;
Good luck with that dismissal.
We saw The Bomb, before it lit up the Nevada night.
We saw the Smallpox disease-organism, before it was identified.
We saw the New outer planets … in the orbits of the Ancient inner planets.
We see the oceans most clearly, through the steel hulls of submarines.
And on and on and on and …
You’ll need some very special luck there.
Analogy of the Cave by Plato (ca. ~400BC)
The difficulties described by Unmentionable, relating to sensing, perceiving and knowing, have been keenly noted and explored for millenia.
Well Plato hated democracy and was suggesting the need for philosopher-king (perhaps himself), so he overinflated the role and importance of the philosopher in society quite a bit.
It is probably the source of the entitled attitude of the “intellectuals” and “revolutionaries” who don’t really produce anything, and as Karl R Popper noted, they never ever get their intended results. Look at the 1900’s in China and Russia.
Ha, you two are terrific. Your responses caricature a zealot discovering an ‘unmentionable’ sacrilege within the temple. Look, it’s not personal, I detect from the comment exchange that you’re 100% convinced you know things which you don’t. If you desire fawning agreements and deference I’m really shocking at that stuff. I’ve a requirement to reject things which don’t pass muster after examination.
You can release the verbal Kraken now, I won’t reply from here on.
Zeke said @ur momisugly January 21, 2014 at 9:49 am;
Democracy at the time was a “theory”, or more accurately, a philosophical construct.
As well, Greek Democracy was extended only to “citizens”; most were not citizens, and citizenship existed almost exclusively within cities. Citizenship, voting and Democracy were mainly a ‘tool’ of the City State, used to dominate, subjugate & exploited the ‘hinterlands’ (everything outside the Walls).
That the words “citizen” and “city” are similar, isn’t incidental … is why we Blue-Urban and Red-Rural … and”Phil Robertson for President” bumper-stickers.
But the problems Unmentionable experiences, grappling with Science, were clearly recognized by Plato, his associates, and less well-recorded (less wealthy & powerful) people in a long line before them. One can make a lot more progress with these difficulties, by knowing that the issues have been long-studied, and building on past work.
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Yes, current Academia, and Intellectualism such as it now exists, have their issues. In decades & generations not at all distant, the actually issues were very different. Beware looking at the frailties of Academia today, and mistaking them for the ‘core problem’.
… Because, to substantial degrees, there are actually more-foundational difficulties in play. Mary Shelley and others of her time & circles sketched these matters. But they aren’t really the complaints we often see leveled at Science & Scientists, today. The Frankensteing we know, is largely the product of Hollywood & Co.
Unmentionable says:
January 21, 2014 at 10:40 am
discovering an ‘unmentionable’ sacrilege within the temple
rather just an ill-informed, willfully ignorant, agenda-driven person, but if you are done whining, good riddance.
Ted Clayton says, “Democracy at the time was a “theory”, or more accurately, a philosophical construct. As well, Greek Democracy was extended only to “citizens”; most were not citizens, and citizenship existed almost exclusively within cities. Citizenship, voting and Democracy were mainly a ‘tool’ of the City State, used to dominate, subjugate & exploited the ‘hinterlands’ (everything outside the Walls).”
All very well, however, that is not why Plato objected to democracy. He objected to it because democracy was a source of change and conflict – two of the greatest societal evils, in his mind. The state ideally would prevent all change and preserve order.
Regarding and the system he preferred, he placed the philosopher-king in absolute control, and a permanent aristocracy around him. The other class would not be allowed to possess certain goods and capital, such as horses, chariots, art, and other luxuries.
And thank you for pointing out the interesting way that Unmentionable was using the shadow analogy. In his use, the theories are the shadows.
Unmentionable said @ur momisugly January 21, 2014 at 10:40 am;
Not every zealot has discovered either the True Truth, or an ‘unmentionable’ sacrilege.
Most zealots never get beyond zealotry for its own sake. Just as it is the occupational hazard of the Rebel, that he is in most cases Without a Cause. And always, aggrandizing anything that might be, in his own mind.
We tolerate zealots, even though so many never find a real cause (or sacrilege), because compliance, and yes consensus, are so deadly to institutions … perhaps especially Science.
… But “us two” are hardly going to prove to be the Guardians of Sacrilege; the crusader’s prize.
Leif,
In a discussion on a different thread, You posted this paper,
http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202011%20SH34B-08.pdf
In the paper you discussed Rudolf Wolf’s Planetary Sunspot Formula, and stated “At the end of his life [1893] Wolf remarked that this research (by him and others) never produced any really satisfactory
results”.
I’ve been Looking at Rudolf Wolf’s formula, and I’ve noticed an obvious reason why it does not hold, the “coefficients are mass/distance/squared” therefor his formula does not correctly represent the positive and negative interactions of mass between two or more planetary bodies at aphelion and perihelion or the increase and decrease as positive and/or negative variables between aphelion and perihelion.
i.e When you square a negative integer value you get a positive result.
e.g [-5 * 5= 25] or [-5 * -5 = 25]
Sparks says:
January 21, 2014 at 11:30 am
I’ve been Looking at Rudolf Wolf’s formula, and I’ve noticed an obvious reason why it does not hold, the “coefficients are mass/distance/squared” therefor his formula does not correctly represent the positive and negative interactions of mass between two or more planetary bodies
Mass and gravity are always positive and there squares [even more so] and cubes are always positive.
Before going to expire during the sun and its system of ultimate knowledge that : these are the true causes of these phenomena on the sun and the solar system . There are many natural and logical approach to the solution of the puzzle , but it is now used ( computing and ” divination ” or divination and prediction ) . Researchers forget that there is simply a logical and natural solution . And that is that the solar system can no more influence from the outside , but what is happening in the mutual action .
Usually the question : how much would it cost and how much would be worthwhile to pay someone who can provide the right solution . ? Organize and offer that to solve the problem and give him a price and you will see that they will soon find someone who ‘s going to solve it. Thus there are thousands of different ” solutions ” and none of them are solvable . Too many participants without bidding requirements . Who can do it and I will take part in the contest.
Please all discussants to think about it and that it does not consider the idea of not , no matter who offers (known or unknown in science ) . And many Nobel Prize winners have been left behind are confusing and ideas .
Zeke said @ur momisugly January 21, 2014 at 11:02 am;
Plato’s big running-theme, is his objection to having the unqualified discharge important roles in society. Over & over, he uses the role of Ship’s Captain, and Doctor to point to the costs of letting role-assignments be filled by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
And that’s the root of his low opinion of Democracy. People without knowledge, skills or ability, casting ballots on matters in which those assets count, toward success.
Modern Democracy, and the degree to which it has enjoyed some success, dates to the emergence of the affordable Printing Press. And for the very powerful reason, that it enabled common people to acquire drastically increased amounts of information, and even elements of an education.
Plato could see plainly, 2,400 year ago, that an education (the exclusive prerogative of Aristocracy, then) made all the different, in being qualified for many of the roles that exist.
And 2,400 years later … the qualified, the educated, the skilled & practiced can indeed see into the sun & understand it … whereas those who lack those assets, as Plato accurately noted, can’t.
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There is an undercurrent of ‘political correctness’ going on here; that it is ‘unfair’ or ‘unsavory’ or otherwise an undesirable condition, that some people have abilities (and qualifications) that others don’t have. That there is something faintly scurrilous, that can even be justifiably attacked, about the possession of qualifications that … not everyone possesses.
That whatever one’s grievance … it’ll do to glare at the astrophysicist.