There is a new paper in Environmental Research Letters that give additional support to Henrik Svensmark’s cosmic ray hypothesis of climate change on Earth. The idea is basically this: the suns changing magnetic field has an influence on galactic cosmic rays, with a stronger magnetic field deflecting more cosmic rays and a weaker one allowing more into the solar system. The cosmic rays affect cloud formation on Earth by creating condensation nuclei. Here is a simplified block flowchart diagram of the process:
The authors of the the new paper have a similar but more detailed flowchart:
The new paper suggest that changes in the quantity of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) are caused by changes in the cosmic ray flux:
The impact of solar variations on particle formation and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), a critical step for one of the possible solar indirect climate forcing pathways, is studied here with a global aerosol model optimized for simulating detailed particle formation and growth processes. The effect of temperature change in enhancing the solar cycle CCN signal is investigated for the first time. Our global simulations indicate that a decrease in ionization rate associated with galactic cosmic ray flux change from solar minimum to solar maximum reduces annual mean nucleation rates, number concentration of condensation nuclei larger than 10 nm (CN10), and number concentrations of CCN at water supersaturation ratio of 0.8% (CCN0.8) and 0.2% (CCN0.2) in the lower troposphere by 6.8%, 1.36%, 0.74%, and 0.43%, respectively. The inclusion of 0.2C temperature increase enhances the CCN solar cycle signals by around 50%. The annual mean solar cycle CCN signals have large spatial and seasonal variations: (1) stronger in the lower troposphere where warm clouds are formed, (2) about 50% larger in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere, and (3) about a factor of two larger during the corresponding hemispheric summer seasons. The effect of solar cycle perturbation on CCN0.2 based on present study is generally higher than those reported in several previous studies, up to around one order of magnitude.
The wider variation in CCNs makes the Svenmark’s hypothesis more plausible since the effect on clouds would also be proportionately larger.
They conclude:
The measured 0.1% level of the longterm TSI variations on Earth’s climate (i.e., solar direct climatic effect) is too small to account for the apparent correlation between observed historical solar variations and climate changes, and several mechanisms amplifying the solar variation impacts have been proposed in the literature.
Here we seek to assess how much solar variation may affect CCN abundance through the impacts of GCR and temperature changes on new particle formation, using a global aerosol model (GEOSChem/APM) optimized for simulating detailed particle formation and growth processes. Based on the GEOSChem/ APM simulations, a decrease in ionization rate associated with GCR flux change from solar minimum to solar maximum reduces global mean nucleation rates CN3, CN10, CCN0.8, CCN0.4, and CCN0.2 in the lower troposphere (0–3 km) by 6.8%, 1.91%, 1.36%, 0.74%, 0.54%, and 0.43%, respectively. The inclusion of the impact of 0.2 C temperature increase enhances the CCN solar cycle signals by around 50%.
The annual mean solar cycle CCN signals have large spatial and seasonal variations, about 50% larger than in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere and about a factor of two larger during the corresponding summer seasons. The average solar cycle signals are stronger in the lower troposphere where warm clouds are formed. The regions and seasons of stronger solar signals are associated with the higher concentrations of precursor gases which increase the growth rate of nucleated particles and the probability of these nucleated particles to become CCN. The effect of solar cycle perturbation on CCN0.2 based on the present study is generally higher than those reported in several previous studies, up to one order of magnitude. Clouds play a key role in the energy budget of Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere.
Small modifications of the amount, distribution, or radiative properties of clouds can have significant impacts on the climate. To study the impacts of a 0.5%–1% change in CCN during a solar cycle on cloud albedo, precipitation, cloud lifetime, and cloud cover, a global climate model considering robust aerosol–cloud interaction processes is needed. It should be noted that 0.5%–1% change in CCN during a solar cycle shown here only considers the effect of ionization rate and temperature change on new particle formation. During a solar cycle, changes of other parameters such as UV and TSI flux may also impact chemistry and microphysics, which may influence the magnitude of the solar indirect forcing. Further research is needed to better quantify the impact of solar activities on Earth’s climate.
Note the bold in the last paragraph.
WUWT readers may recall that Dr. Roy Spencer pointed out the issue of a slight change in cloud cover in his 2010 book intro of The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists. He writes:
“The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.”
The paper at ERL:
Effect of solar variations on particle formation and cloud condensation nuclei
Fangqun Yu and Gan Luo
The impact of solar variations on particle formation and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), a critical step for one of the possible solar indirect climate forcing pathways, is studied here with a global aerosol model optimized for simulating detailed particle formation and growth processes. The effect of temperature change in enhancing the solar cycle CCN signal is investigated for the first time. Our global simulations indicate that a decrease in ionization rate associated with galactic cosmic ray flux change from solar minimum to solar maximum reduces annual mean nucleation rates, number concentration of condensation nuclei larger than 10 nm (CN10), and number concentrations of CCN at water supersaturation ratio of 0.8% (CCN0.8) and 0.2% (CCN0.2) in the lower troposphere by 6.8%, 1.36%, 0.74%, and 0.43%, respectively. The inclusion of 0.2 °C temperature increase enhances the CCN [cloud condensation nuclei] solar cycle signals by around 50%. The annual mean solar cycle CCN signals have large spatial and seasonal variations: (1) stronger in the lower troposphere where warm clouds are formed, (2) about 50% larger in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere, and (3) about a factor of two larger during the corresponding hemispheric summer seasons. The effect of solar cycle perturbation on CCN0.2 [cloud condensation nuclei] based on present study is generally higher than those reported in several previous studies, up to around one order of magnitude.
The paper is open access and can be downloaded here: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/4/045004/pdf/1748-9326_9_4_045004.pdf
h/t to The Hockey Schtick and Bishop Hill
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Yeah, I don’t want my earlier remark to be misconstrued. Those who claim it’s cosmic rays are in the same bucket in my book with those who claim it’s CO2. If the data don’t support it, all we’ve got is some theoretical relationship in both cases. I suspect cosmic rays ~do~ affect cloud formation under some circumstances. I also suspect CO2 has ~some~ influence on temperatures. All I’m saying is I think oversimplifying is a mistake.
Peter Taylor says:
April 10, 2014 at 10:23 am
Why is no-one doing the detailed cloud assessments.
But those assessments have been made recently, e.g.
http://www.leif.org/EOS/swsc120049-GCR-Climate.pdf
http://www.leif.org/EOS/swsc130020-cosmic-rays-clouds-Laken.pdf
There is no observational support for Svensmark’s hypothesis.
Willis says
IF the ~11 variations in solar irradiance are affecting the temperature, the signal is vanishingly small. If it weren’t, we’d have isolated and analyzed it long ago. This aspect of climate has been studied since the 1800s, and to date, nobody I know of has ever shown any kind of strong correlation between the 11-year solar cycles and the weather.
Henry says
My own results show that it has been cooling significantly in Alaska, at a rate of -0.055 per annum since 1998.
http://oi40.tinypic.com/2ql5zq8.jpg
and it seems to me there is an obvious 11 -12 year (=half solar cycle) up and down movement?
So the Earth’s climate may be significantly effected by radiation originating from far outside our solar system? Is is possible for anything to be less effected by a carbon tax?
The number of factors that could influence climate is mind boggling. Too much effort is going into finding the one and only one silver bullet. We may have knowledge of but a very small fraction of all the processes that are influencing our climate. It is possible that a complete string of scenarios all alternatively inter-related and independent variables that have some role to play. Cosmic rays may be influencing our climate but only when conditions u and w and y and z exist. Or any subset of a multitude of other conditions exist. Can a strong correlation ever be found for any single factor until we know all the possible intervening variables?
The total amount of clouds. Western Hemisphere.
http://oiswww.eumetsat.org/IPPS/html/MSG/PRODUCTS/CLA/TCDC/IMAGESDisplay/oM5hJ1p9XPxTq
Ah but:
” lsvalgaard says:
April 10, 2014 at 9:01 am
As the paper concludes: ” Further research is needed to better quantify the impact of solar activities on Earth’s climate.” = please give me more money.
The problem with this kind of papers is that they ignore that solar activity and cosmic ray flux have not varied much [apart form the obvious 11- and 100-yr cycles] the past 300 years, while the climate has. For example, we are currently down to the same level of solar activity as a century ago, but the climate now is not what it was back then.
Understandably, the authors did not show a plot of solar [cosmic ray] activity. ”
However — When the sun was very active [millennial scale Grand Maximum] during the previous 3 cycles [21, 22, 23 — especially 22] all of the “AGW industry” folks was talking non-stop about warmest ever and Catastrophic Global Warming and how we did it with our Fossil CO2 — Now that we see that cycle 24 is quite quiet — all the AGW folks are talking about the “Pause” and trying to finesse how CO2 keeps increasing and temperatures might even be dropping.
Seems to me — we have an opportunity thanks to the Sun — let’s look at the next couple of cycles which the solar folks seem to think will be very low — perhaps approaching the Dalton Minimum of the early 19th C. if the “Pause” continues and deepens – – then the Svensmark [solar output fluctuations amplified by cloudiness changes] hypothesis might begin to gain some traction
It;s unfortunate that there is no good proxy for cloudiness???? — otherwise we could compare cloudiness with the historical instrumental and pre-instrumental record of solar activity — in particular since we now have a well established ability to extract solar activity from radioisotopes in ice and tree rings — Maunder Cloudiness should have been dramatic!!
Anyone — made a study of cloudiness in Dutch Landscapes circa 1650?
WEST HIGHLANDER SAYS
anyone — made a study of cloudiness in Dutch Landscapes circa 1650?
henry says
I am dutch, but I was not around that time?
lsvalgaard
You concentrate only on one aspect of solar activity. Therefore, despite of your findings temperature at mid-latitudes will decline.
Has no such thing as global temperature.
Typo:
“The annual mean solar cycle CCN signals have large spatial and seasonal variations, about 50% larger than in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere”
Probably should read:
“The annual mean solar cycle CCN signals have large spatial and seasonal variations, about 50% larger in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere”
mosher says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/10/more-support-for-svensmarks-cosmic-ray-modulation-of-earths-climate-hypothesis/#comment-1609897
henry says
so what is your explanation of the observed global cooling?
West Highlander, Leif, Willis I just repeat part of my earlier comment- For the connection between cosmic rays and temperature over the last 1000 years see
“For the connection between cosmic ray flux and climate see Fig8 at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/10/commonsense-climate-science-and.html
”
What’s not to like?
and no changes whether you look at daytime clouds or night time clouds.
The seasonal and diurnal changes in clouds are huge. Looking at the period where we have the best data ( highest vertical resolution, and highest grid scale resolution and most frequent temporal resolution ) you will find no link between increased GCR and cloud fraction.. no matter how you cut the data: look by season, by latitude, by pressure level, by day or night, nothing.
try an epoch superposition.. nothing.
Willis says : “Scafetta? Really? Look, folks, anyone citing Scafetta might as well just wear a sign ,,, ”
Hey, Scafetta’s empirical cycle curve-fitting model has been pretty good over the last decade and that puts him 25y ahead of the A-team of AGW.
The 9.1 year cycle he found and neatly showed was due to the presence of the moon using JPL ephemeris, has also been found in NH land SAT by BEST project.
I’ve also shown it many ocean basins in ICOADS SST and in cross-correlation of Atlantic and N Pacific and is present in Indian Ocean.
Since 9.1 will drift in and out of phase with any solar signal, failing to recognise the presence of the lunar 9.1 cycle will mess up any attempt at detecting solar link and also mean trivial attempts to dismiss such a link unfounded because they are over simplistic. All that can show is that the “it’s the sun, stupid” crowd are as simplistic and incorrect as that “CO2 control knob” crowd.
There are many things affecting climate. If we had not spend the last 25y twisting the models and the data to fit a foregone conclusion, we would certainly have a better understanding by now.
lsvalgaard says: “The problem with this kind of papers is that they ignore that solar activity and cosmic ray flux have not varied much [apart form the obvious 11- and 100-yr cycles] ”
With that in mind look at the unprocessed (grey line) mean of the Neukom proxies.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/mean-neukom-proxies-final-result.jpg
Co2 is not the driver of the warming from the 1970’s. It’s the weakening of the Suns magnetic field by 50%. As the Suns magnetic field weakened it released more energy warming the Earth, Now the temps have flat lined. The suns solar wind is so weak that it can’t protect Earth from cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are known to interact in the atmosphere to create clouds, You can see this interaction with the planes contrails, instead of dissipating it spreads out forming a larger area of thin clouds. I expect to see a sudden drop in global temps and temps will continue to fall for years to come until the Suns magnetic field gets back to normal.
lsvalgaard says:
April 10, 2014 at 9:01 am
The CCN effect is proven in the laboratory, just as the LWIR absorption by CO2 is, and unlike that property, has been for decades a useful tool (cloud chambers) in subatomic particle studies.
At least one study, “A History of Solar Activity over Millennia,” by Ilya G. Usoskin, Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory (Oulu unit), University of Oulu, Finland, shows a steady increase in the production of 14C and Be10 over the 19th and 20th centuries that would clearly correlate better with post_LIA warming than atmospheric CO2 does. If 14C and Be10 are indeed cosmogenic isotopes, and they really have been increasing in occurrence over the last two centuries, and, as you say, there has been no “significant” changes in cosmic ray flux, we have a theoretical problem that actually does need “more money.”
Duster says:
April 10, 2014 at 11:41 am
At least one study, “A History of Solar Activity over Millennia,” by Ilya G. Usoskin, Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory (Oulu unit), University of Oulu, Finland, shows a steady increase in the production of 14C and Be10 over the 19th and 20th centuries
That study has been superseded by later data and a better calibration of the record.
Duster says:
April 10, 2014 at 11:41 am
At least one study,….
We are doing something about the discordance of some of the cosmic data, see:
http://www.leif.org/research/Svalgaard_ISSI_Proposal_Base.pdf
Figure 2
lsvalgaard says:
For another example: In September, we in the northern hemisphere will be down to the same level of daily insolation as we had back in March. By your … ‘logic’ … if NH September is not as cold as March, then the our trip around the sun cannot drive the seasons. Yeah … no.
The idea that climate forcings must act instantaneously is asinine.
JJ says:
April 10, 2014 at 11:53 am
The idea that climate forcings must act instantaneously is asinine.
Tell that to Svensmark et al.
mosher says
you will find no link between increased GCR and cloud fraction.. no matter how you cut the data: look by season, by latitude, by pressure level, by day or night, nothing.
try an epoch superposition.. nothing.
henry says
I agree that the cloud story could probably be a red herring as explanation for the global cooling
this is my explanation:
I figure that there must be a small window at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) that gets opened and closed a bit, every so often. Chemists know that a lot of incoming radiation is deflected to space by the ozone and the peroxides and nitrogenous oxides lying at the TOA. These chemicals are manufactured from the UV coming from the sun. Luckily we do have measurements on ozone, from stations in both hemispheres. I looked at these results. Incredibly, I found that ozone started going down around 1951 and started going up again in 1995, both on the NH and the SH. Percentage wise the increase in ozone in the SH since 1995 is much more spectacular.
My theory fits my observations for the drop in global maximum temperatures….
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
One would still have to explain why the drop in magnetic field strength on the sun causes an increase in these substances TOA that back radiate (mostly) UV to space.
The comment sections at WUWT are as valuable as the posts themselves. Thanks everyone.
Both sides of the argument appear to be only partially correct.
There is GCR-cloud effect, appears to be significant but short lasting, and most of all requires strong geomagnetic storm, which is very rare.
Above comments are based on analysis of a single event starting on 7th March 2012, when Ap-index peaked over 100, 4 times during period of one week. Such events are very rare; since there was a delay about 6 days it is hard to tell if tropics cloudiness change was a causal or coincidental. All supporting data are included in the link so anyone can have a go.
lsvalgaard says:
I quoted you, not Svensmark. Own your words.