Guest essay by Dr. Tim Ball
Correlation between sunspot numbers and global temperature was known for decades, but with no proven mechanism it was correctly set aside. That changed when Henrik Svensmark proposed his Cosmic Rays hypothesis. Figures 1 and 2 show the mechanism in two different ways. Figure 2 is from “The Chilling Stars” by Svensmark and Calder, the book that took the idea to the public.
Figure 1 Figure 2
The Cosmic effect is now established through rigorous attempts to disprove it, the proper scientific method.
IPCC Challenge
Figure 3. IPCC Figure 7c
A major objective of the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) was to counter the evidence in Figure 7c from the 1990 First Assessment Report (FAR) (Figure 3). It was troubling because it showed significant variations of temperature over the last 1000 years. This appeared to contradict the IPCC claim that 20th century warming was unique and abnormal. The major focus was the depiction of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) from approximately 950 to 1350 AD, but the cold spell from 1350 to 1850 known as the Little Ice Age (LIA) was also a concern. As Lamb noted (personal communication) the onset and termination of these periods varied regionally, sometimes by decades.
Artist’s Images Of The LIA
We all see the world through different eyes with different sensibilities and awareness. In the classic nature-nuture division most of this is nature, especially with certain abilities, such as mathematics, music or art. Artists see colour, light, and patterns of the world differently. There is a basic for landscape artists because they paint what they see before them, albeit with artistic license on occasion. Their work provides evidence of conditions such as the snow and cold of the Little Ice Age by Breughel (Figure 4) or Grifier (Figure 5). There was an exhibition of the work of Hendrick Avercamp titled the Little Ice Age at the National Gallery in Washington from March to July 2010.
Figure 4: Pieter Breughel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow
These artists considered the conditions relatively normal, especially if their lifespans were within the LIA. However, as landscape artists they would detect changing atmospheric conditions before others and be influenced by this in their work.
Figure 5: Jan Grifier, The Great Frost 1683 (River Thames)
Changing Skies Are Evidence of Changing Climate
Figure 6: John Constable, English Artist
Montana is known as “Big Sky Country” so the dominant feature in images are sky and clouds. This is true of any flat region, such as Saskatchewan, or Norfolk in eastern England. Artists naturally paint these skyscapes, but few with greater awareness than John Constable (Figure 6). He became so aware of the clouds that in 1821 he produced an entire book simply depicting clouds and cloud forms (Figure 8). There are several books analyzing these depictions. One of them, John Constable’s Skies, is subtitled A Fusion of Art and Science and poses the question, “And were the skies he painted scientifically accurate?” Published in 1999 it preceded the confirmation of Svensmark’s work on sunspots and cloud cover.
Constable’s works do not, in themselves, provide support for Svensmark, but when put with a 1970 study by Neuberger (republished in Weather on 30 April 2012) it provides independent confirmation. The beauty of Neuberger’s work, Climate in Art, is that it precedes by 29 years the beginning of the sunspot temperature connection outlined in Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen’s Science 1991 article Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated with Climate.
Neuberger’s hypothesis was that,
…a statistically adequate sample of paintings executed by many painters living during a given period in a given region should reveal meteorological features significantly different from those of a similar sample of paintings produced during the same epoch in a climatically different region.
He studied over 12,000 paintings in 41 European and American art museums. The period of coverage was from 1400 to 1967. Various definitions were assigned to standardize the categories including the US airways code of four categories,
“clear (less than 10% of the visible sky covered by clouds)”,
“scattered (10 to 50% clouds)”
“broken (60 to 90% clouds)”
“overcast (more than 90% clouds)
He divided the 1400 to 1967 span into three epochs as shown in Figure 7 (Figure 12 in the original article).
Figure 7: Neuberger’s caption, “Epochal changes of various painting features”
He labeled the epochs,
1400 – 1549 the pre-culmination period of the Little Ice Age
1550 – 1849, the culmination period which contains the “years without a summer”
1850 – 1967, the post-culmination period in which a definite retreat of glaciers and substantial atmospheric warming occurred.
When he broke this down by 50 – year epochs the percentages for average cloudiness were dramatic ranging from 29% for 1400 – 1449 to 77% for 1550 – 1599. As he noted,
The frequency of low and convective clouds also shows a sharp change from the first to the second epoch reflecting the deterioration of the weather throughout Europe.
Figure 8: From a cloud study by Constable (1821).
J.M.W. Turner, a contemporary of Constable’s, also painted landscapes with extensive displays of clouds. He was more intrigued by the changing light conditions particularly after the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Because of this his works are considered early English impressionism.
Conclusion
A critical part of climate reconstruction is to obtain corroborating information from different independent sources. This early empirical study by Neuberger supports Svensmark’s hypothesis that changing solar activity creates changing lower cloud cover, which causes changing temperatures.
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I suspect most alarmists would only consider socialist realist art, and they don’t do clouds.
There are hundreds of studies that show the medieval warming period existed worldwide and of the studies that show the little ice age, the majority show it existed. only mann and couple of other cherry picked tree proxies show otherwise. why do we need to look at paintings? there is clear evidence such as uncovering farms in greenland etc without having to rely on artists impressions.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
are we sure this is tim ball that posted this?
Blackadderthe4th,
“Svensmark’s Cosmic Theory ”
“This one’s so easy to debunk”
So a video on You Tube showing a few sentences by R. Alley ” debunks Svensmark .
Any peer reviewed papers from Alley ?
Let him write a paper rebutting Yu, F. and Gan Luo , ” Effect of Solar variations on particle formation and cloud condensation nuclei.” Environmental Research Letters , April 9, 2014.
Or perhaps he might write a paper in response to ” The Role of Solar Activity in Global Warming” , by S.V. Avakyan,Herald of The Russian Academy of Sciences 2013,Vol 83,no 3 pp. 275-285.
I don’t think your opinion or that of Alley that ” We know it’s not the Sun ” is very convincing.
We have artists of a certain type ‘modeling’ / describing a sky / climate.
We have scientists of a certain type ‘modeling’ / describing a sky / climate.
Is one of those situations any less epistemologically filtered in its physical representality than the other? Especial knowing how IPCC subservient scientists do research and how peer review isn’t often criticality conducted on their research.
Interesting comparisons are possible.
John
Ever notice how many Christmas carols, usually concerning winter and cold, were written during the LIA?
The lack of sunspots usually allows more galactic sub atomic particles actually hitting the earth.
This was well known actually and I learned about this years ago at university. In fact a scientist employed by a fishers authority to investigate why anchovies were in short supply some years more than others. There was more rain fall flowing into the sea and anchovies moved away. The CERN report mentioned this a few years ago regarding cloud formation.
Studying the sun would most probably be too much hard work for alarmists. Yet everyone knows frost does not form if there is cloud cover, and without cloud cover desert temperatures plunge at night and always have.
As far as artists, well there are drawings of the ice fairs held on the Thames, and as we all know, wine growing was hit hard during the mini ice age even in Britain. But they turned the old grape presses into printing presses. This really was a important phase in human cultures, if you could read of course. Books were really for the rich at first, but without them now, we would be not so well informed.
About Christmas Carols, LOL, well Jesus was supposed to have been born in winter, and it corresponds with a lot of pagan winter festivals, Saturnalia, Anglo Saxon and Celtic when food was in short supply. Then Yule of course, the 12 days of Christmas. Each country had their own version of the winter soltise.
When was the Zieder Zee constructed, maybe our Dutch poster could answer that, wasn’t that in the late 40s? As the Netherlands (low countries) were being swamped by the North Sea, they reclaimed the land.
Figure 8: From a cloud study by Constable (1821).
Lookin’ like that noctilucent structure he’s trying to get here..
Now here in Wisconsin been quite noticeable this spring that if it weren’t for the clouds it might start warming up some.. clouds clouds go away and let the sunshine in ..
Oh, in Australia, first colonized in 1788, some of our Christmas cards, have Father Christmas, being driven by white kangaroos, not reindeer. Or Santa sitting on a beach in his swimmers, having a quiet beer. Somehow being English, and always following a traditional Christmas fare,
it ain’t ‘alf hot cooking a roast in Australia, with sweat pouring down one’s face. Just doesn’t seem as Christmas to me. But I am used to it now, especially as one year we had snow two days before Christmas, a extreme weather event.
Well I have some of Constables prints, and they show lots of green trees. And cathedrals of course, and country life. I know when I lived in UK, snow generally was not seen until after Christmas, unless you lived in Scotland. But one year we woke up on Christmas Day with snow.
That was in Liverpool, UK.
Mark Bofill says:
April 24, 2014 at 1:10 pm
“I wonder when those were, and if there were significant corresponding temperature anomaly fluctuations around those events?”
To quote from http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/do-clouds-disappear-4/ (although, of course, this is just a excerpt with the link best gone to directly):
“The focus was on the “natural experiments” in which big puffs of gas from the Sun block some of the cosmic rays coming from the Galaxy towards the Earth. The resulting falls in cosmic ray influx, called Forbush decreases, last for a few days. The game is to look for observable reductions in cloudiness in the aftermath of these events. The results are most clearly favourable to the Svensmark hypothesis for the Forbush decreases with the largest percentage reductions in cosmic rays. Scientists keen to falsify the hypothesis have only to mix in some of the weaker events for the untidiness of the world’s weather to “hide the decline”.
The Serbs avoid that blunder by picking out the strongest Forbush decreases. And by using the simple, reliable and long-provided weather-station measurements of temperature by night and day, they avoid technical, interpretive and data-availability problems that surround more direct observations of clouds and their detailed properties. The temperatures come from 184 stations scattered all across Europe (actually, so I notice, from Greenland to Siberia). A compilation by the Mount Washington Observatory that spans four decades, from 1954 to 1995, supplies the catalogue of Forbush decreases.
The prime results are seen here in Dragić et al.‘s Figure 5. The graphs show the increase in the diurnal temperature range averaged across the continent in the days following the onset of cosmic ray decreases (day 0 on the horizontal scales). The upper panel is the result for 22 Forbush events in the range 7−10%, with a peak at roughly +0.35 C in the diurnal temperature range. The lower panel is for 13 events greater than 10%. The peak goes to +0.6 C and the influence lasts longer. It’s very satisfactory for the Svensmark hypothesis that the effect increases like this, with greater reductions in the cosmic rays. The results become hard (impossible?) to explain by any mechanism except an influence of cosmic rays on cloud formation.
To be candid, these results are much better than I’d have expected for observations from a densely populated continent with complex weather patterns, where air pollution and effects of vegetation confuse the picture of available cloud condensation nuclei. Svensmark’s team has emphasized the observable effects over the oceans.“
strike says:
April 24, 2014 at 1:41 pm
@rgb
“Is it colder because it is cloudier, or cloudier because it is colder? The pictures do not and cannot reveal that. All they can do is show that cloudier and colder tend to go together, which is surely no surprise”
You’re statement is correct for a summerday, but is wrong for winters, at least my european ones. They only get really cold without clouds. Maybe this is different in Your warmer regions?
____________
My experience from living a decade in the Yukon east of Laberge concurs. In the winter, clear days equal colder days and cloudy days equal warmer days. I think this is easy to understand. Cloudy days are somewhat more humid than clear days and the humidity ameliorates the temperature to some extent. Although, with the sun fairly high above the horizon, a clear and cold day can ‘feel’ warmer when you’re exposed to direct sunlight.
However, as far as climate goes, the fluctuations of temperatures during winter don’t really matter very much. Once it goes below the freezing point of water: it’s cold, period. Everything is either dead or dormant until temperatures go above and stay above the freezing point again.
In the summer, however, it’s the reverse. Sunny days are warmer and cloudy days are colder. This has a profound effect, for instance on crops. A cool, cloudy (and especially wet) spring can delay planting beyond the point of viability. Long season crops may fail entirely. A cloudy and cool summer growing season can retard plant growth, reducing the harvest significantly in the fall.
I have turned up my Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology, now out of print, it was a prescribed book for me in my first year at UNE. Regarding ice ages, the causation factors are varied, but volcanic dust is one factor thought to be involved, as well as orbit, and ocean currents, as the glaciers took over the rain cycles were involved and so was the sun. However, one mention is cutting down trees can alter precipitation. This was discovered in the Amazon basin over a ten year research project, that removing rain forests
in very large tracts, drove the clouds up higher and altered precipitation in places as much as 200 miles away. There suggestion was to avoid this to leave tracts of rainforest in place, to almost equal the amount of land cleared.
Thanks, Dr. Ball. Good art research, good science.
rgbatduke says:
April 24, 2014 at 1:10 pm
Correlation not being causality, it is better stated that there is a correlation between cloudiness and reported average temperatures. However, it isn’t necessarily the case that the Svensmark hypothesis is the causal basis. I could just as easily state that the cause is purely orbital, or due to variations in solar state other than solar magnetic, or due to variations in aerosol levels and consequent all-source albedo (both direct and from the aerosol/cloud secondary connection) from sources other than cosmic rays.
Is it colder because it is cloudier, or cloudier because it is colder? The pictures do not and cannot reveal that. All they can do is show that cloudier and colder tend to go together, which is surely no surprise, even as it doesn’t in and of itself prove or disprove any particular mechanism (where there might well be more than one!) producing the correlation.
Just before anybody gets carried away with the notion that this is “proof” of the Svensmark hypothesis…
++++++++++++
Good points, however the opposite would tend to disprove the theory. If the evidence from art was clear (not cloudy).
I am not going to argue about art but there is imaginative art and landscape art. 16th century
art is mainly concerned with portraits but Constable was for recreating English landscapes.
So were the French impressionists of the 19th Century. Just because it shows snow in any of them means it snowed. Period. It depends on which season clouds are plentiful. In summer and warmer months the temps drop if there is cloud cover, in Winter they tend to keep temps a bit warmer. There are so many variables.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Hendrick_Avercamp_-_Winterlandschap_met_ijsvermaak.jpg
http://www.zeeburgnieuws.nl/nieuws/images/hendrick_haverkamp_ijspret.jpg
http://historianet.nl/files/bonnier-his/imagecache/630×420/pictures/140686_18_0203_01.jpghttp://www.faqt.nl/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/pompenburg.jpg
http://www.cobra.be/polopoly_fs/1.651373!image/2627964354.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape670/2627964354.jpg
http://www.cobra.be/polopoly_fs/1.651404!image/342223212.jpg
http://www.cobra.be/polopoly_fs/1.651409!image/2602900684.jpg
http://www.cobra.be/polopoly_fs/1.651408!image/688242908.jpg
http://www.cobra.be/polopoly_fs/1.651410!image/2789553532.jpg
http://static1.trouw.nl/static/photo/2012/10/15/8/20120102192350/media_xl_1060628.jpg
The list is long …
“The global cloud cover has a clear overall cooling effect on the planet, even though the net effect of high and low clouds are opposite.”
“The overall reflectance (albedo) of planet Earth is about 30 percent, meaning that about 30 percent of the incoming shortwave solar radiation is radiated back to space. If all clouds were removed, the global albedo would decrease to about 15 percent, and the amount of shortwave energy available for warming the planet surface would increase from 239 W/m2 to 288 W/m2 (Hartmann 1994). However, the longwave radiation would also be affected, with 266 W/m2 being emitted to space, compared to the present 234 W/m2 (Hartmann 1994). The net effect of removing all clouds would therefore still be an increase in net radiation of about 17 W/m2.”
“Within the still short period of satellite cloud cover observations, the total global cloud cover reached a maximum of about 69 percent in 1987 and a minimum of about 64 percent in 2000 (see diagram above), a decrease of about 5 percent. This decrease roughly corresponds to a radiative net change of about 0.9 W/m2 within a period of only 13 years, which may be compared with the total net change from 1750 to 2006 of 1.6 W/m2 of all climatic drivers as estimated in the IPCC 2007 report, including release of greenhouse gasses from the burning of fossil fuels. These observations leave little doubt that cloud cover variations may have a profound effect on global climate and meteorology on almost any time scale considered.”
http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateAndClouds.htm
Anyway, as in the above, generally on average the net effect of increased cloudiness is substantial cooling, dominated by reflectance of daytime sunlight, although clouds in the night do warm in the sense of slowing cooling and although cloud type (altitude) matters.
Do not forget Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’, setting in tunes the poems by Wilhelm Müller written under the impression of the Dalton Minimum.
“River, once so restless
Flowing fast and bright
Why are you now so still
Lifeless, chilled and silent
A hard and icy case
Is now your winter prison
You lie cold and dreary
Pressed fast upon the earth”
omnologos says:
“Has anybody ever seen a bristlecone artist?”
No, but we’ve all seen a bristlecone con-artist.
Constable was one of the first artists to actually paint the countryside while in the countryside and for it’s own sake , rather than a back drop to a portrait or some classical or biblical scene. If there was one artist i would trust to paint clouds accurately it would be Constable. Also the Dutch/Flemish realists of the 16-17 centuries painted accurate records
When the Dutch/Flemish painted pictures of classical or biblical themes they often set them in contemporary vistas.
@Herbert says:
April 24, 2014
‘So a video on You Tube showing a few sentences by R. Alley ” debunks Svensmark’
Well they seem pretty sound evidence to me!
‘the cosmic rays came streaming in…we had a big cosmic ray signal and the CLIMATE IGNORES IT and it’s just about that simple’
And no doubt he has more evidence on the effect, the graphs he shows are very convincing!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgAuMWDHy30
If you look closely at Pieter Breughel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow, you will see that the people on the lake are Curling. [You know. The game with rocks and brushes played on ice].
Just a useless bit of trivia. But this painting was not in Scotland, where the Scots claimed to have “invented” curling. [Their claim would be that they set the rules of the game]
I am a painter and the paintings could be an indicator, but I agree with Pamela. There is not enough evidence. I vary my skies depending on the picture.
The CRE [Cosmic Ray Effect] is interesting in that it is controlled by the sun. This, to me, is far more realistic, than the UN IPCC’s burning-fossil-fuels-releasing-CO2-forming-a-blanket-trapping-heat-leading-to-Thermageddon, aka the GHE [green House Effect]
You’re statement is correct for a summerday, but is wrong for winters, at least my european ones. They only get really cold without clouds. Maybe this is different in Your warmer regions?
No, you are quite correct. Clouds are an awesome reflector of not only LWR but SWR as well — they simply have high albedo and reflect a very large fraction of incident light back as specular multiple reflection (I recall around 90%, but I’m far from sure of that number and don’t feel like looking up the right one). They are white white as seen from above in sunlight because they are collectively reflecting most of the sunlight right on back up.
Beneath the clouds in the daytime, they are cooling. Even in the winter, they can be cooling during the day in the sense that they prevent some of the warming attendant on sunshine. At night, clouds are more often warming, as they block outgoing radiation. They can either REALLY be warming — clouds can easily be inverted relative to ground temperatures and can radiate more energy down than they receive back for a while if they are the result of bulk transport of warm wet air — or they can passively prevent cooling by trapping and backradiating thermal radiation from the surface even more efficiently than “greenhouse gases”.
From what I recall, clouds are on average cooling in temperate through tropical latitudes, and are on average warming in the polar regions. This can locally in space and time easily depend on cloud height and dynamics, though. Daytime vs nighttime can easily depend on what kind of clouds they are — some clouds form during the day from updrafted moisture and tend to come and go diurnally, other clouds form over a comparatively long time and are persistent. Anthony could probably speak chapter and verse on clouds — it’s part of his thing. One way clouds can affect climate, though, is very simple. Clouds have a very high albedo, and are responsible for a substantial fraction of the Earth’s mean albedo. An increase of a few percent in relative average albedo is enough to, on average, drop the Earth’s mean surface temperature by as much as 2 C (the computation is pretty easy to do — it takes incoming insolation off of the top, so to speak).
This is a really interesting potential source of natural variation. The sun may not vary its output by more than a few tenths of a percent (at least within our period of accurate observation) but albedo is considerably more variable with fluctuations on the order of 5%. What isn’t really known is whether or not there is any sort of long term pattern or structure to albedo variation — what are the factors that make it vary other than random fluctuation? The Earthlight project (and more recently satellite observations) reveal that albedo might be a far more serious contributor to climate than previously thought, far more important than CO_2 increases in the short run. Its sensitivity to planetary temperature is also a very important open question — if it automagically increases with temperature, the feedback is negative and might well cancel, on average, most of the greenhouse warming (and help keep planetary temperatures as stable as they apparently are).
rgb