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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Contemporary art and contemporary literature both support the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. It has been clear to me ever since I first saw the “hockey stick” that Mann does not know anything about the history, literature or art of the time period reflected in his “science”.
Got this far: “…but with no proven mechanism it was correctly set aside.”
Darwin provided no good mechanism–only good correlation–and his theory could not be correctly set aside. Mendel provided a mathematical mechanism–theoretical genetics. The true mechanisms continue to be spelled out: genes, genetic drift, etc. Correlation equates to causation. To deny this is to deny the usefulness of statistics. –AGF
Darwin provided no good mechanism–only good correlation–and his theory could not be correctly set aside. Mendel provided a mathematical mechanism–theoretical genetics. The true mechanisms continue to be spelled out: genes, genetic drift, etc. Correlation equates to causation. To deny this is to deny the usefulness of statistics. –AGF
Hence, ladies and gentlemen, it is easy to demonstrate that smoking causes pregnancy (to cite a single example from actual stats textbooks), as well as heroin addiction. Green jelly beans cause acne. Poverty causes an inheritable excess of melanin in the skin. Fondness for classical music causes wealth. The passing of time itself causes increasing average intelligence (the Flynn effect).
Much as I appreciate what you are trying to say, let’s say it more carefully. Post hoc ergo propter hoc — after a thing therefore because of a thing — is indeed a logical fallacy because it is trivial to come up with literally uncountable examples of correlation that is not, in fact, causality. Some observed correlation is purely statistically accidental, and only comes to our attention via inadvertent data dredging (green jelly beans cause acne). Some observed correlations between A and B does not indicate a causal relationship between A and B at all, but rather a common relationship with C (smoking causes pregnancy and heroin addiction, the Flynn effect). Some observed correlation is enormously complex and arises in spite of the lack of any proximate cause and can only be understood in terms of history, chance, sociology, custom (poverty and skin color, classical music and wealth). Some correlations that are asserted aren’t even valid correlations or are observed only in specific milieu and don’t even indicate a secondary identifiable causality, only complex accident.
At the same time, while correlation is not causality, in the end it’s all we’ve got to make sense of the world. In that sense I agree with you. But “making sense” itself only makes sense in the context of building an entire, reasonably consistent, evidence supported worldview that is basically a self-consistent network of Bayesian (joint and conditional) probability statements that function as mutually supporting prior and posterior probabilities. When certain parts of that structure are so strongly validated by statistical analysis of observation and experimentation that we come to believe that there are (probably) no exception to the rules, we transform them into Bayesian priors with such high probability of truth that it might as well be unity — they become Boolean/Aristotelian constraints of posterior reasoning. When we have enough of these priors that they leave very few gaps in the chain of reasoning from the near-certain priors, through a new conditional hypothesis (that some particular causal structure produces some given observational correlation), to posterior probabilities in excellent agreement with posterior observation, we consider the correlation to indeed be the result of the cause.
Until this happens, though, we cannot be certain — or even reasonably certain — that an observed correlation of A and B is indicative of proximate causality (A causes B) or even secondary causality (a single common, mutual cause C causes A and B). Beyond that, we have entire networks of interlinked causes and really do need to show a strong agreement and consistency with the priors before anyone takes the hypothesis of causality too seriously.
This abuse of logical and/or statistical fallacies is a major problem with the climate debate both ways. For example: The global average surface temperature increased significantly during the 15 year span from roughly 1983 to 1998 (and varied much less strongly on either side of that interval). That span coincided with a period in which atmospheric CO_2 increased. Therefore, the atmospheric CO_2 increase caused the temperature increase. Pure correlation equals causality.
However, if one examines the data more broadly, one observes that the temperature increased quite strongly during the interval from roughly 1910 to 1940 as well, and that during this interval the increase in atmospheric CO_2 was negligible. One observes that from roughly 1943 to 1973 the temperature decreased slowly, although atmospheric CO_2 increased strongly. One observes that from 1998 to the present, the temperature has remained roughly flat while atmospheric CO_2 has increased strongly. One goes further back in the climate record (with ever lower precision associated with the increasingly proxy-derived picture of the climate) and notes times in the comparatively recent historical past when the climate rapidly and substantially warmed and cooled — so much so that they are named eras — with virtually no variation in atmospheric CO_2.
All of these are confounding data — they contradict the assertion of a strong, predictive relationship between CO_2 concentration alone and average temperature. In some cases the evidence shows that the climate can naturally vary substantially without the contribution or influence of variable CO_2. In other cases the evidence shows that monotonic CO_2 variation is a poor predictor of climate trends. Both substantially degrade the probable truth of an assertion of a strong, necessary causal relationship between monotonically increasing CO_2 and the non-monotonic temperature variations of the latter half of the 20th century and first 7th of the 21st century, in spite of the monotonic correlation observed in the 1980s and 1990s.
However, this sort of analysis cuts both ways. The data suggests that the CO_2 “signal” to natural “noise” ratio is not large, but it hardly excludes the possibility that there is no CO_2 signal. Given that we have Bayesian priors that we believe quite strongly — radiation physics, fluid physics, and well-known, easily measured CO_2 spectroscopy — that unambiguously predict that increasing atmospheric CO_2 will have a direct, proximate effect on the average temperature of an increase between 1 and 1.5 C by the time concentration reaches 600 ppm, given that we can clearly see that the climate can and often does vary on nearly this scale over a century without any help from CO_2, given our substantial ignorance of the nonlinear interactions that act as regulatory feedbacks within the climate system, we are left with the distinct possibilities that the climate could actually cool as negative feedbacks eliminate most of the CO_2 linked warming and natural cycles carry the Earth into a cooling phase, that the climate could remain nearly neutral as feedbacks and natural variation effectively cancel CO_2-linked warming within noise, or that the climate would warm by as much as 1 to 1.5 C or more because of net positive feedbacks and/or help from natural variation. The only thing we are required to be especially careful of is any assertion that natural variation is necessarily going to be less important than CO_2, as that is likely to be true only in the very long run based on our observational knowledge of the natural variability of the past.
Until we can solve the complete, coupled, nonlinear, chaotic, multivariate physics problem at a sufficiently fine scale and with sufficiently precise specification of the initial conditions that the computation has reasonable predictive skill, our knowledge of the data only — that is, the visible correlations between different factors and/or observations — has incredibly limited utility. It at best enables us to establish crude bounds and sanity checks on egregious assertions of causal relationships between parameters and observations by preventing them from being cherrypicked or data dredged out of the morass of data available at different sampling, resolution, quality, precision and with vastly different probable errors that themselves vary over time (a data miner’s playground, open invitation to confirmation-bias directed searches). Thus the 80s and 90s don’t prove CAGW, and the 2000s don’t disprove it. The GCMs don’t prove it either, not until they work where at this point, they manifestly are not working. There may or may not be correlations between sunspot levels and solar activity and global temperature — whether there are or there aren’t, the correlations aren’t enough to prove causality and neither is a theory that predicts a correlation if that correlation is not observed in the future, looking for it with good instrumentation, however uncertain any discussion of “corrected” or “uncorrected” sunspot levels observed in the past must necessarily be.
Correlation is not causality, but physics is what we name our most firmly held Bayesian priors for the establishment of causality that explains any given correlation. Explanations that violate physical law are held to be very improbable. Explanations that violate “higher order” laws in chemistry, biology, or in other slightly softer sciences are also treated with well-deserved suspicion, as their truth in some sense contradicts our well-established, observationally verified beliefs, which are further strengthened in most cases with causal chain connections back to still more fundamental and strongly held beliefs. One cannot reason in a scientific vacuum, or reason on the basis of statistics alone.
That’s the major problem I have with numerology in climate science. It is absolutely true that one can come up with very simple numerological models for the global average temperature (according to e.g. HADCRUT4) from 1850 to the present. It is possible to get a very decent fit to the data with a single term linear in time plus a single term that is harmonic in time with a period of ballpark 60 years. One can connect the 60 year period with all sorts of things — planetary conjunctions, the phase of the PDO, whatever you like. One can connect the linear behavior with whatever you like — slowly increasing CO_2, slowly warming oceans post the Little Ice Age with its unknown proximate causes, slowly varying levels of vulcanism, slowly varying levels of solar activity, all of the above in various patterns of coincidence. The problem is that without the underlying, directly computable physical explanation, in the end all you ever have is numerology, not a scientific understanding.
Humans observed correlations between the phases of the moon and sun and the tides long, long before the causal explanation of tides was understood, either in the “simple” sense of understanding the actual proximate cause in terms of accelerating-frame pseudoforces or the far more difficult to compute sense of being able to combine that proximate cause with the fluid behavior of the oceans as shaped and directed by the continents into a wave description that works well enough to have predictive value. But until the latter was known, the former was no more meaningful than the correlation between the lunar orbital period and the solar diurnal period, which are not causally connected in any meaningful sense, although both share the same underlying causal mechanism. In fact, share it with the tides.
rgb
agfosterjr says:
April 25, 2014 at 8:05 am
Darwin & Wallace did discover a good mechanism, ie natural selection, to explain the observation that previously lacked a good mechanism, ie the fact that species originate from other species such that the suite of species changes over time. For about a lifetime before “Origin of Species”, at least since the demonstration of extinction by Cuvier, “transmutation of species”, ie evolution of living things from other living things rather than divine special creation, had been a recognized but not scientifically well explained phenomenon. Today other evolutionary processes besides natural selection are known, but it’s still observed to be important in the development of living things.
As a contribution to the temperature records, the required cold conditions for the Dutch Elfstedentocht (the Eleven Cities Iceskating Race) have only been present 15 times in the last 100 years. The race requires about three weeks of very cold weather.
2 January 1909
7 February 1912
27 January 1917
12 February 1929
16 December 1933
30 January 1940
7 February 1941
22 January 1942
8 February 1947
3 February 1954
14 February 1956
18 January 1963
21 February 1985
26 February 1986
4 January 1997
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfstedentocht#Winners
Ralph
Don’t forget the work by Japanese scientists who discovered that muons produced when cosmic ray protons hit O2 and N2 molecules directly weaken silica rich volcanic calderas. Hence during times of prolonged low solar activity there eventually will be higher volcanic activity. Cloud cover is directly affected by volcanic activity, particularly in the immediate vicinity of volcanoes. Stratospheric clouds are particularly influenced by volcanic activity if that activity is strong enough to eject SO2 and particulates into the stratosphere. However the troposphere varies in thickness. It is up to three times as thick at the equator as it is at the poles at winter. This means that relatively weak volcanic eruptions close to the poles can produce stratospheric clouds in higher latitudes.
When the sun’s magnetic field is low then the cosmic rays reaching the polar regions increases faster than at the equator. All this means that volcanoes close to the poles become more active during low sunspot activity and can more directly affect the weather in high latitudes. So it is possible that the Northern Hemisphere polar jet streams is being modulated by the extra-ordinary volcanic activity on the Kamchatka peninsular and this is an indirect effect of the relatively low level of the sun’s magnetic field.
This is a further mechanism to produce clouds so is additional to those more directly produced by cosmic rays.
Nature is very complex., Its complexity is beyond the comprehension of simpletons who would have us believe that carbon dioxide plays an important role in climate matters.
J. G. Roederer has aptly remarked:
“The energy argument is not valid for highly nonlinear complex systems such as the coupled atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere-biosphere. It is well known that complex systems can behave chaotically, i.e., follow very different paths after the smallest change in initial or boundary conditions, or in response to the smallest perturbation. In a highly nonlinear system with large reservoirs of latent energy such as the atmosphere-ocean-biosphere, global redistributions of energy can be triggered by very small inputs, a process that depends far more on their spatial and temporal pattern than on their magnitude.”
Thus important may be the duration of action of cosmic radiation and its distribution, regardless of the total energy.
rgbatduke says:
April 25, 2014 at 6:45 am
Thanks for your explanations, I’ll use them as an inspiration for further privat research..
Reference, please (to the Japanese paper)? I’m aware of the muon production mechanism and did a senior physics lab on the lifetime of the muon, but from my direct experience doing that lab, I’d be very surprised if muon flux could have a discernible effect on bulk matter within any one to two order of magnitude variation of its baseline rate. It’s just too low — it would take centuries or longer to matter. You might as well cite muons as a source of global warming heat as they catalyze fusion in molecular hydrogen or other materials — something that actually happens, but at a pathetically slow rate because of the lack of significant muon flux. Radiation can certainly weaken structures, but direct neutron flux is bound to be far more important for several reasons:
a) A neutron is roughly 9 times more massive than a muon. All things being equal (both travelling at relativistic velocity) a neutron will do more damage where it hits.
b) A muon is charged. That means that it interacts strongly with matter, in particular with electrons (it is basically a heavy electron). It can slow gradually while passing through denser matter and cause nothing more than transient dislocations or ionizations of electrons — spreading the “heat” of its collision around. It also has very little penetrating distance and stops comparatively close to the surface of the first dense matter it encounters. A neutron is electrically neutral. It more or less ignores electrons and interacts directly with nuclei it encounters. When it hits a nucleus, it communicates a large amount of energy/momentum directly to the nucleus, which can easily cause dislocations in a crystal structure. Neutron embrittlement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrittlement of surrounding materials is a well studied phenomena in the context of nuclear reactors. I’ve never heard anyone worry about muon embrittlement, although those same reactors produce many muons.
c) A muon has a half-life of around 2 microseconds. A free neutron has a half life of around 15 minutes. This strictly limits what a muon can do. We wouldn’t even observe them at ground level if it weren’t for relativistic time dilation/length contraction that gives them time (or shrinks for the muon the distance) to the ground from where they are produced far overhead.
So why go to the extremes of using muons for the hypothesis instead of directly using the increased neutron flux? Which again, I seriously doubt is sufficient to cause large scale structural degradation of rock to the extent that they enable vulcanism on a decadal time scale.
rgb
November 2010
Muons of course are the galactic cosmic “rays” often fingered in the creation of cloud condensation nuclei. Stanford Linear Accelerator site used to have an excellent presentation on how this formation worked, but of course the Thought Police have taken it down. Lief suggested it was for budgetary reasons, but my doubts remain.
Oops. Missing part of the citation.
Toshikazu Ebiska, Hiroko Miyahara, Tatsuhiko Sato, Yasuhiro Ishimine: Explosive volcanic eruptions triggered by cosmic rays: Volcano as a bubble chamber- – Godwana Research, November 2010
RGB:
From a recent actuarial risk paper, posted without comment:
There are a number of scientific papers that link low periods of sunspot activity with increased seismic activity and particularly during solar grand minimums8687. One paper by a multi-disciplinary team of Japanese scientists drawn from Riken Advanced Science Institute, the Institute of Cosmic Ray Research (University of Tokyo), The Japan Atomic Energy Agency and the Riken Computational Science Research Program88 showed how muons can affect the calderas of certain volcanos and how increased densities of muons can cause explosive eruptions. They do this by changing the chemical composition of matter within silica rich magma, particularly when it is cool, so that aerosols are formed, which eventually lead to increased pressure within the magma chamber and hence explosive eruptions. Presumably a steady state is reached with normal muon penetration of the caldera but with significantly more than usual muons and perhaps when they have higher energies than normal then disequilibrium occurs. If this occurs in active volcanoes then presumably it also occurs in extinct volcanos.
Perhaps higher muon densities during solar grand minimums can weaken some caldera enough to enable the release of pressures in earthquake fault lines produced when the volcano was active. This might be the reason why the Christchurch earthquakes are occurring at this time. (Christchurch is located next to volcanoes on Banks Peninsular that were last active around 8 million years ago and apparently has complex volcanic geology beneath the shingle fan on which it is located). By the end of January 2012 Christchurch had experienced over 10,100 earthquakes in just over 17 months. The Christchurch earthquakes were also relatively shallow. The February 22nd 2011 earthquake that killed 186 people was only about 4 kilometers below the surface. These earthquakes were caused by movement of existing crustal fault lines presumably formed when the volcanoes were active. These fault lines also radiate from the main Alpine fault line where both the Pacific and Indo-Australian tectonic plates are thrusting up the Southern Alps and this is contributing factor.
The current increased muon activity might also help to explain the swarm of more than 10,000 earthquakes in a few months in 2011 on the German/ Czech Republic border, also at the site of an extinct volcano. This follows 8,000 earthquakes some three years earlier, also occurring within a few months.
86 Correlation of Solar Activity Minimums and Large Magnitude Geophysical Events: John L. Casey, Space and Science Research Center, March 2010
87 Ivanka Charvatova, Institut of Geophysics of AS CR, Bočni II, 141 31 Praha 4, Czech Republic: Long-term relations between the solar inertial motion (SIM) and solar, geomagnetic, volcanic activities and climate
88 ToshikazuEbiska, Hiroko Miyahara, Tatsuhiko Sato, Yasuhiro Ishimine: Explosive volcanic eruptions triggered by cosmic rays: Volcano as a bubble chamber- – Godwana Research, November 2010
To quote from the wikipedia article on muons:
molecules. Let’s assume that all 10,000 muons are stopped in this single cubic meter. Then every second, a mere 167 muons traverse and stop in the cubic meter. If we divide 100 into 10^28 (ignoring order unity parameters) we would need 10^26 seconds to have an average of one muon stop in the cubic meter per molecule already there.
eV! Is that a lot of energy? Well, let’s multiply by 
Joules/eV and get (ignoring factors of order unity) 
Watts being delivered to the cubic meter of rock. It would take a whole year to deliver a single, solitary Joule.
“About 10,000 muons reach every square meter of the earth’s surface a minute”. This sounds like a lot but it is not. Furthermore, those muons are stopped/absorbed so that their flux exponentially attenuates with depth with a penetration depth on the order of a few tens of meters, so that while some muons do penetrate to as much as a kilometer, one is likely down to a flux of a few muons per square meter per minute.
Now some simple arithmetic. Let’s take 1 cubic meter of water — that’s 1000 kg of water. The molar weight of water is 18 gms. Thus there are roughly 56000 moles of water in a cubic meter. That is
A year is order 10^7 seconds. The lifetime of the Universe is 10^10 years, or 10^17 seconds. It would therefore take on the order of a billion lifetimes of the Universe (so far) to reach a 1:1 ratio of muon stopping to molecules in the sample.
Of course, one really has far fewer than this to work with. Only maybe 1/3 are stopped in (say) the first 30 meters of rock, and of course rock is much more dense than water. So one has maybe 1/100th of this much flux to work with in a cubic meter of rock. Order of one muon stopping per cubic meter per second, which is incidentally very close to what I observed doing experiments on muons personally 40 years ago.
I have to say that I don’t think rock is going to respond in any measurable way to being tickled by a single muon, or 100 muons, or 1000 muons, or very likely 10,000 muons, per second per cubic meter. The energy flux is a good measure of this. Suppose there were 10,000 muons, each carrying 2x their rest energy or 200 MeV. That’s
That’s why I think that any assertion that muons modulate vulcanism is pure crack. Even if one multiplies out the energy delivered by another order of magnitude, or three (assuming that the muons catalyze some sort of exothermic nuclear fusion, for example) one ends up many orders of magnitude short of what is reasonably needed to produce a detectable effect over decades. Perhaps the authors think that the Brehmstrahlung that slows the muons imparts enough energy to be chemically significant in the slowing process, but again, I don’t care, take all of the rest energy, multiply it by 1000, do anything you like with it — and you are still orders of magnitude short. You just can’t get there from here with a flux on the order of 1-1000 muons/second per square meter, with exponentially cutoff delivery from the surface on down.
Muons do not heat the earth. Nor do they catalyze sufficient interesting chemistry to affect the earth. I rarely make statements like this, so it is probably wrong when I do, but somebody is going to have to show me some sort of back of the envelope estimate to get me to even take the proposal seriously.
rgb
Could the answer to the question be in the interstellar cloud variations of ACR and GCR?
“Why was there a transition from a 40,000-year cycle to a 100,000-year cycle?” Buizert said
————————————-
Ice dating from Krypton
Posted on April 21, 2014 by Anthony Watts
…Buizert said reconstructing the Earth’s climate back to 1.5 million years is important because a shift in the frequency of ice ages took place in what is known as the Middle Pleistocene transition. The Earth is thought to have shifted in and out of ice ages every 100,000 years or so during the past 800,000 years, but there is evidence that such a shift took place every 40,000 years prior to that time.
“Why was there a transition from a 40,000-year cycle to a 100,000-year cycle?” Buizert said. “Some people believe a change in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide may have played a role. That is one reason we are so anxious to find ice that will take us back further in time so we can further extend data on past carbon dioxide levels and test this hypothesis.”…
The paper preprint: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.6201v1
Radiometric 81Kr dating identifies 120,000 year old ice at Taylor Glacier, Antarctica
______________________________________
“”“Why was there a transition from a 40,000-year cycle to a 100,000-year cycle?” Buizert said.”””
“”” the Sun would cross these clouds with a mean crossing time of 47, 000 years.””” P. Frisch”””
Pricilla Frisch asks a good question in the following article.
Boy oh boy did that post get scrambled. Not how I had it layed out when the post comment button was clicked..
Frisch also tries to spell out why the divergence between 14C and 10Be in the paleomagnetic record. Whilst the 10be is in agreement with and the 14C is not..
I am sorry I didn’t give the reference. I have referred to that japanese paper before on this website. My grateful thanks to Milodonharlani for referencing it for me and also to rgbatduke for quoting directly from my paper entitled “Extraterrestrial Influences on Nature’s Risks”. The Japanese paper is paywalled. This paper does help to explain why there eventually seems to be more volcanic eruptions during periods of low solar magnetic storm activity. But, of course, it is only one component of nature’s complex web of intersecting forces.
Rgbatduke’s analysis is interesting but he is working from a starting point of an inactive volcano. The volcanoes that are, or can be affected, are more or less just temporarily in a state of equilibrium with only small changes in their calderas necessary for a fresh eruption. Increased muon activity apparently causes a reduction in the surface tension of bubbles within the magma and if this tips the balance between the activating and dampening mechanisms within the magma then eventually an explosive eruption will be triggered. But you will need to read the paper to understand the mechanics of this.
Incidentally the paper also mentions the increase in large earthquakes (M > 7.5) during this period on low solar activity but don’t give an explanation of this. My own view is that the increase is due to the extra amount tidal force friction, which has been converted into mechanical heat deep within the mantle, resulting from near planetary line-up that occurred in the early part of this century. Earth crossed this gravitational force field many times when the gas giants were more-or less aligned and their small but additional gravitational pull would have been added at times to that of the moon and perhaps Venus. Obviously there are very long and differing lags between the cause and the effects because once again there are only small amounts of additional energy being added to a natural system that is not quite in equilibrium. Actuaries are used to dealing with lagged not quite stable systems in insurance and finance so perhaps we can look at such systems with a slightly different perspective.
Incidentally since 2003 there have now been 20 great earthquakes (M > 8) and the previous 20 occurred between 1949 and 2002. The odds of this being purely by chance are very, very low! Of course volcanic activity is also affected by the same forces that affect the incidence of great earthquakes.
rgbatduke says:
April 26, 2014 at 3:25 pm
I’m with you regarding muon vs. rock. I just provided the cited study which you requested.
I do however think work in both the lab & the field shows that muon & other GCR flux can & does affect CCNs.
Carla says:
April 26, 2014 at 4:30 pm
I’m open to any actual physical evidence, but IMO the trigger for the 40/100 ka periodicity transition is unlikely to have been CO2. Will be happy to change my opinion when presented with actual observations supportive of that conclusion, but so far, after reading papers suggesting this hypothesis in the complete absence of evidence, I’m inclined to go with other explanations.
I suspect that paper authors raise this possibility in order to get their research published.
Brent Walker says:
April 26, 2014 at 5:39 pm
I’ll grant you that the biggest earthquakes do seem to come in clusters, but the possible explanations for this observation include internal terrestrial (eg superplume activity) as well as extraterrestrial. Surely the crust is subject to tidal forces, however.
As a denizen of the Ring of Fire, ie resident of the US Pacific Coast & Chile, I have had ample opportunity to experience some Big Ones. Here are clusters from among the most powerful earthquakes since 1900, ie since seismology has measured or estimated their magnitudes:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/10_largest_world.php
Location Date UTC Magnitude Lat. Long. Reference
1. Chile 1960 05 22 9.5 -38.29 -73.05 Kanamori, 1977
2. 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake 1964 03 28 9.2 61.02 -147.65 Kanamori, 1977
8. Rat Islands, Alaska 1965 02 04 8.7 51.21 178.50 Kanamori, 1977
17. Kuril Islands 1963 10 13 8.5 44.9 149.6 Kanamori, 1977
3. Off the West Coast of Northern Sumatra 2004 12 26 9.1 3.30 95.78 Park et al., 2005
9. Northern Sumatra, Indonesia 2005 03 28 8.6 2.08 97.01 PDE
13. Southern Sumatra, Indonesia 2007 09 12 8.5 -4.438 101.367 PDE
4. Near the East Coast of Honshu, Japan 2011 03 11 9.0 38.322 142.369 PDE
6. Offshore Maule, Chile 2010 02 27 8.8 -35.846 -72.719 PDE
11. Off the west coast of northern Sumatra 2012 04 11 8.6 2.311 93.063 PDE
5. Kamchatka 1952 11 04 9.0 52.76 160.06 Kanamori, 1977
10. Assam – Tibet 1950 08 15 8.6 28.5 96.5 Kanamori, 1977
12. Andreanof Islands, Alaska 1957 03 09 8.6 51.56 -175.39 Johnson et al., 1994
7. Off the Coast of Ecuador 1906 01 31 8.8 1.0 -81.5 Kanamori, 1977
Unranked. San Francisco 1906 04 18 xx xx 7.7-8.25
14. Banda Sea, Indonesia 1938 02 01 8.5 -5.05 131.62 Okal and Reymond, 2003
15. Kamchatka 1923 02 03 8.5 54.0 161.0 Kanamori, 1988
16. Chile-Argentina Border 1922 11 11 8.5 -28.55 -70.50 Kanamori, 1977
OK, so the 1938 quake wasn’t a cluster, but neither was the 1906 cluster until I brought in SF.
Whether these associations are statistically significant or not, & with what natural phenomena they might correlate, I don’t know. But here are just the facts.
Mosher has no scientific credentials and has not published anything on cosmic rays or clouds so I have no idea why anyone would take anything he says seriously.
Poptech, one doesn’t need scientific credentials to understand this natural weather facts..
It is a fact and if you didn’t know, that is your problem. Ignoring the truth and natural physics seems to be a problem with some alarmists.
For example, Pop, if you were living in the Sahara desert, you would note, that the days are rather hot! Then at night you would no doubt freeze your bum off. Why no cloud cover!
Frost doesn’t form in winter nights that have cloud cover. Now work that out?
bushbunny, sorry I don’t get my science from English majors but from scientists like Dr. Svensmark and Dr. Ball.
REPLY: Andrew we are all aware of your position on this, let’s not start another flame war on my blog, OK? – Anthony
Well maybe Andrew, but just because someone is an English major, does not prevent them from having opinions on scientific matters. Nor are some alarmists who can boast at being climatologists interested in spewing irrelevant data to prove what is not as yet a proven science any right to claim credibility over others.
I found Dr. Hiroko Miyahara (Institute of Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo) to be more convincing in this talk at a conference two years ago: the 2nd Nagoya Workshop on the Relationship between Solar Activity and Climate Changes. Dr. Miyahara is more nuanced in discussing what causes cosmic rays to be deflected towards earth, and when, and what their consequences are. Further, she backs it up with some earthly correlations from the Institute’s experiments and findings that have less of the Hiyo Silver! quality that Dr. Alley adopts.
The presentation slides (recommended) are here:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2011ScienceMeeting/docs/presentations/2k_Miyahara_SORCE_brief.pdf
Other Miyahara slides here:
http://st4a.stelab.nagoya-u.ac.jp/nagoya_workshop_2/pdf/3-2_Miyahara.pdf
I wanted to draw attention to the current situation. You can see that despite the increase in the neutron (a decrease of solar activity) a significant part of the of ionizing radiation is absorbed by the ozone over the Arctic Circle (radiation falls on cruise altitudes). Were otherwise in the winter, when the ozone level was low. Thus, cosmic radiation reacts strongly with ozone.
http://terra2.spacenvironment.net/~raps_ops/current_files/rtimg/dose.15km.png
When we speak of correlation we do not automatically include spurious correlation but true correlation, of the sort which is used in probably all studies in animal intelligence. That is, the sort of correlation through which we make basic sense of the world. The purpose of statistics is to determine what is true, relevant, non spurious correlation.
Granted, there is excellent correlation between the cock’s crow and sunrise, and while we may not be certain the rooster makes the sun come up, we can be reasonably sure there is some causal rerlationship between the two. “Correlation” is usually defined a priori as causal.
As for Darwin’s mechanism of “survival of the fittest,” this is hardly more than tautological philosophical speculation, hardly better than Wegner’s explanations for Continental Drift. But Darwin and Wegner both provided excellent correlation, and Wegner was wrongly ignored, inexcusably ignored.
So to say it slightly more carefully, true correlation equates to causation. To deny this is to deny the usefulness of the study of correlation, that is, of statistics. –AGF