Guest essay by David Archibald
There were two papers published in 2013 that, when considered together, paint a bleak picture of North American climate and agriculture for the rest of the century and beyond. Firstly from the abstract of “Multidecadal to multi-century scale collapses of Northern Hemisphere monsoons over the past millennium”1 by Asmerom et al.:
“Late Holocene climate in western North America was punctuated by periods of extended aridity called megadroughts.” And “Several megadroughts are evident, including a multicentury one, AD 1350–1650, herein referred to as Super Drought, which corresponds to the coldest period of the Little Ice Age. Synchronicity between southwestern North American, Chinese, and West African monsoon precipitation suggests the megadroughts were hemispheric in scale. Northern Hemisphere monsoon strength over the last millennium is positively correlated with Northern Hemisphere temperature and North Atlantic SST.” And “the megadroughts, including the Super Drought, coincide with solar insolation minima, suggesting that solar forcing of sea surface and atmospheric temperatures may generate variations in the strength of Northern Hemisphere monsoons.”
So droughts in North America are coincident with solar insolation minima. We already know of the cause and effect relationship between solar cycle minima and East African rainfall. West African drought has been found to be linked to Atlantic sea surface temperatures2.
With that knowledge, all we need to predict the timing of the next megadrought in North America is a long term solar activity forecast. That was also provided in 2013 by Steinhilber and Beer3. They predict a deep low in solar activity starting straight away and continuing for 150 years. This is Figure 4 from that paper:
Figure 4 from Steinhilber and Beer – Prediction of solar activity on the left axis and total solar irradiance on the right axis. M, D and G refer to the Maunder, Dalton and Gleissberg minima respectively. The lighter grey band is based on FFT (fast Fourier transformation) and the darker grey band is based on WTAR (wavelet decomposition using autoregression). As the paper demonstrates, amplitudes of solar activity are better predicted by the FFT method than by the WTAR method.
In effect, Figure 4 predicts a megadrought for North America from at least 2050 to 2200. Generations of people will experience what a Dalton Minimum is like, all their lives. In the meantime it will get colder and drier. In terms of the effect on agricultural productivity, productivity of corn production in the Corn Belt falls by 10% for each 1°C fall in annual average temperature. The Corn Belt also moves south by 144 km for each 1°C fall in annual average temperature. Soil quality declines to the south of the Corn Belt though so farms won’t be as productive. For example, one hundred years ago Alabama had four million acres planted to cotton. Today only 1.3 million acres are devoted to all agricultural crops. Unable to compete with the Corn Belt as it is now, a lot of acreage in Alabama has reverted to pasture and woodland.
A fall in annual average temperature of 2.0°C might decrease production by 20% and the southward move to poorer soils might decrease production by 10% (purely a guess, but I do have a botany major). What drought might do on top of all that is a 30% fall for a total decrease in production in the range of 50% to 60%. Two big corne states, Illinois and Indiana, had corn production falls of 30% in the 2012 drought year:
The US could then feed 600 million vegetarians instead of the current 1.2 billion vegetarians. Food that we would want to eat will become expensive with wide price swings. That is what these two papers are saying about what the future holds for us.
David Archibald, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery, 2014).
References
- Asmerom, Y. et al., 2013, “Multidecadal to multi-century scale collapses of Northern Hemisphere monsoons over the past millennium” PNAS vol.110 no. 24 9651-9656
- Shanahan, T.M et al., 2009 “Atlantic Forcing of Persistent Drought in West Africa” Science, Vol. 324 no 5925 pp. 377-380
- Steinhilber, F. and Beer, J., 2013, “Prediction of solar activity for the next 500 years” Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, vol. 118, 1-7
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David Archibald is a ..Guest.? . Poster?.
Why does management set him up in order to pull him down.
Dr Archibald you have been framed. What are you doing in the lions den?
There is no whiff of measured consideration of your assessment.
noting from above. Management says
“This post is just alarmism that does not seem to serve a purpose other than peddling D. A’s views to the gullible.”
so why employ David As a guest poster. . ?
This is just a cycle phobic site …so just what you might expect David
I
idreamofthought says:
May 15, 2014 at 3:59 am
Criticising spelling – well we have to be grateful to people who keep up standards. But to misspell “can’t” in the same sentence.
[But “misspelled” is always misspelled, or else it would be spelled properly and not be misspelled. 8<) Mod]
During the weaker solar cycles 12 to 14 (1878-1913), there were very frequent drought episodes in the Great Plains, with the worst years corresponding very well to the colder years in CET through the period.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/tcet.dat
US corn production 1000’s tons
2000 251854 (1000 MT) 5.14%
2001 241377 (1000 MT) -4.16%
2002 227767 (1000 MT) -5.64%
2003 256229 (1000 MT) 12.50%
2004 299876 (1000 MT) 17.03%
2005 282263 (1000 MT) -5.87%
2006 267503 (1000 MT) -5.23%
2007 331177 (1000 MT) 23.80%
2008 307142 (1000 MT) -7.26%
2009 332549 (1000 MT) 8.27%
2010 316165 (1000 MT) -4.93%
2011 313949 (1000 MT) -0.70%
2012 273832 (1000 MT) -12.78%
2013 353715 (1000 MT) 29.17%
Mr. Archibald, thank you for the links to the work from Solheim and crew. If that’s what you decide to use to ignore the expectation of continued warming that was stated in the paper you based your essay on, I’m unconvinced.
The Solheim papers deal with a very local area of the North Atlantic and Arctic north of Norway.
In one, they somehow conclude that the local, homogenized weather station temperatures at 4 sites in Svalbard are tied to the length of the previous solar cycle. Local weather trends in the area north of Norway might very well trend along – but they make no global prediction, as the following quote shows: “This provides a tool to predict an average temperature decrease of at least 1.0 ◦C from solar cycle 23 to 24 for the stations and areas analyzed.” .
They also say this in one paper: “We find for the Norwegian local stations investigated that 25–56% of the temperature increase the last 150 years may be attributed to the Sun. For 3 North Atlantic stations we get 63–72% solar contribution. This points to the Atlantic currents as reinforcing a solar signal.”
Attempting to use a range of 25%-72% of -local- pattern matching to make -global- predictions is really thin.
I’m not convinced. You contradict the Steinhilber and Beer conclusions directly, and for further backing you present some very localized, short-term pattern matching of dubious robustness.
Here’s a good paper to read – and Beer is a co-author on it. “Solar Influences On Climate”
Gray, L. J., et al. (2010), Solar influences on climate, Rev. Geophys., 48, RG4001, doi:10.1029/2009RG000282
The paper is available here: http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html if you scroll down to “Solar Variability & Global Warming” and click the link “Solar Influences on Climate”
They cover sunspots, UV, cosmic rays, the whole range of possible solar influences. And as the web site states: “Their bottom line: though the Sun may play some small role, “it is nevertheless much smaller than the estimated radiative forcing due to anthropogenic changes.””
So again, a very long, detailed analysis paper, which includes one of your essay’s authors, concludes that anthropogenic forcings have overtaken solar forcings as a primary climate driver.
Vukcevic You say
“lsvalgaard says:
May 15, 2014 at 12:31 am
‘predicting’ centuries ahead based on cycles is silly. At best we can observe the recent past, say, 200 years where we have reasonable data and try to extrapolate.
I think most of us should agree on that one.”
I would absolutely disagree. The 1000 year quasi-periodicity seen in the proxy temperature data is the most obvious and simplest key to forecasting temperature trends for the next thousand years .See Figs 3 and 4 at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/10/commonsense-climate-science-and.html
Using Occam’s razor the idea that the cycle from 1000 – 2000 (see Fig3 )is about to repeat is
an obvious working hypothesis. By comparison Leif’s notion of extrapolating the last 200 years is a non starter- for forecasting 1000 year periodicities – you need to go back 2-3000 years at least to make sense. That is why climate models tuned to the last 40 – 50 years are a joke.
On fig 4 the 1000 year peak appears several times during the Holocene – and will likely appear again at about 3000.Obviously nothing repeats exactly because there the are underlying longer Milankovic cycles to be taken into account .I would add that for forecasting purposes it is not necessary to understand the processes involved. Ancient astronomers did not need to know Kepler’s laws to make useful forecasts of eclipses.
David Archibald says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/14/studies-weaker-solar-activity-means-colder-and-colder-also-means-drier/#comment-1636631
Henry says
Just before they started with the nonsense about (more) life giving carbon dioxide causing (additional) warming, the link between a “100” year weather cycle and the flow of the river Nile was already clearly established by William Arnold in 1985 and most recently confirmed by myself.
For some odd reason he was out by about 7 years. However, for a “100” year cycle that error is OK by me.. ..
As a result of my own investigations I predict drought conditions similar to the dust bowl drought 1932-1939 to start in 2021 on the great plains of America.
Tell me why, if you think I am wrong.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/
Dr Norman Page says:
May 14, 2014 at 4:06 pm
Nonsense. We invented statistics for a good reason, which is that humans are very good a fooling ourselves, and we are most practiced at finding patterns where none exist. If you choose not to use those tools, it doesn’t make you a fool … but it does mean that you’re not a scientist.
w.
David Archibald says:
May 14, 2014 at 5:59 pm
David, I begin to despair. Your link is to the Parana river study. Not only did I point out the huge problems with that study in my post called “Sunny Spots on the Parana River”.
I also linked to that study in my comment to you above, by name, viz:
For you to now cite the Parana River study in support of your position just proves that you’re not paying attention. The Parana River study is fatally flawed. Read my study to see why. Their analysis is based on erroneous methods and bad math.
The other claim in your link is that you can show a good correlation between sunspots and Lake Victoria levels … well, actually you claim that you can show a good correlation between sunspots and Lake Victoria levels as long as you throw away the middle third of the record.
Is that some kind of joke I’m not getting? Throw away a third of the data?
David, if you throw away the part of the data that doesn’t agree with your hypothesis, the rest of the data will most certainly agree with your hypothesis … you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t find that impressive or persuasive in the slightest.
My friendly advice for you in that regard would be that you emulate the rooster, and wait until it is actually dawn before you start crowing …
w.
Willis It is statisticians who fool themselves into creating patterns that exist only in their clever mathematical minds.
One of the basic problems of present day climate science is the unwillingness or inability of most establishment scientists to accept the blindingly obvious in the record ie at its simplest ,the present high – the MWP and the Roman maximum separated by the LIA and the Dark Ages .I suppose doing the obvious would not produce many academic papers that the IPCC could use to support its political agenda or generate much grant money or academic positions and the great boondoggle conferences of the whole IPCC circus.- to say nothing of in the UK Knighthoods Lordships -Government jobs etc etc see.
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/05/climate-forecasting-basics-for-britains.html
You and Leif need to get a longer term time perspective so that you can distinguish the wood from the trees.
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley: I tried being a vegetarian for two years. I had, er, problems, so I tried vegetarian. I won’t go through all the permutations, to keep the post short… yeah, vegan, ova-lacto, all of it… Now I eat meat, lots of it, little of anything else… I’m doing great. If you have eyes to the side of your head, go veggie. My eyes are to the front, I’m not an herbivore. Inuit folks’ traditional diet is meat and fat. They do well. Might be fine for some folks, but not me.
Dr. A: You are saying today is special, a game-changer, an end-of-times. Almost as special as the alarmist says (except theit science is special also). I agree with a temp decline is upon us, I just see the observations you quote as reflecting at most a pre:Dalton cycle cycle, I.e. we are entering the oeriof before the serious ninimum – if it even occurs.
Like the IPCC reports that focus on the high end, I feel you focus on the extreme, but low end. Planning for a cold disaster is no less disturbing than doing so for a warm one and not appropriate before the signs are clear. Society cannot afford false alarms any more than the children of Harold Camping’s followers could afford the ones he pitched.
@ur momisugly Doug Proctor
All our results show that warming came to a top in 1998 and that now (since 2002) it is cooling
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987/to:2015/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2015/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2015/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2002/to:2015/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2015/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2015/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2015/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2015/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2002/trend
What makes you think that the cooling will stop, especially when looking at the polar [field] strengths of the sun?
http://ice-period.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/sun2013.png
Pamela Gray says:
May 14, 2014 at 7:30 pm
If you mean that there is almost no support for either theory, I’d agree. The problem with the solar theory is that it is easier to find contradictory evidence for that than for CO2, because there is a clear 11-year cycle in the solar data. Not finding that 11-year cycle in the temperature data is significant.
But log(CO2) is basically a straight line, so it is very hard to find contradictory evidence for that.
Me, I’m climate heretic, I don’t believe either hypothesis, either CO2 or solar. Instead, I say that the temperature is thermally regulated by a variety of emergent phenomena. I say that is why if there is a solar signal in the temperature, it’s vanishingly small.
w.
Willis says
Me, I’m climate heretic, I don’t believe either hypothesis, either CO2 or solar. Instead, I say that the temperature is thermally regulated by a variety of emergent phenomena. I say that is why if there is a solar signal in the temperature, it’s vanishingly small.
Henry says
CO2 does not make energy. It makes crops and trees and other stuff that we want which trap some energy (from the sun).
Clearly, the record
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
shows that the sun and the planets / stars around us are in charge?
btw
I do believe in a GH effect
but not by an increase of 0.01% CO2 in the atmosphere
If you are interested you can read some of my musings here:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2011/08/11/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-aug-2011/
Dr Norman Page says:
May 15, 2014 at 8:32 am
I would add that for forecasting purposes it is not necessary to understand the processes involved.
It is absolutely necessary to know the mechanism to have confidence in the forecasting, unless the cycles are strict and sharp and you have many of them. This is not the case for any of the cycles longer than 100 years. The Milankovic cycles are different animals and there we actually do know the mechanism. I do not share your naive cyclomania, but then there so many other things that do not convince me, so one more does not keep me awake at night. Especially not on a 1000 yr time scale.
Leif Minds work differently – I submit that it would be naïve ( not wise perhaps?) to ignore the approximate 1000 year periodicity seen in the Holocene in Fig4 at 10000,9000 8000 7000 5000?2000 1000 and the present
see http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/10/commonsense-climate-science-and.html
Dr Norman Page says:
May 15, 2014 at 1:42 pm
Leif Minds work differently – I submit that it would be naïve ( not wise perhaps?) to ignore the approximate 1000 year periodicity seen in the Holocene in Fig4
Ignore or not. On the timescale of decades a 1000-yr wave is not of significance.
Leif I think you have things backwards the Amplitude of the 1000 year wave is greater than eg the 60 or 22 year cycles. It is the smaller amplitude high frequency cycles which are really the noise and not so significant on time scales most relevant to humanity which I would suggest is centennial Similarly the 1000 year cycles are noise relative to the Milankovic cycles .If you get the 1000 year scale right then it is relatively easy to modulate that for decadal frequencies via the 60 year cycle.
“..the simplest way to test this theory, […] is to look for 11/22 year cycles in either temperature or precipitation.”
The way to test it is to check temperature and precipitation during solar grand minimums. Whether there is a 11/22 signal is not the issue.
Dr Norman Page says:
May 15, 2014 at 2:01 pm
Leif I think you have things backwards the Amplitude of the 1000 year wave is greater than eg the 60 or 22 year cycles.
As Willis has pointed out there really are no 22 or 60 yr cycles in climate nor in solar activity, so your statement is trivially true, but perhaps you are confusing solar activity and climate. This confusion is often exploited by peddlers. The issue is whether a strong 1000-yr cycle exists in climate and that you have not demonstrated.
I agree with you on what is the main issue. I suggest that Fig 4 at
see http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/10/commonsense-climate-science-and.html
suggests strongly enough that a 1000 year cycle exists that it is the most reasonable working hypothesis to use in forecasting. Fig 3 can be used for more detailed forecasts.
For the 60 year cycle see Fig 6 global at the same link The 30 year segments from 1910 – 40 – 70 -2000 are certainly good enough for reasonably supposing that a cooling trend from 2000 – 2030 +/-related to the 60 year cycle is a reasonable working hypothesis.
As to mechanism – as you know for forecasting I consider knowledge of process,while it would be desirable is not necessary. I’m reasonably sure that this 60 year cycle is solar related but I say
“NOTE !! the connection between solar “activity” and climate is poorly understood and highly controversial. Solar ” activity” encompasses changes in solar magnetic field strength, IMF, CRF, TSI ,EUV,solar wind density and velocity, CMEs, proton events etc. The idea of using the neutron count as a useful proxy for changing solar activity and temperature forecasting is agnostic as to the physical mechanisms involved.”
The 60 year temperature cycle is there. It is probably solar. You are better qualified to tease out the processes than I am – Get Busy!! Seek and ye shall find .You might start by looking at the
Saturn /Jupiter lap cycle of 19.589 X 3 = 59.577
Of course such an heretical suggestion is probably unlikely to arouse your interest I just put it out there to stir the pot a bit.
Dr Norman Page says:
May 15, 2014 at 5:38 pm
see http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/10/commonsense-climate-science-and.html
suggests strongly enough that a 1000 year cycle exists that it is the most reasonable working hypothesis to use in forecasting.
There are other peaks that you ignore. And the most recent peak is not yet at its maximum, so ‘common sense’ calls for continued warming for a hundred years, but, again, that is just speculation and has no physical basis. I recognize that for some people their conviction is so strong that all caution is thrown to the wind and that further arguments are fruitless.
Changes in solar activity have a strong influence on the temperature changes in the stratosphere and air circulation. Here is how blockade the southern polar vortex affect the temperature of the Pacific Ocean.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/70hPa/orthographic=-119.89,-37.55,419
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic=-119.89,-37.55,419
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/ocean/surface/currents/overlay=sea_surface_temp_anomaly/orthographic=-119.89,-37.55,419