Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I hear a lot of folks give the following explanation for the vagaries of the climate, viz:
It’s the sun, stupid.
And in fact, when I first started looking at the climate I thought the very same thing. How could it not be the sun, I reasoned, since obviously that’s what heats the planet.
Unfortunately, the dang facts got in the way again …
Chief among the dang facts is that despite looking in a whole lot of places, I never could find any trace of the 11-year sunspot cycle in any climate records. And believe me, I’ve looked.
You see, I reasoned that no matter whether the mechanism making the sun-climate connection were direct variations in the brightness of the sun, or variations in magnetic fields, or variations in UV, or variations in cosmic rays, or variations in the solar wind, they all run in synchronicity with the sunspots. So no matter the mechanism, it would have a visible ~11-year heartbeat.
I’ve looked for that 11-year rhythm every place I could think of—surface temperature records, sea level records, lake level records, wheat price records, tropospheric temperature records, river flow records. Eventually, I wrote up some of these findings, and I invited readers to point out some record, any record, in which the ~ 11-year sunspot cycle could be seen.
Nothing.
However, I’m a patient man, and to this day, I continue to look for the 11-year cycle. You can’t prove a negative … but you can amass evidence. My latest foray is into the world of atmospheric pressure. I figured that the atmospheric pressure might be more sensitive to variations in something like say the solar wind than the temperature would be.
Let me start, however, by taking a look at the elusive creature at the heart of this quest, the ~11-year sunspot cycle. Here is the periodogram of that cycle, so that we know what kind of signature we’re looking for:
Figure 1. Periodogram, showing the strengths of the various-length cycles in the SIDC sunspot data. In order to be able to compare disparate datasets, the values of the cycles are expressed as a percentage of the total range of the underlying data.
As you’d expect, the main peak is at around 11 years. However, the sunspot cycles are not regular, so we also have smaller peaks at nearby cycle lengths. Figure 2 shows an expanded view of the central part of Figure 1, showing only the range from seven to twenty-five years:
Figure 2. The same periodogram as in Figure 1, but showing only the 7 – 25 year range.
Now, there is a temptation to see the central figure as some kind of regular amplitude-modulated signal, with side-lobes. However, that’s not what’s happening here. There is no regular signal. Instead of there being a regular cycle, the length of the sunspot cycle varies widely, from about nine to about 15 years, with most of them in the 10-12 year range. The periodogram is merely showing that variation in cycle length.
In any case, that’s what we’re looking for—some kind of strong signal, with its peak value in the range of about 10-12 years.
As I mentioned above, when I started looking at the climate, like many people I thought “It’s the sun, stupid”, but I had found no data to back that up. So what did I find in my latest search? Well, sweet Fannie Adams, as our cousins across the pond say … here are my results:
Figure 3. Periodograms of four long-term atmospheric pressure records from around the globe.
There are some interesting features of these records.
First, there is a very strong annual cycle. I expected annual cycles, but not ones that large. These cycles are 30% to 60% of the total range of the data. I assume they result in large part from the prevalence of low-pressure areas associated with storms in the local wintertime, combined with some effect from the variations in temperature. I also note that as expected, Tahiti, being nearest to the equator and with little in the way of either temperature variations or low-pressure storms, has the smallest one-year cycle.
Other than semi-annual and annual cycles, however, there is very little power in the other cycle lengths. Figure 4 shows the expanded version of the same data, from seven to twenty-five years. Note the change in scale.
Figure 4. Periodograms of four long-term atmospheric pressure records from around the globe.
First, note that unlike the size of the annual cycle, which is half the total swing in pressures, none of these cycles have more than about 4% of the total swing of the atmospheric pressure. These are tiny cycles.
Next, generally there is more power in the ~ 9-year and the ~ 13-14 year ranges than there is in the ~ 11-year cycles.
So … once again, I end up back where I started. I still haven’t found any climate datasets that show any traces of the 11-year sunspot cycles. They may be there in the pressure data, to be sure, it is impossible to prove a negative, I can’t say they’re not there … but if so, they are hiding way, way down in the weeds.
Which of course leads to the obvious question … why no sign of the 11-year solar cycles?
I hold that this shows that the temperature of the system is relatively insensitive to changes in forcing. This, of course, is rank heresy to the current scientific climate paradigm, which holds that ceteris paribus, changes in temperature are a linear function of changes in forcing. I disagree. I say that the temperature of the planet is set by a dynamic thermoregulatory system composed of emergent phenomena that only appear when the surface gets hotter than a certain temperature threshold. These emergent phenomena maintain the temperature of the globe within narrow bounds (e.g. ± 0.3°C over the 20th Century), despite changes in volcanoes, despite changes in aerosols, despite changes in GHGs, despite changes in forcing of all kinds. The regulatory system responds to temperature, not to forcing.
And I say that because of the existence of these thermoregulatory systems, the 11-year variations in the sun’s UV and magnetism and brightness, as well as the volcanic variations and other forcing variations … well, they make little difference.
As a result, once again, I open the Quest for the Holy 11-Year Grail to others. I invite those that believe that “It’s the sun, stupid” to show us the terrestrial climate record that has any sign of being correlated with the 11-year sunspot cycles. I’ve looked. Lots of folks have looked … where is that record? I encourage you to employ whatever methods you want to use to expose the connection—cross-correlation, wavelet analysis, spectrum analysis, fourier analysis, the world is your lobster. Report back your findings, I’d like to put this question to bed.
It’s a lovely Saturday in spring, what could be finer? Gotta get outside and study me some sunshine. I wish you all many such days.
w.
For Clarity: If you disagree with someone, please quote their exact words that you disagree with. It avoids all kinds of pernicious misunderstandings, because it lets us all know exactly where you think they went off the rails.
Why The 11-year Cycle?: Because it is the biggest cycle, and we know all of the other cycles (magnetism, TSI, solar wind) move in synchronicity with the sunspots. As a result, if you want to claim that the climate is responding to say a slow, smaller 100-year cycle in the sunspot data, then by the same token it must be responding more strongly to the larger 11-cycle in the sunspot data, and so the effect should be visible there.
The Subject Of This Post: Please do not mistake this quest for the elusive 11-year cycle in climate datasets as an opportunity for you to propound your favorite theory about approximately 43-year pseudo-cycles due to the opposition of Uranus. If you can’t show me a climate dataset containing an 11-year cycle, your hypothesis is totally off-topic for this post. I encourage you to write it up and send it to Anthony, he may publish it, or to Tallbloke, he might also. I encourage everyone to get their ideas out there. Here on this thread, though, I’m looking for the 11-year cycle sunspot cycle in any terrestrial climate records.
The Common Cycles in Figures 3 and 4: Obviously, the four records in Figs. 3 & 4 have a common one-year cycle. As an indication of the sensitivity of the method that I’m using, consider the two other peaks which are common to all four of the records. These are the six-month cycle, and the 9-year cycle. It is well known that the moon raises tides in the atmosphere just as it does in the ocean. The 9-year periodicity is not uncommon in tidal datasets, and the same is true about the 6-month periodicity. I would say that we’re looking at the signature of the atmospheric tides in those cycle lengths.
Variable-Length Cycles, AKA “Pseudocycles” or “Approximate Cycles”: Some commenters in the past have asserted that my method, which I’ve nicknamed “Slow Fourier Analysis” but which actually seems to be a variant of what might be called direct spectrum analysis, is incapable of detecting variable-length cycles. They talk about a cycle say around sixty years that changes period over time.
However, the sunspot cycle is also quite variable in length … and despite that my method not only picks up the most common cycle length, it shows the strength of the sunspot cycles at the other cycle lengths as well.
A Couple of my Previous Searches for the 11-Year Sunspot Cycle:
Looking at four long-term temperature records here.
A previous look at four more long-term temperature records.
Atmospheric Pressure and Sunspot Data:
Tahiti to 1950 and Tahiti 1951 on (note different units)
Darwin to 1950 and Darwin 1951 on (note different units)
Sunspots These are from SIDC. Note that per advice from Leif Svalgaard, in the work I did above the pre-1947 values have been increased by 20% to adjust for the change in counting methods. It does not affect this analysis, you can use either one.
For ease of downloading, I’ve also made up a CSV file containing all of the above data, called Long Term Atmospheric Pressure.csv
And for R users, I’ve saved all 5 data files in R format as “Long Pressure Datasets.tab”
Code: Man, I hate this part … hang on … let me clean it up a bit … OK, I just whacked out piles of useless stuff and ran it in an empty workspace and it seemed to fly. You need two things, a file called madras pressure.R and my Slow Fourier Transform Functions.R. Let me know what doesn’t work.
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John says:
May 24, 2014 at 3:42 pm
John, as I mentioned above, that Parana River study has fatal flaws. I dis-assembled it here.
w.
David Archibald:
Perhaps because Willis likes to see the evidence with his own eyes rather than accept the claims of others? Which is what people call skepticism (Patron Saint: Thomas).
Also, Willis would seem to care whether there is a substantive correlation between solar variation and atmospheric data before worrying what can cause the effect.
Mosher says
It is not enough tocriticize the existing theory one must at some point replace it with a better theory:
It IS enough.
It is not necessary to provide a better theory to show a given theory wrong.
What is wrong with “at the current time we don’t know” ?
TSI seems to explain the LIA.
dbstealey, are you just trying to poke the Irish badger in me???? Do you not read anything of history????????????? Gawd!
Mosher,
Let me go further though. Suppose natural ocean cycle warming and cooling was disregarded and the warming part of one cycle was imputed to CO2 instead of to the ocean cycles? You would get exactly what we have now. When the cycle ends its warming phase you see no warming for a while and eventually cooling will show up.
Do all models show ocean cycles? Have the ocean cycles been included in the models if they do not arise naturally from model construction?
How is that for a theory?
Steven Mosher says:
May 25, 2014 at 9:28 am
Go read Tomas’ piece at Curry’s.
Now go back and read it again, and understand it this time.
Alex E says:
May 24, 2014 at 3:45 pm
Alex, as I mentioned several times, my method has no problem finding variable cycles. Look at Figures 1 and 2. The sunspot cycles (as you point out) vary from 9 to 15 years, but despite that, they show up clearly in Figs 1&2, bold as brass …
Since my method finds those various sunspot cycles in the sun, why would it have trouble finding the same cycles on earth if they existed?
I appreciate the thought, but claims without citations are useless here, Alex. What study and where did they look at that link?
Thanks,
w.
Harold says:
May 25, 2014 at 10:23 am
Steven Mosher says:
May 25, 2014 at 9:28 am
Go read Tomas’ piece at Curry’s.
Was this the one you were referring to?
http://judithcurry.com/2014/05/23/how-simple-is-simple/
Steven Mosher says:
May 25, 2014 at 9:28 am
===
LOL…..Mosh you’re a hoot
Dancing with your strawmen again
What about the ones that think it’s all a huge load…and we’ve not smart enough to know any of it….that is without faking numbers
So, say Karl Marx had remained an unknown kook and his book never published. No Marxism, no commies, no central planning in Russia, no Mao, no lust for a new tax and spend idea for the U.S. Democrat Party and or the United Nations. No Mike Mann, No James Hansen, no computer code master to fudge the tax money out of our pockets. With this other history would any one have needed to fudge the temp’s or acuse man of being the cause. Would the current temp’s still be flat lined as they are. Would the next 1,000 years of temps still be set by the solar system together with the earth system as it did in the last 1,000,000 or the next 1,000,000.
Man has a way to big of an collective ego and seeks to see all from that ego’s point of view.
The earth being a non thinking operation it just goes about like Marx never existed.
Yet there stand the windmills, spinning or possible not spinning.
Phil’s Dad: I feel that is not an accurate reading of Roger Sowell’s original assertion;
“Do we actually need a proven, causal mechanism before it is prudent to act?”.
Fair enough.
The catastrophists’ claim for “prudence” depends on a mechanism without a complete case for an effect, whereas Roger Sowell’s claim for “prudence” depends on a correlation without a complete case for any mechanism. Given the state of knowledge and the state of ignorance about all the dynamic processes that affect climate (or that constitute weather), my view of “prudence” gives some weight to both inadequate scientific arguments. But mostly I think “prudence” for now should focus on actions that will be necessary whether there is a rise or fall in the mean temperature: better flood control and irrigation, better protection of shores against storms, and other things. You do not have to believe in any climate theory in particular to think that New Orleans should seriously consider: (1) reforestation of its outlying, especially seaward, deforested regions; (2) unstraightening its ship channel; (3) building flood control walls seated deeper in the ground than before; (4) putting its emergency electricity generators above previously recorded flood extremes; (5) relocating its city-owned vehicles away from flood-prone parking lots. You can easily write recommendations like that about nearly any region on Earth. This whole debate is distracting people’s attention away from the actions that are most “prudent” (imo) no matter what the future holds.
Re My Speculation of the LIA:
Ice cores record volcanic eruptions via chemical content of aerosol material found in the ice. Atmospheric sulfur loads can be dated during the little ice age time span. How? Date the sulfur load layer in the ice cores. There was a very large eruption in the mid 1200’s, at the beginning of the early signs of the impending Little Ice Age. Largest load in fact. But from what volcano? So here is what they did. They took those grains of material from the ice core, analyzed them, and found a match with material from a still active volcano in Indonesia. The amount of sulfur compounds in the air (based on the ice core proxy) would have been enough to darken a LOT of skies, easily. And for quite some time if that volcano continued to burp and belch. Volcanic affect on insolation is huge. HUGE. Especially if that volcanic aerosol load was in the equatorial band where potential solar energy SWIR penetration into the ocean is at its greatest.
So. Cool the source of equatorial warm pools that ride the overturning circulation currents and you get very cold quickly. We saw how the North Atlantic warm current that invades the Arctic melted ice this past decade. It can do the reverse by turning cold, allowing ice expansion. That ice expansion and retraction has been calculated with regard to glacier killed plant carbon dating. Regarding plants from the Little Ice Age, glacier kill happened about the same time as that huge eruption, leading me to speculate that the warm current into the Arctic Ocean at the beginning of the Little Ice Age was cold, not warm, because the insolation at the ocean surface around the equatorial band was greatly diminished by that eruption, thus disallowing solar recharge of the upper ocean layer quite rapidly and significantly. This now much cooler water rode the overturning circulation current to the Atlantic mouth of the Arctic Ocean, leading to ice expansion, driving away the Vikings in short order from their happy homes. No solar change in TSI could have done that much damage, nor change in any other less energetic solar parameter. But changes in solar insolation regarding oceanic recharge can do that much damage.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/09/indonesias-samalas-volcano-may-have-kickstarted-the-little-ice-age/
Roger Sowell: The sudden aspect will be crop failures. The world has very little stored food and will be in crisis mode in roughly one year after the first major crop failure. Political upheaval will occur as hungry people act in violent ways. Medical treatment will be in short supply.
My question was not about what the threats might be, but what prudent actions should be taken now. I infer from that selection that you agree with me that agricultural research should be increased, something that will be valuable even if your predicted imminent global cooling does not come to pass. I take it from your comments about protecting the nuclear power plants that you favor improved flood control infrastructure, something that will be valuable for either cooling or warming, and something that I also support. I don’t mean that my support counts for much, but I favor local efforts toward local problems that will likely continue whether the Earth warms or cools.
More on sunspot/solar cycle signals affecting heat/convection in the upper atmosphere..
Top down meets bottom up..
Influence of solar variability on the infrared radiative cooling of
the thermosphere from 2002 to 2014
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL059556/pdf
Martin G. Mlynczak1, Linda A. Hunt2, Christopher J. Mertens1, B. Thomas Marshall3,
James M. Russell III4, Thomas Woods5, R. Earl Thompson3, and Larry L. Gordley3
4. Summary and Discussion
”’We have presented 12 years of radiative cooling data associated with NO and CO2 in the Earth’s lower and middle thermosphere. The influence of the variability of the Sun during solar cycle 23 and
the first part of solar cycle 24 are evident in these data. A long and deep solar minimum previously noted is now observed in its entirety, and solar maximum conditions that are substantially weaker than the prior maximum conditions are now occurring. The deseasonalized vertically integrated cooling rates (radiated power)
appear to be more strongly correlated with changes in solar ultraviolet irradiance and geomagnetic
activity during the prior maximum than during the current maximum conditions. The influence of solar
variability is evident in both NO and CO2 cooling throughout the entire depth of the lower and
middle thermosphere.
The SABER radiative cooling data for NO and CO2 constitute a unique climate data record for testing upper atmosphere models in terms of both radiative/chemical physics and response to solar variability. One key application would be to the ongoing debate [e.g., Solomon et al., 2013] regarding the causes and consequences of the last solar minimum in 2008–2009 during which record low thermospheric densities occurred [Emmert et al., 2010]. Solomon et al. [2011] attributed the low density to changes in solar ultraviolet irradiance, while Emmert et al. [2010] conclude that other factors including composition
changes must play a role. The SABER radiative cooling data can be used to test different scenarios
on composition (atomic oxygen) changes, temperature changes, and CO2 changes to further resolve
this enigma.”’
Willis Eschenbach:
In your comment addressed to Konrad at May 25, 2014 at 9:35 am which is here you ask
Sorry, but that is a profound misunderstanding. The oceans CAUSE the “1 year cycle in temperature”.
I explained this in my above post to you at May 25, 2014 at 12:34 am which is here where I wrote
Clearly, the oceanic heat sink is so great that the difference between its magnitudes in the NH and SH completely swamps the effect of the change to the Earth’s absorbtion of solar radiation induced by Earth’s varying distance from the Sun around its elliptical orbit. Clearly, so large a heat-sink effect can – at least in principle – smooth the smaller effect of a putative variation in solar radiation.
Richard
@Willis
Try Solar Activity and Climate – Hiroko Miyahara, The University of Tokyo
Better copy of slides.
Mods:
The WordPress problems continue. I have twice attempted to send a post to this thread and both attempts have vanished. Please let me know if neither is in the ‘bin’.
Richard
@Willis,
Sorry, wrong slides. Here: Decadal Variations of Solar Magnetic Field, Heliosphere and the Cosmic Rays, and their Impact on Climate Change
Roger Sowell says:
May 24, 2014 at 4:12 pm
Well, no. It is widely believed that climate gets cold when sunspots disappear, but I wouldn’t say in was “well-known”. In my opinion the data is far from being complete, clear, or convincing.
One reason I say that is because the according to accepted ideas of solar evolution, the sun has warmed by about 5% in the last half billion years. If the global temperature actually followed the solar input, it would have resulted in a global warming of about 5%, or about 15°C (27°F) … and obviously, that hasn’t happened.
Another reason I say it is believed rather than known is that both the sunspot data and the temperature data from back around 1650 is … well … sketchy.
Another reason I say that is shown in the graph I gave above, viz:
The red line shows the longer-term variation of the sunspots … are you seriously claiming that the global temperature data looks anything like that? We should have been cooling since 1960 if that were the case …
Another reason I say it (obviously) is the lack of an 11-year cycle in any climate data. Why should a system respond to a small, slow change in some variable when it is apparently immune to a much larger and somewhat slower change in the same variable?
Not sure what you mean by “act” … I can already see James Hansen getting arrested at the protests at the White House:
w.
Steven Mosher: It is not enough to criticize the existing theory one must at some point replace it with a better theory: better in all regards.
Not enough for what? If a public policy is advocated on the basis of an “existing” theory that has a history of incorrect predictions and is full of holes besides, it is very worthwhile to point out the liabilities. Just because it will take another 2 to 6 decades to create a reasonably accurate theory is no reason to act as though the only theory that we have is reasonably accurate.
As Roger Sowell and others point out, we have a multiplicity of threats, and a prima facie case that cooling is at least as likely and at least as threatening as warming. The prima facie case for warming and the prima facie case for cooling are both full of holes when considered in detail, but it is not true that we have a single “the existing theory”.
I wonder how I fit into your classification scheme: I believe a bunch of stuff and disbelieve a bunch of other stuff. Both the sunspot cycle and the absorption/emission spectra of H2O and CO2 have been well-studied, and I believe a bunch of propositions about them; the case that either affects climate change isn’t equally well supported by evidence, and I don’t believe any quantitative claims about either, though I also don’t think either has been totally discredited by evidence to date. I support research to find out how the “holes” in the evidence get filled, and I oppose using either of them exclusively as the basis of policy and investment decisions. Quantitatively, the evidence seems to support small estimates of the effects of sunspot cycles and anthropogenic CO2 since WWII, as far as I can tell now.
How about anyone else? Is your scheme any good at all in classifying any actual people?
Roger Sowell says:
May 24, 2014 at 4:12 pm
That passes for “evidence” in your world? Here’s Perry’s description of the gyre:
So one rotation of the gyre “could take approximately 9-12 years” and sunspot cycles are 9-15 years … and? Are you truly claiming that coincidence is significant?
The Perry paper has a number of other problems, I should probably do a post on it. Here’s their hypothesis:
Now … look at the units on that graph. Their claim is that when the annual solar irradiation goes up and down by three hundredths of a watt per square meter … that four years later, this by now four-year-old change of 0.03 W/m2 somehow affects the rain in the Pacific Northwest … … …
Sorry, Roger, but that doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Three hundredths of a watt per square meter forcing a change in rainfall four years later?
And sadly, this is typical of the arguments in favor of the 11-year solar/climate connection. In your citation, they’ve searched and searched, using different lag times and different localities, until they find some chance correlation, and then claimed it proved their case.
Sorry, not impressed.
Best regards,
w.
I read the item with interest , but without feeling that I had anything to contribute to the debate , until I started reading an archaeological study guide on the use of GPS in surveys ( using the USDOD satellites).
A request was made in the WUWT article for any evidence of geophysical periodicity around 11 years ( the mean sunspot cycle). What I read in the study guide, talking about errors in GPS signal was the following:——–
Error sources are variable; here are some of the more commonly occurring:
• Ionospheric delays. The ionosphere is the upper layer of the atmosphere
ranging in altitude from 50 to 500 km. It consists largely of ionized particles
which cause a disturbing effect on the GPS signals. Since the density of the
ionosphere is affected by the sun there is less ionospheric influence during
night time. The ionosphere has also a cyclical period of 11 years which
reaches a maximum and a minimum of the magnitude of its effect. For the
current cycle, it reached its maximum in 1998 and its minimum in 2004.
—————————————————————————————————–
I do not know if the ionosphere could have any influence on global warming or its current suspension but if it does its density is going to be at a minimum in 2015 +/- 1or 2 years.
Stuart says:
May 24, 2014 at 4:14 pm
Thanks, Stuart. Actually, because the clouds reflect some 20% of incoming energy, there’s always plenty of reserve power to heat the system back up again. When the system is cool, tropical clouds simply form on average a bit later, and that allows a huge amount of energy into the system.
w.
So Mike. Are you waiting for someone else to tell you if the ionosphere has any top-down influence on weather over the long term (which is where we get our “climate” warming statistic from)?