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Has solar activity influence on the Earth’s global warming?
A recent study demonstrates the existence of significant resonance cycles and high correlations between solar activity and the Earth’s averaged surface temperature during centuries. This provides a new clue to reveal the phenomenon of global warming in recent years.
Their work, entitled “Periodicities of solar activity and the surface temperature variation of the Earth and their correlations” was published in CHINESE SCIENCE BULLETIN (In Chinese) 2014 No.14.
The co-corresponding authors are Dr. Zhao Xinhua and Dr. Feng Xueshang from State key laboratory of space weather, CSSAR/NSSC, Chinese Academy of Sciences. It adopts the wavelet analysis technique and cross correlation method to investigate the periodicities of solar activity and the Earth’s temperature as well as their correlations during the past centuries.
Global warming is one of the hottest and most debatable issues at present. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claimed that the release of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases contributed to 90% or even higher of the observed increase in the global average temperature in the past 50 years. However, the debate on the causes of the global warming never stops. Research shows that the current warming does not exceed the natural fluctuations of climate. The climate models of IPCC seem to underestimate the impact of natural factors on the climate change, while overstate that of human activities. Solar activity is an important ingredient of natural driving forces of climate. Therefore, it is valuable to investigate the influence of solar variability on the Earth’s climate change on long time scales.
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This study also implies that the “modern maximum” of solar activity agrees well with the recent global warming of the Earth. A significant correlation between them can be found (Figure 2).
As pointed out by a peer reviewer, “this work provides a possible explanation for the global warming”.
See the article:
ZHAO X H, FENG X S. Periodicities of solar activity and the surface temperature variation of the Earth and their correlations (in Chinese). Chin Sci Bull (Chin Ver), 2014, 59: 1284, doi: 10.1360/972013-1089 http://csb.scichina.com:8080/kxtb/CN/abstract/abstract514043.shtml
Science China Press Co., Ltd. (SCP) is a scientific journal publishing company of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). For 60 years, SCP takes its mission to present to the world the best achievements by Chinese scientists on various fields of natural sciences researches.
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May I remind everyone of WUWT Quote of the Week #11?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/21/quote-of-the-week-11/
Jack Eddy: “Were God to give us, at last, the cable, or patch-cord that links the Sun to the Climate System it would have on the solar end a banana plug, and on the other, where it hooks into the Earth—in ways we don’t yet know—a Hydra-like tangle of multiple 24-pin parallel computer connectors. It is surely at this end of the problem where the greatest challenges lie.”
Perhaps Solar Physicists should not be too sure of their subject…
Since it is in Chinese, it hasn’t been peer reviewed by the Team, and so doesn’t count.
Move along.
Yeah, but you can’t always trust the Chinese. I once read that the ‘ancient Chinese secret’ to getting out tough stains in clothes was actually Calgon detergent. Ancient Chinese secret, huh?
The solar-climate link (if it exists) appears to end in about 1975. Funnily enough that’s just about the time that the warmists claim that ghg-enhanced warming could be detected from natural variability.
Did a Chinese Michael Mann author this paper?
What has the dictator, Obama, have to say about this?
The plot from paper suggests recent warming has suddenly broken out of mere solar influence, alarmingly.
I thought Willis just debunked any 11-year cycle?
This is not an 11-year cycle. this is the first solar maximum since 450 BC. Still not much TSI variation, but there’s more to it than that. Worth a wait-and-see.
Meh…
There’s no reason to post that lame Google translation. The link provided has a readable English translation:
Abstract：
Based on the well-calibrated systematiCmeasurements of sunspot numbers, the reconstructed data of the total solar irradiance (TSI), and the observed anomalies of the Earth’s averaged surface temperature (global, ocean, land), this paper investigates the periodicities of both solar activity and the Earth’s temperature variation as well as their correlations on the time scale of centuries using the wavelet and cross correlation analysis techniques. The main results are as follows. (1) Solar activities (including sunspot number and TSI) have four major periodic components higher than the 95% significance level of white noise during the period of interest, i.e. 11-year period, 50-year period, 100-year period, and 200-year period. The global temperature anomalies of the Earth have only one major periodic component of 64.3-year period, which is close to the 50-year cycle of solar activity. (2) Significant resonant periodicities between solar activity and the Earth’s temperature are focused on the 22- and 50-year period. (3) Correlations between solar activity and the surface temperature of the Earth on the long time scales are higher than those on the short time scales. As far as the sunspot number is concerned, its correlation coefficients to the Earth temperature are 0.31-0.35 on the yearly scale, 0.58-0.70 on the 11-year running mean scale, and 0.64-0.78 on the 22-year running mean scale. TSI has stronger correlations to the Earth temperature than sunspot number. (4) During the past 100 years, solar activities display a clear increasing tendency that corresponds to the global warming of the Earth (including land and ocean) very well. Particularly, the ocean temperature has a slightly higher correlation to solar activity than the land temperature. All these demonstrate that solar activity has a non-negligible forcing on the temperature change of the Earth on the time scale of centuries.
That’s a great quote from Jack Eddy. He had a good sense of humor, and, it appears, awareness of the unreliability of science to always produce definitive answers.
I’m not a scientist, but that seems like a useful message. From what I’ve seen, it’s inevitable that we have to try every wrong connection before we get the plug that fits.
Bill Parsons says:
June 5, 2014 at 12:04 pm
There’s no reason to post that lame Google translation. The link provided has a readable English translation:
I confess to being intrigued by the comment “lame Google translation” and don’t know the source of the “…provided…readable English translation.” I did an uneducated comparison to shed some light on the difference. The provided translation has 30 more words and considerable more context and explanation. Would be interested in comments about the differences from the subject experts.
@ur momisugly Leif
Could you provide raw SSN4 data? My eyeball still detects a modern maximum, how “grand” it is I don’t know.
Interesting. A few years ago I did my own similar model. My analysis was mostly “physics based” (rather than purely statistical) with a tiny number of adjustable parameters (each parameter an estimate of an established physical property). It spanned the mid 1700s to now (based on data I could download). I accounted for volcanic activity.
Keeping it simple: My results said “the Sun ‘seems’ somehow responsible” for the temperature changes over the last couple hundred years (both amplitude and periodicity). But, the exact heating/cooling mechanism was not presupposed or elucidated.
So, this paper’s result is not surprising. However, I don’t know if their methods are sound.
John West says:
June 5, 2014 at 12:35 pm
Leif’s team is trying to enforce their change in the way sunspot numbers are counted, which just happens to get rid of the grand maximum so odious to CACA advocates. No doubt a coincidence.
“I thought Willis just debunked any 11-year cycle?”
He didn’t debunk anything. He merely was unable to find any 11-year cycles in the temperature data he was looking at. Absence of discovering cycles is not proof of absence of cycles.
Why do we think it’s easy to find true cycles in data? Is it as simple as applying Fourier transforms to sampled data and declaring every peak that pops up a cycle?
So it seems that there are 11-year cycles in solar sunspot cycles. Yet this periodicity wasn’t discovered until 1843 (by Schwabe), a hundred years or so after modern systematic observations started in the 18th century (and earlier, before the Maunder Minimum).
Actually, there is a bit of uncertainty on how many cycles have occurred since 1755. It is claimed that SC 4 (1784-1798) consisted two cycles, based on sightings of high-North latitude sunspots in 1793) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle_4
Usoskin, I. G.; Mursula, K.; Arlt, R.; Kovaltsov, G. A. (2009). “A Solar Cycle Lost in 1793-1800: Early Sunspot Observations Resolve the Old Mystery”. The Astrophysical Journal, http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-4357/700/2/L154/
So which cycle are we currently in? SC24 or SC25?
Leif, what say you? (I know you take a dim view of cycle-mania)
The modern maximum isn’t real? If cycle 25 turns out to be as some predict then what would you call the period of relatively high solar activity between the Dalton Minimum and cycle 25, the modern not-so-maximum but still relatively active compared to bounding cycles period? Modern Maximum has a nicer ring to it.
That circa 20-yr periodicity shows up
in a good number of climatological series.
John West says:
June 5, 2014 at 12:35 pm
Could you provide raw SSN4 data? My eyeball still detects a modern maximum, how “grand” it is I don’t know.
There is a local maximum in the 20th century, and in the 19th, and in the 18th, …
None of them ‘Grand’.
daymite says:
June 5, 2014 at 12:55 pm
Leif, what say you? (I know you take a dim view of cycle-mania)
There is no good evidence for a missing cycle. Claims that a cycle was lost go back at least 150 years.
Whoever claims there was no solar activity peak towards the end of the 20th century will have a problem with Steinhilber, et al., doi:10.1073/pnas.1118965109, Usoskin, Living Rev. Solar Phys., 5, (2008), 3, Georgieva, et al., Mem. S.A.It. Vol. 76, 969, Vieira, et al., doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201015843, Lockwood, et al., doi:10.5194/angeo-31-1979-2013, Avakyan, doi:10.1134/S1019331613030015, and quite number of other authors, and, of course, the measurements they talk about.
Even with Leifs adjusted numbers there is a modern maximum but he does not want to understand the difference between peak power and energy so the disinformation continues.
http://virakkraft.com/Solar-GISS.png
So… maybe it’s just me, but I’m put off by bad grammar, run-on sentences, confusing syntax, etc., and unlike Mr. Mosher, lack the facility with decoding to translate the meaning from the original Chinese. So I go looking for a usable translation. Like you, I tried reading a few of the posted Google translations, got burned by the opening (what looked like) run-on-sentence, and when all else had failed, went back and re-read the o.p. The link was there
http://csb.scichina.com:8080/kxtb/CN/abstract/abstract514043.shtml
Google translator mangles most languages, so, on scanning the translations, wasn’t surprised to see things like “11 a cycle , 50 a cycle , cycle century and double century cycle”, etc. I get that the “a” in this case must be Google’s shorthand for annum or years… just don’t like having to use quite so much of my brain to figure it out.
We can say that sunspot cycle, geomagnetic activity steadily rose from around 1910 to 1957. Then steadily declined until now, where it hit the floor. Didn’t quite hit the ceiling, oh well.
I see there is slowly growing a split between East and West on the subject of climate change. Good news for the conference next year in Paris, no consensus Russia, China and the Middle East and other oil producing countries versus Europe and USA. A standoff will be the result.
Further I want to add that it doesn’t matter anymore what the content of the scientific article is, pseudoscience is sufficient for the political leaders.
Gustav says:
June 5, 2014 at 1:23 pm
Whoever claims there was no solar activity peak towards the end of the 20th century will have a problem with Steinhilber, et al., doi:10.1073/pnas.1118965109, Usoskin, Living Rev. Solar Phys., 5, (2008),…
Perhaps those people are the ones with the problem. Take for example Usoskin and Steinhilber and compare their data as I do in slide 6 of
http://www.leif.org/research/The%20long-term%20variation%20of%20solar%20activity.pdf
or look at slide 45 that shows the Steinhilber data since 1700. Further comparisons can be found in http://www.leif.org/research/Confronting-Models-with-Reconstructions-and-Data.pdf [see e.g. last slide].
Now, there is a concerted effort to push the notion of a Modern Grand Maximum in order to provide a natural [?] explanation for ‘Global Warming’. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold water.