Guest essay by David Archibald
Back in late April, European wine growers were hit by the most damaging frost since 1991. That frost affected vines as far south as Tuscany. More recently it is the western Corn Belt that has been affected by late Spring frost. The following two figures show damage to crops from frosts a few days ago:
Figure 1: Chickpea crop in Saskatchewan just north of the Montana border, 27th June 2017 (image source Mike Foley, yellow is frost-killed dead plant material)
Figure 2: Frozen corn just east of McLaughlin, South Dakota, 27th June, 2017
(image source Joel Bierman)
Figure 3: South Dakota Spring frost incidence 1974 – 2003
As Figure 3 shows, the majority of frosts for McLaughlin are usually over by mid-May.
Figure 4: U.S. Drought Monitor
Warmer is wetter and colder is drier. In a cooling climate there will be a concommitant reduction in moisture available.
Figure 5: Spring Wheat Futures
The reaction of the wheat market has been a 50% increase in price over two weeks. That has geopolitical implications, as shown by the following graphs.
Figure 6: Percentage of personal budget spent on food
This is a graphic made in 2010 using data from 2009. At 6.9 percent, the United States has the lowest percentage of disposable income spent on food of any major country and will be hardly affected. But most countries spend between a quarter and half their income on food. A rise in the budget allocation to food, driven by the prices of wheat and other grains, will result in a reduction in economic activity.
Figure 7: Imported grain and domestic grain production in the Middle East
The Middle East lost the ability to feed itself from its own production decades ago. Even countries as large as Egypt live a hand-to-mouth existance. Egypt recently sold off a couple of islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia in return for Saudi funding of the Egyptian budget, and thus grain imports. On average, humans get about 48 percent of their calories from grains. Wheat, with the best amino acid profile of the major grain crops, is a near-complete foodstuff for those not allergic to it. Tunisia has wheat consumption of 80 percent of their calorific intake. We know from the raid on Bin Laden that his household visited the local bakery three times a day to buy bread. The wheat price rise has geopolitical implications.
Figure 8: F10.7 flux 2014 – 2017
Where to from here? Relative to the climate of the last century, an F10.7 flux above 100 causes warming and below that level causes cooling. As of today, the F10.7 flux is 71, not far above the activity floor of 64. Solar minimum is three years away and then we are likely to have at least two years of activity below 100 as activity rises into Solar Cycle 25. Thus some of the heat that built up in the second half of the 20th century due to the highest solar activity in 8,000 years will have a chance to radiate into space. Late spring frosts will become more frequent.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare
I told my wife this spring with plummeting ENSO and when every uptick of a day or two into warm weather was followed by seasonally cool weather for weeks in eastern Ontario, Canada, that we could have a “year without summer” alluding to the early 19th century global cold spell (trolls will cite yellow literature that it was only part of the NH). I have tried to do without heat, but during stays of my young grandchild, I have had to put on the heat.
It dropped to 7C a few days ago at night. My wife called me from Moscow in early June and told me she had to buy a coat! Today, Canada Day, its rainy and cool. The week ahead is largely forecast to be low to mid 20s and the weather network always errs on the warm side. A half dozen years ago I showed them that my forecasts, made from theirs by subtracting 2 to 5C was more accurate than theirs for weeks. Usually we are getting high 20s and often good runs in the 30sC. We are easily 5C below normal this summer and the longest day is behind us.
I was in Peterborough, Ont. A few days ago and asked a shopkeeper if global warming was over with. He laughed and said he doubted it! Sometimes it feels like we’ve slipped into a Lewis Carroll fantasy. I’m predicting a frigid winter (I’ll remind you all of this when it gets here! )
http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=gillen-darcy-wood-1816-the-year-without-a-summer
That’s not rain on canada day, that’s the heavens crying because you voted for trudeau to coincide with Canada’s 150th
Relative to the climate of the last century, an F10.7 flux above 100 causes warming and below that level causes cooling.
Relative to the climate of the last century, an F10.7 flux above 100 is indicative of warming and below that level is indicative of cooling.
There, corrected.
No, there is no such indication. F10.7 is but a proxy for the EUV flux which we can determine back to the 1740s. There has been no long-term trend in the EUV flux:
http://www.leif.org/research/Reconstruction-EUV-F107.png
Group Sunspot Number=Delta East Component=SQRT Solar EUV (space)=SQRT F10.7 flux (earth).
Since EUV and 10.7 scale so well (one in space and the other at the surface), one might conclude that very little EUV energy is lost to the atmosphere. Perhaps EUV is out of range for the ozone layer.
Is EUV but a proxy for sunspots? The SQRT relationship makes sense as electromagnetic “action at a distance”, but intuitively it seems that something that ripples the earth’s magnetic field at its leading edge every day, would lose energy in the process.
EUV is a measure of the Sun’s magnetic field and thus also of sunspots, F10.7, etc.
http://www.leif.org/research/EUV-Magnetic-Field.pdf
David A
Good piece.
It would be interesting to flesh out your idea by adding a chart that shows how much of income is spent on energy. It is the combination of food and energy expenses that matters. Food, if it is cheap, usually has to be cooked longer. More expensive food is often more costly because it cooks faster.
When I see that in Central Asia the food expenses are 40% of income, I am also aware that energy counts for another 10-20%. Low temperatures drive heating and cooking costs as people fight (economically) over access to energy.
It happens at the moment that the oil price is low. It could easily double. With food+fuel doubling, quite ordinary people will find they need 120% of current income to stay alive. It really is a lot worse than we thought, when the decades-long expectation has been that food production would continue to outstrip population growth and globally rising living standards are suddenly threatened.
We might have to learn to actually cooperate on a global scale to rein in nonsense and waste, then apply our minds to affordable food and energy.
From the top of my head, one third of energy comes from oil at the moment. When that starts running down, liquid fuels will start being made from coal, eventually doubling the coal consumption rate. So instead of coal lasting hundreds of years, people being borne today will start seeing the end of coal. And then there is nothing except nuclear. Currently solar panels and wind turbines and the steel and cement to make nuclear reactors are all cheap because coal is cheap. Whether or not we have a civilisation further out depends upon the cost of nuclear power when nuclear is the source of all energy – electrolyticly splitting water to make hydrogen to make urea so we can have fertiliser, hydrogen to make liquid fuels etc. How much freeboard there will be relative to the cost of nuclear power will determine our standard of living. The climate thing has been an enormous distraction when time is running down.
Perhaps our current civilization has run it’s course and it is time for it do demolish itself. 1000 years of turmoil to come? I have no Foundation for that so I must have read it somewhere.
Extended solar minimum and near-solar minimum will have NH cooling effects and it will last long enough to coincide with AMO decline as a stacking of cycles. This too will be claimed as climate change and the drum beat for carbon taxes will go on, facts or no facts.
Mike Jonas wrote: “I find it extraordinary that we get all sorts of satellite data by the day or hour or minute, but we have had no cloud data for over 7 years.” I have been wondering the very same thing. Anybody who knows?
You guys should actually read what I write or what Zeke writes
Not looking for a used car, mosh !!
Who’s funding Berkley this year, btw 😉
Why? All I hear is “Meow meow meow”…
The biggest donors are always conservatives and intellectual heroes of mine working in similar fields
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/12/02/robert-mercer-trump-donor-bannon-pac-523366.html
I donate my time as all good conservatives who can afford to should.
“Wow, you have a lot to learn about climate forcing. Orbital variations affect global climate. Greenland ice cores reflect Greenland climate. When you have ice core data that reflects global climate, you’ll see the orbital variation. How come Greenland cores don’t match Antarctica cores?”
If there existed such a thing as a “global climate”, what classification would it be? Would you classify in a Koppen-Geiger or Trewartha classification? Is a “global climate” something like a “global language” or a “global currency”? Why to people insist on using the term “climate” when they actually mean “temperature”.
Regardless of all the banter about the Sun and spots and such the fact remains that the start of the growing seasons have gotten progressively worse the last few years. We can live with warmer weather quite well; cold snaps and reducing CO3 simply kills your food. It’s crazy to want to cool the planet and eliminate plant food (CO2) when we’re at the end phase of the current inter-glacial. The glaciers will come regardless of how much we learn or think we know about the Sun. My hope for the next 30 years is the alarmist continue to lose and those that believe glaciations can fire up in the space of a couple of decades are wrong. After that, let your grand children debate cold versus warmth.
I should have more sympathy for the farmers, but I have an instinctive desire to thank anything that kills chickpea plants.
Where to from here? Solar minimum around March 2019; F10.7 back up to your magic 100 by about Q1/2 2021. Global temperature going nowhere beyond recent variability unless there’s a volcanic event greater than VE4 injecting a large volume of SO2 into the stratosphere, a large asteroid strike or similar. Huge CME end of October 2018; war, pestilence and derision sure to follow. Friesian cow discovered on dark side of moon July 2020. Place your bets, bake more bread while you still can and invest in fear, uncertainty and doubt. Crystal ball gazing sure ain’t what it used to be, bring back Mystic Meg.
Cycle 24 progress (July 1, 2017).
So it begins
https://youtu.be/QYSYAHDKtvM
And don’t forget that the PDO has to enter its cold mode shortly. It runs a regular 60 or 70 year cycle, and was about to go into cold-mode until that last El Nino came along. But the odds are that it will now drop into cold mode, for the next couple of decades.
http://www.data.jma.go.jp/gmd/kaiyou/data/db/climate/pdo/pdoindex.png
I have posted becore. The climate is ever changing come what may. The early frosts are a weather event possible associated with ever changing climate.
I cannot claim to be a scientist but I wish people would be honest. The worldwide corruption of the MSM must be set aside from the facts.
I wish I could dismiss politics from this excellent site, but those who believe as scientists, must slam the corruption factor – please.
Solar cycle 24 sunspot number for June 2017 in the old money (Wolf SSN) is virtually unchanged from the May’s at 11 points while the new Svalgaard’s reconstructed number is at 19.4.
Composite graph is here
SC24 is nearing what might be a prolong min (with late start of SC25) but a ‘dead cat bounce’ from these levels could not be excluded.
Stirred up some interest huh.
Scared of dying perhaps..
Maybe those faeries, dancing on their pin and making spaghetti will save us all.
I’d venture that that is A Long Shot.
Don’t worry about what happened way back when. That is not now.
Now is now.
Listen what the farmers say. They talk about the dirt a lot.
We all remember from primary school that ‘Deserts have crap climates so no plants grow there’
Children being told that are never given the option of asking why deserts and rainforests exist where they do, effectively side by side.
Why is that?
To explain that conundrum, maybe its the other way round.
Deserts are deserts because no plants grow. ‘No Plants’ causes the Crap Climate.
And the plants don’t grow there because, and not through any lack of CO2, but because the dirt is all used up and worn out.
And what are modern farmers doing? Here and now, not ages ago in the Maunder Minimum, not 10,000 years ago, not even as recently as WW2
They are weathering the soil, with endless plowing, tillage and especially nitrogen fertiliser.
Maybe we should start looking after the dirt a bit better.
Not taking it for granted would be a start.
A wise comment about looking after the soil.
Climate, vegetation and soil are intimately linked. We have changed Earth’s vegetation dramatically over the past 300 years. Little wonder climate has changed too. Attribution and amount of the climate change is the problem – but I’d put money on vegetation and land-use change over TSI or CO2 as drivers.
https://www.watercorporation.com.au/water-supply/rainfall-and-dams/streamflow/streamflowhistorical
As for imminent global cooling? Not convinced that’s here yet. I hope not.
Javier July 2, 2017 at 5:12 pm
included in one of your responses up thread to lsvalgaard (couldn’t put it there so I put it here):
“I remember I already told you that present Milankovitch insolation parameters are almost identical to 19 kyr ago, and yet the climate could not be different.”
Yes. I also remember you saying that. But you must be trying to be tricky because you could not possibly miss the direction of the climate. You know very well that although the parameters are almost identical BUT 19k years ago the climate was coming out of a cold climate and just beginning to head into the current warming interglacial while today we are already in the warm climate interglacial (and eventually heading back into cold). The same reason the climate on March 21 is different than Sep 21 yet the Sun is at the equinox in each case.
Well, that is a common trick to only tell half of the story…
Odd that it is three years away. Jupiter and Saturn will be aligned on the other side of the sun from us in 3 years.
Some kind of Barycentric coordinate, what do you think will happen?
Jupiter and Saturn will be harder to see.
That cold spell caused a 46F overnite low here in the central Appalachians. Pretty dang cold for last days of June.
I think the data describing percentage of disposable income actually understates how vulnerable developing countries are to food prices. Food in the developed world is so processed that inputs are less important than corporate overhead, distribution, marketing, etc.
1 bushel of wheat makes 40 loaves of American commercial white bread – so, at $5/bu, the loaf contains 12.5 cents of wheat. If the bread sells for $2/loaf, few American consumers would even notice if the price of wheat doubled. Although I don’t have comparable statistics for food in the developing world, I conjecture the percentage of inputs as a fraction of sales price is higher.
Harsh winter takes toll on wildlife….
http://www.concordmonitor.com/Harsh-winter-took-heavy-toll-on-wildlife-across-western-US-11063460
I can attest to horrendous bird losses.