Essay: Solar cycle wave frequency linked to jet stream changes

It’s not the heat It’s the humidity 

By Francis Tucker Manns, PhD

Abstract: The sun controls climate change. Not industry. Not you. Not me. It is the sun.

Solar cycle 24, the weakest in 100 years, is stumbling to an end. The sunspot cycle averages about 11 (± 1.5) years. There may not be any sunspots this week. In the spring of 2017 the sunspot number was low or zero and Canada was plagued with spring floods from melting snow and heavy rainfall.

Major floods have occurred in Quebec and caused a human tragedy in loss of habitation; the army was called in. The fire chief was lost at Cache Creek, BC. Canada is wet from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

Toronto Island is sandbagged and may be closed for several months. The Lake Ontario high water is the 22nd anniversary of the previous highest water levels recorded. This year’s Minden Ontario flood occurred on the 11th anniversary of the Peterborough flood. But not just that, worse calamities, Hurricane Hazel (1954) occurred during a solar minimum. Eighty-eight people died in Toronto and Toronto abandoned living in its beautiful wooded ravines. Toronto, if you will, is within a Great Lakes cloud chamber.

History supports this hypothesis – the horrible Johnstown flood occurred on 31 May 1889 with loss of 2,200 lives. The Johnstown Flood of 1936 and another Johnstown flood in 1977 occurred during solar minima. In 1977 nearly 12 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, when a thunderstorm stalled over the area.

But these phenomena are not restricted to North America or Canada. In early June, rescue workers battled to reach remote areas of Bangladesh hit by landslides and heavy rains that have killed at least 137 people, with dozens more missing. “Authorities say hundreds of hillside homes were buried by landslides in the southeast of the country as people slept. The landslides were triggered by heavy monsoon rains, with 343 millimetres (13.5 inches) of rain falling on the area.” In May, Sri Lanka has suffered 2,000 deaths due to landslides, and 200,000 displaced this spring. On 1 July 2017 China reported the highest rainfall in 60 years. The climate is changing globally, but it’s not caused by the heat. It’s the humidity.

The effect of the solar cycle is seriously misunderstood. There is no correlation with the number of sunspots, though we know that sunspots are a proxy for the sun’s electromagnetic behavior. Astrophysicists in Denmark, however, have teased out the relationship between sunspots and climate (Friis-Christensen and Lassen, 1991). It’s the frequency of the wave. A very tight correlation to climate is coupled to the frequency of the solar cycle. When solar cycles are shorter than 11 years over several cycles the planet warms; when cycles are longer than 11 year for a few cycles, the planet cools. There has been a strong (95%) correlation between the solar cycle and cooling and warming of the northern hemisphere over the past 150 years. Climate, moreover, is also tightly tied to what Zharkova et al. (2015) have called the heartbeat of the sun. Ironically, Lockyer in 1872 called sunspot observation the meteorology of the future. Ask your weather bureau if this is true. The emphasis has always been on the peaks, but the real story is in the troughs and the wavelength.

Here is how it works. When sunspot peaks are far apart, the electromagnetic shield is down for a long period of time, cosmic radiation seeds the clouds, and there is more rain and snow (with its albedo reflectivity) and the planet cools (Svensmark, J. et al., 2016). The rainfall makes sense in this context because cooling results in condensation. When the sunspot peaks are frequent the minima have less effect and earth warms (Svensmark, H. and Friis-Christensen, 1997; Svensmark H., et al. 2007).

This pattern is completely consistent with the extremes, the thundery hot summers and cold winters of the Little Ice Age which coincided with the Maunder Minimum when sunspots were few or completely absent for 60 years. Zharkova’s research group is predicting another Little Ice Age beginning right now, today, or at the end of Cycle 24. So think many others who study the sun and think it trumps carbon dioxide (Shaviv, 1998).

How does that happen? Here’s how. NASA says, as we enter the solar minimum, our wispy atmosphere shrinks. NASA has learned to juggle satellites that drop into lower orbits during the solar cycle. Lower down in our atmosphere the sun drives our winds and the most important winds of all, that rule all the others, are the jet streams that power around the planet at well over 160 kilometres an hour.

When the atmosphere contracts, the jets start to meander. The meandering happens because there is a space problem; the same jet stream is jammed into less volume within a shrunken atmosphere; hence the jet streams kink. The cloud levels are slightly but measurably lower as well.

Figure 1: The relationship between the weather and a jet stream Rossby wave.

The meanders with ridges and troughs (similar to those of a great river like the Mississippi but far more vast) typically carry the weather fronts with them with low pressure and a high pressure zones: a ridge and a trough. The jet streams maintain their velocity as in a solar maximum, but wander farther north and farther south taking colder air south and hotter air north. The meanders are called Rossby waves. Hence, wide temperature variations occur; most of North America had two temperature swings in May from the teens to the high twenties and back again. Kinking of the jet stream causes extreme weather. As the wandering is slow, the storms behave like broken lawn sprinklers. Under certain conditions, a normal weather front can cause dangerous flooding because, although the jet stream is moving rapidly (consistent with its name) the lateral course of the jet stream meander wanders slowly from west to east and occasionally stalls.

Figure 2: Condition of the Greenland Ice Sheet as of September 2018. Numerous papers were produced attributing Greenland’s icy decline in 2011-12 to arctic temperature amplification (Greenland Climate Research Centre and Danish Meteorological Institute). The Greenland Ice sheet has rebounded strongly since the summer of 2011-12.

The result is like a broken water sprinkler dumping rain or snow in one spot, a region out of equilibrium with local conditions on the ground. The result is flooding or a numbingly serious blizzard. Today the Gulf Coast is swamped by tropical storm Cindy caught in a slowly moving jet stream.

We are witness to the climate change we have been taught to fear, and it is not anthropogenic; it is extraterrestrial.

It has never been proven that carbon dioxide affects the climate. It is an interesting hypothesis, but not only is it not proven, I am unaware of any experimental support for the CO₂ hypothesis. It stands equal to any other unsupported hypotheses – all the hypotheses of ghosts or special creation, but does not rise to the credibility of a theory without experimental support. Friis-Christensen and Lassen (op cit), however, estimated a 95% correlation with sunspot peak frequency, a remarkable correlation, rare in natural science; the editor of Science magazine at the time commented that the “ball [meaning Anthropogenic Global Warming] is now in the other court”. Only matching your right hand with your left might exceed 95%. Not meaning to be glib, but, 95% for solar leaves only 5% for any other cause (without considering the standard deviation).

The alarmist outcry was that “correlation is not causation”, yet the same alarmists, using the precautionary principle (which is not science) asked us to believe a correlation of temperature with CO₂. Moreover, in recent years (the entire 21st century) there has been no correlation even as CO₂ continues to nudge above 400 parts in 1,000,000 parts in the atmosphere over Hawaii.

The Danish laboratory now directed by Henrik Svensmark and sustained by his colleagues has produced experimental support over the interval since 1991 for cloud seeding by cosmic radiation from deep space a cycle modulated by an electromagnetic solar cycle. It’s a mouthful and a complex theory but it has been tested in cloud chambers in Copenhagen and also by an international team of astrophysicists in THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER in Switzerland. Despite difficulties with introduction of extraneous experimental matter (organic aerosols were introduced to complicate the trial) there can be little doubt that cosmic radiation seeds the clouds whether the nuclei was sulphur or Great Smoky Mountain aerosols. Moreover, the Greenland Ice sheet is growing again and the California drought has broken. During the recent solar maximum of solar cycle 24 the melting of the Greenland Ice Cap was the foremost worry of the alarmists.

In Figure 3 one sees the big picture of the solar cycle wavelength or frequency. There is an empirical relationship between the cumulative length of several solar cycles and past climate. For brevity, the Maunder Minimum is not shown. It falls on the left of the chart and shows no cycles and few sunspots, hence the name minimum. It was a lengthy period of the Little Ice Age that was characterised by Alpine glacial advance, epidemics, and the potato famine. The Dalton Minimum was similar and the continuation of the Little Ice Age. Since then the frequency has stabilized around a half wavelength of 11.0 ± 1.5 years. I call this as the Goldilocks trend (obviously not too cold.

Figure 3: The Goldilocks Trend or the Big Picture. This is a plot of alternating elapsed time between Maxima and Minima of the solar cycle. Please refer to the cover page for the conventional views. Data from National Geophysical Data Center web site, Boulder, Colorado, USA.

and not too hot) we have enjoyed as the planet warmed. However, the Goldilocks trend may be about to end. There has been no statistical warming for the 21st century despite the rising CO₂ and the corresponding solar cycles have been approximately 12 years long. If the current cycle 24 lasts much longer, expect Niagara Falls to freeze over as it did in 1912 and 2014.

Conclusions

The logical progression is for the rain to fall, the clouds to clear, the earth to cool and humidity to drop and warmth to not return until the sunspots return. Regardless whether or not this forecast is correct, we must understand the danger of Lysenkoism – synonym for flawed government science – is that public science policy can lead to disaster. For example mistakes like the cholesterol [statin] myth started in the 1950s by Eisenhower’s doctors or the denial of lead poisoned water in Flint Michigan by the EPA.

NGOs, Environmental Lobby Groups, industries and governments are creating policy for the warming forecast, but serious cooling could be coming. Keeping our environment healthy is paramount to our prosperity but free speech in science and not false consensus is part of the solution.

“…Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.”– Dwight Eisenhower, 1961

References

Friis-Christensen, E. and K. Lassen, 1991: Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated with Climate, Science 254 (5032):698-700, December 1991.

Lockyer, J. N., 1872: The Meteorology of the Future, Nature, 12 December 1872, pp 98 – 101.

Shaviv, N. J., 1998: Using the Oceans as a Calorimeter to Quantify the Solar Radiative Forcing, J. Geophys. Res., 113, A11101, doi:10.1029/2007JA012989.

Svensmark, H. and E. Friis-Christensen, 1997: Variation of Cosmic Ray Flux and Global Cloud Coverage—a Missing Link in Solar-Climate Relationships, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Volume 59, Issue 11, July 1997, Pages 1225-1232

Svensmark, H., J. O. Pedersen, N. D. Marsh, M. B. Enghoff and U. I. Uggerhøj, 2007: Experimental Evidence for the Role of Ions in Particle Nucleation Under Atmospheric Conditions, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 463 (2078): 385–396. Bibcode:2007RSPSA.463..385S. doi:10.1098/rspa.2006.1773.

Svensmark, J., M. B. Enghoff, N. J. Shaviv, H. Svensmark, 2016: The response of clouds and aerosols to cosmic ray decrease, Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, Volume 121, Issue 9, pp 8152–8181, September 2016.

Zharkova, V. V., S. J. Shepherd, E. Popova and S. I. Zharkov, 2015: Heartbeat of the Sun from Principal Component Analysis and Prediction of Solar Activity on a Millennium Timescale, Scientific Reports 5, Article Number: 15689.

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NOTE: I don’t necessarily agree with this article, but thought it was worth discussing – Anthony