Guest post by David Archibald
News has come from the Duluth office of the National Weather Service that both International Falls & Hibbing broke their records for low temperatures on the morning of September 17. The Falls got to 23°, breaking the old record of 24° set in 1959, and Hibbing to 24°. We shouldn’t be surprised because the Canadian prairies have been cooling for decades now. Also, President Trump, while in California on September 14, had predicted cooling, saying “It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.” Three days later a new cold record is set at the iconic International Falls weather station. Either President Trump actually has some control of the weather or he is getting very good advice.
The paper on the Canadian prairies by Garnett, Khandekar and Kauer notes that “During the grain growing months of May-July, the mean temperature on the Canadian prairies has cooled down by 2ºC in the last 30 years. The cooling appears to be most certainly linked to diminishing solar activity” and “This cooling has led to a reduction in Growing Degree Days (GDDs) and has also impacted the precipitation pattern.” The paper includes this figure showing the multi-decadal decline in GDDs:
The Canadian prairies grow about 75 million tonnes per year of grains and pulses so the temperature downtrend evident is concerning with respect to the ability of the world to feed itself. The fact that the reduction of solar activity over that period is likely to have been the cause of the cooling is supported by the following figure, produced from data in Table 4 of the paper:
Over the period 1985 to 2019, the figure above shows the correlation between sunspot activity and GDDs on the Canadian prairies. The blue line is the line of best fit.
While the Canadian prairies have been cooling for decades, the Modern Warm Period only ended 14 years ago as shown by the following graph of the cumulative aa Index against the long term average:
While sunspots are visual manifestations of solar activity, it has been suggested that the Sun’s magnetic activity is the biggest factor in controlling climate on Earth. The figure above suggests that trends in solar activity are about 70 years long. If so, the Earth has just started into a long term cooling trend.
David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia
Fuzzy data. Sometimes fuzzy data have meaning.
Mark me down as interested but not yet convinced of a long-term trend Nonetheless, IMHO, the observations of the farmers are credible.
I do appreciate the effort to prepare the information and discuss same because I am unfamiliar with this hypothesis. Am I a bad person?
David why did you use the AA index in lieu of sunspots?
The modern maximum is 1935-2004 using annual v2 sunspot numbers.
It’s recently cooling in the north from the TSI having dropped back near solar minimum levels after the flux dissapated from small sunspots.
My empirically derived decadal ocean warming threshold is 95 v2 SN and 120 sfu F10.7 cm flux. The running average of F10.7 since my model training period started (May 1960) is now about 117.1 sfu after falling below 120 in early 2017. The high latitude cooling I expect will happen as this average falls further over the next few years, before sunspots and TSI get high enough for more warming, as the tropics cool too under low TSI.
From my Dec 2018 AGU poster, the assumed solar minimum in Fig 12 was July 2019, whereas the actual was Dec 2019, so the whole thing gets time-shifted forward by 5 months. We are now in the ‘cold winters, hot dry US SW’ part of the cycle, and my conclusion then was for early hard winters until sunspots/TSI rebound to decadal warming levels again.
I ran the numbers again for Fig 12 using the latest SWPC SC25 forecast, and it looks like even their highest range will result in a cumulative F10.7cm running average curve that doesn’t return back above 120 sfu in SC25:
Warmer scientists have plenty of time on their hands and some of them would have looked at what actually causes changes in climate out of idle curiosity. About 10 years ago on WUWT, one such person make a comment along the lines of “You fools. It is solar magnetic activity that changes climate.” Everything has its place. It could be that solar magnetic activity is the largest component, not necessarily the largest component. The best long term record is the aa Index. So I plot it up and, lo and behold, it works like a charm. The changes in trend stand out like the proverbial. So they define the Modern Warm Period.
Calculate the average for the period 1868 – 2020, which is 19.2. Then for each year add the difference between the annual result and 19.2. The Modern Warm Period is a plateau of consistently higher activity. The result is nice and clean, the interpretation unequivocal.
Actually Anthony Watts picked the end of the Modern Warm Period in 2006 when the Ap Index and the aa Index suddenly fell out of bed. At the time, Anthony said “That means something” and so it did.
Thanx David you were definitely on to something. It looks like the AA index lags sunspots by about a year; sunspot numbers go back farther than the AA index which is why I use them. See inset (d) here:
The breakpoints for the detrended integrated sunspot number are in 1935 and 2004. The Modern Maximum in annual numbers averaged 108.5, 65% higher than the previous 70-year period average of 65.8 v2 SN.
Changes in Canada’s Climate: Trends in Indices Based on Daily Temperature and Precipitation Data (2018)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07055900.2018.1514579
A Third Generation of Homogenized Temperature for Trend Analysis and Monitoring Changes in Canada’s Climate (2020)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07055900.2020.1765728
See also …
ftp://ccrp.tor.ec.gc.ca/pub/EC_data/AHCCD_daily/
V3 are the min/mean/max daily temperatures that are not “_Gen2”
Long story short? GDD have increased throughout CA (one needs to include September to determine total growing season, see the 2018 reference above).
Oceanic cooling is being detected in various places in the Southern Hemisphere.
For instance, there’s been a lot of attention to flow of warmer water toward Antarctica. Apparently a warming phenomenon. But recent research has show this warm inflow to be in reaction to a deep downwelling outflow of cold dense water away from Antarctica along the ocean floor. So it’s more like a cooling phenomenon.
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/09/12/widespread-signals-of-southern-hemisphere-ocean-cooling-as-well-as-the-amoc/
Is WUWT going to post something saying we’re getting warmer next time two places in the same state set record highs for one of the dates of the year?
Oh look, a yellow-bellied warmunist troll. Nice. I thought they had gone extinct.
No the msm will blow it out of proportion with the we are are all gonna die mantra. No need to post it here, and the local coolaid drinkers will slobber all over it like it is the hottest evah.
Don’t need to, you warminists will do it for us.
Donald L. Klipstein
Oh, how funny! Three Cooling alarmistas in a row, barking unisono like little ankle biters!
Wow! I love that.
The best is that upon a very first analysis, you can see a typical flaw: the time series for 1980-2019 has near its beginning the second highest JJA temperature average since 1900 (after 1936), followed by the four least temperatures since then.
Exactly what should be avoided. The linear estimate for that period therefore hardly could be positive: -0,37 °C / decade.
But… if available data had not been available before 1992, the trend would ave been +0.27 instead, and the article probably wouldn’t have been written that way.
I’ll try to obtain some more data for a deeper analysis, and compare the time series with Silso’s Sun Spot Number data.
J.-P. D.
Frostbite Falls! I assume the 23 degrees is Fahrenheit, frost bite indeed?
Frostbite Falls — that’s the hometown of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle Moose. 😉
Yes, someone remind them to watch out for Pottsylvanian spies and tech thieves ..
The Nino 3.4 index will soon drop to -0.8 degrees C, which is full La Nina conditions.
And yet no mention of the elephant in the sky–geoengineering aka weather warfare. Mother Nature had nothing to do with the freak lightening storms that sparked the California fires or the double whammy hurricanes in the gulf or the extreme temp changes. Educate yourself at: geoengineeringwatch dot org
“During the grain growing months of May-July, the mean temperature on the Canadian prairies has cooled down by 2ºC in the last 30 years.”
Am I misunderstanding something in the paper? They claim in the abstract that there’s been a 2°C drop during May-July period, but in the body they say there’s been “a 2°C cooling in April, a 1°C cooling in May, a slight cooling in June and a nearly flat to slightly upward trend in July and August.”
So only one of the 3 months showed any significant cooling, and that only half what is claimed for the entire period.
Cooling down in April in Canada means a delay in vegetation.
My question was about why this paper claims something in the abstract that isn’t backed up in the actual paper. Maybe it’s just a typo and they meant to say April, rather than May-July, but that’s a huge error, and doesn’t give me much confidence in the rest of the paper.
And then David Archibald quotes it without checking the details, and that gives me even less confidence in this article. Though there are many other reasons I don’t give much credit to it.
Joe Bastardi says shortest period between last spring frost and first fall frost in his PA area. Click on video:
http://www.weatherbell.com/premium
I’m not far from him. Killing May frost here and this morning first fall frost (30F) — earliest fall frost I can remember in west MD, tho I think there were earlier freezing Sept temps in the early 1900s.
Here in Butler county PA we have had frost 3 mornings in a row, looks like tomorrow will make it 4.
“The fact that the reduction of solar activity over that period is likely to have been the cause of the cooling is supported by the following figure, produced from data in Table 4 of the paper”
I looked at the same data, and cannot see how you arrived at that conclusion. Here are a few observations:
1) Solar activity has been declining during the period. We can agree on that.
2) The GDD values supplied in the table actually show no overall cooling, in fact they show a slight but statistically insignificant warming. (This despite the table deliberately excluding two cold years near the beginning.)
3) A linear fit of Solar Activity to GDD shows a positive but statistically insignificant correlation between the two.
4) However, given that the trend of Solar is decreasing over time, but GDD is flat, suggests to me that what you are seeing is a correlation with the phases of the solar cycle, not the size of the peaks. As a test of this I looked at only years where Solar was above 50 – result no positive correlation.
Which begs the question: why post Archibald’s delusions at all? I suspect the reasons are banally idealogical.
Yours get posted, so what’s your point?
Hardly. The last 3 days of August were indeed unusually cool – well-timed for the long weekend. But September has been about 1.5 degrees above the long term average (according to the Central England Temperature), and most enjoyable too.
Dylan from Hibbing, Minnesota – Bob Dylan predicted this:
Lyrics
… Somebody could freeze right to the bone
I froze right to the bone
New York Times said it was the coldest winter in seventeen years
I didn’t feel so cold then… More
From song talkin New York
– JPP
Hmmmm, I haven’t heard this in a long time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS_mZfpRe9c
– JPP