Three decades of cooling ahead

She was not helped by this unfortunate quote/report,"Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645." She is only speaking about sun-spot activity that happened to coincided with a regional event (according to PAGES 2K.) I am reminded of a scientist who emerges with an "eureka" moment only to have it blow-up in their face.

Many, many years ago, I learned when diagnosing a problem, don't rush to the front of the line. Rather, be patient and let the other 'problem solvers' have the first opportunity. They are often more than willing to be identified as the problem solver . . . BUT if it doesn't match my diagnosis . . . I wait, polish, and offer my solution last. Zharkova has my sympathy because I think there may be merit in their frequency analysis of three cycles. Just it was a little premature.

Ok, I need to share some of my work this weekend. JPL "HORIZONS" is an online, orbital mechanics service that is available via Web, telnet, and e-mail to resolve orbital mechanic problems. We know that the earth orbits the Sun in an elliptical orbit:

• Perigee - Southern hemisphere "summer", orbital velocity fastest and closest to Sun, ~3 days shorter
• Apogee - Northern hemisphere "summer", slowest velocity, and furtherest to Sun
• Solar radiance - F(1/d**2) solar radiance decreases by the square of the distance

HORIZONS will give us true, earth-moon and solar ephemeris with a day-by-day summary over any given year. I will pick a point at the Northern latitude and Southern latitude where one 24 hour day w/o light occurs (i.e., the poles have several 24 hour days, a day w/o light is a boundary towards the equator.) Then using the inverse square law, integrate the solar radiance between the Northern and Southern equinoxes at those points over a year. Another interesting point would be on the 23 degree latitude from the equator where the Sun reaches directly overhead on one day of the year.

I want to find out if Northern and Southern hemispheric heating is symmetrical or not. If not symmetrical, get a first-order magnitude of the difference of these four points. Then I can add albedo effects and integrate over latitudes towards the equator. It won't include clouds and vegetation/desert but it will give a first-order approximation.

My suspicion is Southern heating is significantly less than Northern heating as this would explain the cycle seen in the sea level and orbital rotational changes. This might give us insights that combined with ocean currents might explain polar dynamics.

Bob Wilson

ps. I can't believe I do this for fun! FYI, I'm doing some N19WT work too.

 

Earth heading for 'mini ice age' in 15 years, scientists say - UPI.com

These days I wonder if ocean acidification is the worse problem, so cooling (if happens) is not a free pass. I do wonder if controlling SOx/NOx might be help there.

 

She made an unfortunate choice of words combined with a paleo record that appears to be regional. But I'm patient as there are plenty of solar observations that directly read the Solar irradiance. Nature doesn't parse language.

There will be more and more proposals for 'terra forming' over time but the economics don't make sense. It is the problem of the commons on a world wide scale.

Bob Wilson

 

So I was curious about Professor Zharkova's work and found this:

I have a wide range of research interests in solar and solar-terrestrial plasma physics, solar/medical imaging and pattern recognition/ classification. In general, I am interested in:

Solutions of non-linear partial differential equations (PDEs):
- particle motion in 3D magnetic field topology
- Fokker-Planck equations for particle precipitation
- radiative transfer PDEs for multi-level atoms

Solutions of systems of non-linear PDEs:
- two fluid hydrodynamics,
- multi-elements radiative transfer,
- Particle-in-Cell (PIC) (joint solutions motion PDE with Maxwell equations)

- Magnetic Topology during magnetic reconnection
- Impact Excitation/Ionisation by thermal and non-thermal electrons/protons
- Automated pattern recognition on full disk solar images
- Artificial Intelligence Methods
- Solar activity patterns derived from long series (>36 years) of full disk magnetograms
- Classification of solar activity patterns with Artificial Intelligence methods (ANN, MCMC etc.)
- Interpretation of solar activity patterns with Parker’s two layer solar dynamo model
- Pattern recognition and classification in EGSO (EU funded project) - Solar Feature Catalogues​

If I were single, I'd date her because we share so many interests . . . and she is cute. <SIGH>

Bob Wilson

 

You will have better luck if you ask her out without the presumption.

 

Hope we make it to witness the mini-ice-age in 15 years...let's make our calendars, probably my Gen4 is 10 yrs old then.

Wish they'd move it up a few years so we could blog about global cooling

 

Any decrease in sun insolation below average will even out in the future, so all a solar minimum will do now is encourage AGW denialism and make the problem even worse for the future.

That is nothing I hope for.

 

I would of course be remiss if I did not mention Svantes Arrhenius, the grandfather of climate change, when he popularized the calcs/concept around 1900 was not sure if global warming was a good thing or bad thing, in view of the little ice age, I think he felt warmth was better than cold.

 

About 'sun spots': No, Earth is not heading toward a &#8216;mini ice age&#8217; - The Washington Post

The ice age idea got rolling last week when researcher Valentina Zharkova, a professor of mathematics at Northumbria University in England, presented some of her recent research into solar variations at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Wales. The presentation was based on a study she had published last year in the Astrophysical Journal, which presented a technique for understanding variations in solar radiation and made some predictions about how this radiation will change in the near future. Most notably, the research predicts that between 2030 and 2040, solar activity should drop significantly, leading to a condition known as a “solar minimum.”

However, the issue isn’t so simple for Zharkova, who is openly skeptical about the strength of anthropogenic greenhouse gases when compared to the influence of the sun.

On the one hand, Zharkova maintains that her research was not intended to make assumptions about the effects of solar variation on climate — only to lay out predictions about the solar activity itself. “What will happen in the modern Maunder Minimum we do not know yet and can only speculate,” she says. On the other hand, she adds, her gut assumption is that temperatures will drop as they did 370 years ago.

The reason, she says, is her belief that the sun is a bigger influence on earthly climate than the effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. “I am not convinced with the arguments of the group promoting global warming of an anthropogenic nature,” Zharkova says, adding that she would need to examine more research before she could take a clear stance on anthropogenic climate change. Given the right evidence, she says she might accept that human-caused climate change is a bigger factor — but her belief for the time being is that changes in solar radiation are likely to have a bigger influence on temperature changes on Earth, not just during times of solar minimum, but throughout history.
. . .
Complicating the matter further is theidea that the 17th century’s “little ice age” wasn’t even really the result of the solar minimum going on at the time. Feulner also authored another 2011 paper that concluded that volcanic activity was the major cause of a cooler climate during this time, rather than solar variations. . . .

While Zharkova is one of a small minority of scientists who do not fully accept human activities as the greatest drivers of current climate change, she says she’s surprised at the media response her study has garnered. “I didn’t realize there would be such a strong response from the climate people,” she says, adding that she would need to repeat the calculations of mainstream climate scientists and examine the evidence herself to decide if she can accept their point that anthropogenic influences outweigh those of the sun.
​

BTW, the Washington Post link gave me an open copy of her/their paper.

Bob Wilson

 

And until I repeat her calculations, I'll be skeptical of her opinions.

 

Like modern warming, unless you can model the LIA you can't figure out greenhouse influence. Since ideas differ, some even contending ENSO, AMO and volanos are effected by solar radiation, the best way to run the experiment is to have anouther minium, with these projections and measure what's going on. 30 years from now we may understand the little ice age a little better.

Let's put our head back in the science though. Zharkova is projecting low sunspot activity, which is her area of research. Then she is plugging it into other peoples climate models about the LIA. The first part is a scientific hypothesis, that we will soon be able to confirm or deny. The second part is some raw speculation based on not much. Can raw speculation turn out to be true? Sure but it is not likely.

I think the first is a prediction of solar cycles. The rest is raw speculation which has gotten this study some press. Think of it as the near term 6 meter sea level rise from that inconvient movie. It gets people thinking, but isn't based on science. Could it happen? Sure, but unlikely and we should know soon.

 

This is a credible study and found the intervals between solar sun spot activity are not found to have a significant impact on planet warming. For good measure, they took an extreme 25% reduction, 1361-1362 W/m{2} down to a flat line 1357.5 W/m{2} and found the effect slightly changed the upward slope and caught up 10 years later.

BTW, I started trying to read "Climate Change A Risk Assessment" . . . talk about a paper authored by Government bureaucrats! I'm going to assign myself reading of the USA tax code to get my reading speed back up. There are some interesting charts that all look like "S" curves with today at the lower, left tail.

Bob Wilson

 

OK, now my hair is on fire: "Prediction of Solar Activity From Solar Background Magnetic Field Variations In Cycles 21-23".

The authors only used cycles 21-23, with 24 in progress, to report the pattern. Anyone could take Excel and using a 6-degree polynomial over this small sample size and claim "Here is the pattern."

No, if this approach has merit, apply it to as much modern data as possible going back at least 100-150 years, say 1850s. Cutting off the historical data at 1980 is just plain wrong. Better still, go back to the historical records of the first Maunder Minimum.

So may be the presentation paper at the symposium did that ... I can not tell without a copy. But this paper, doi.10.1088/00004-637X/795/1/46 does not.

Bob Wilson

 

Fair enough but it also outlines the problem.

If only modern magnetic observations are usable, it suggests the claimed principles have no history-predictive value. The phenomena only runs 'forward' and can not reconstruct earlier sun spot behavior. If it can not explain earlier sunspot observation I then begin to suspect the predictive value. But this goes to my earlier problem, a frequency analysis had not found the claimed patterns.

Fourier analysis date back to the late 1700s and well overlapped early sun spot observations. If such analysis were unable to identify the 'dual dynamo' mechanism described in this paper in over 200 years, I find it hard to accept that recent magnetic observations finally found the pattern AND it has predictive value.

There are random events, like weather and dice, that have limited or no predictive value. I am OK with the limits of weather prediction but we should be able to see at least as far in the past as we predict into the future. There should be some hind-cast capability and this paper does not show that or someone can perhaps cite where they, the authors address this problem.

Bob Wilson

 

Although the Ukranian is a handsome woman, I remember an unfortunate college relationship with a journalism student that I didn't get over until the third week of Marine bootcamp. She too wrote an article that had 'problems.' Then there are the FOX ladies. However, I suspect another effect is occurring.

The early symptoms of global warming are becoming more evident and over time, these effects will wear down on the deniers. They in turn will grasp at any straw. Since literature surveys suggest in the climate community, deniers are a minority, their pronouncements have news in the same way 'man bites dog' gets coverage. The 'Maunder Minimum' and 'Little Ice Age' phrases were just something to catch attention to what otherwise would be a weak paper.

So I though this was dead when 5 hours ago, this bit shows up in Google News:

Source: Diminishing solar activity may bring new Ice Age by 2030 | Astronomy Now

"Lomonosov Moscow State University Press Release"


Dr. Helen Popova of the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics and of the Faculty of Physics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. Image credit: Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Dr Helen Popova responds cautiously, while speaking about the human influence on climate.

“There is no strong evidence, that global warming is caused by human activity. The study of deuterium in the Antarctic showed that there were five global warmings and four Ice Ages for the past 400 thousand years. People first appeared on the Earth about 60 thousand years ago. However, even if human activities influence the climate, we can say, that the Sun with the new minimum gives humanity more time or a second chance to reduce their industrial emissions and to prepare, when the Sun will return to normal activity”, Dr Helen Popova summarised. ​

It is a fine article that recaps the paper without the 'technical details.' However, even their summary reports they used their model to 'go forward in time'. There is no mention of hind-casting or using the model to compare it with earlier sun-spot activity.

Sorry, I was looking at the Ukranian who spoke at the symposium and not all of the paper authors.

Bob Wilson