No Maunder mininum (sorry, disinformers) so we’re still on track for the hottest decade on record
"No Maunder mininum (sorry, disinformers) so we’re still on track for the hottest decade on record"
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Solar cycle 24 revs up, though changes in the sun are increasingly a bit player in the global warming trend
The 2000s were the hottest decade in recorded history by far “” even though we’re at “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” The 2000s were a full 0.2°C warmer than the 1990s, which of course had been the hottest decade on record, 0.14°C warmer than 1980s (according to the dataset that best tracks planetary warming). Hmm. It’s almost like the warming is accelerating.
Yet when the anti-science crowd isn’t perversely spending their time trying to stop all efforts to cut global warming pollution that might slow warming, they are perversely trying to convince the public and policymakers we’re not warming at all. That’s why many of them have been rooting for this deep solar minimum to become a Maunder Minimum (“also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum”), to mute the warming signal and hence the motivation for action for a few more years. Yes, they have a self-destructive streak.
In fact, even if total solar irradiance never recovered, we wouldn’t have entered a period of cooling since, “the negative forcing, relative to the mean solar irradiance is equivalent to seven years of CO2 increase at current growth rates,” as NASA noted in January 2009. Heck, even with a La Ni±a and an unusually inactive sun, 2008 was almost 0.1°C warmer than the hot decade of the 1990s as a whole. And 2009 was (just barely) the second hottest year on record after 2005. And in spite of the unusual solar minimum, the past 12 months werer the hottest on record and “It is likely that 2012 will reach a record high global temperature,” according to NASA.
As far back as 2007, a Hadley Center paper in Science had concluded,
Our system predicts that internal variability will partially offset the anthropogenic global warming signal for the next few years. However, climate will continue to warm, with at least half of the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.
So there’s little doubt the 2010s will be the hottest decade on record, barring multiple supervolcanoes, just as the 2000s and 1990s and 1980s were.
When we last looked at the sun [please, don’t try that at home], NASA was reporting that the sunspot cycle was about to come out of its depression, if a newly discovered mechanism for predicting solar cycles “” a migrating jet stream deep inside the sun “” proved accurate (see National Solar Observatory, NASA say no “Maunder Minimum”).
Now, NASA has released a new “Solar Cycle Prediction” (see figure above):
Current prediction for the next sunspot cycle maximum gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 64 in July of 2013.
Predicting the behavior of a sunspot cycle is fairly reliable once the cycle is well underway (about 3 years after the minimum in sunspot number occurs [see Hathaway, Wilson, and Reichmann Solar Physics; 151, 177 (1994)]). Prior to that time the predictions are less reliable but nonetheless equally as important. Planning for satellite orbits and space missions often require knowledge of solar activity levels years in advance.
A number of techniques are used to predict the amplitude of a cycle during the time near and before sunspot minimum. Relationships have been found between the size of the next cycle maximum and the length of the previous cycle, the level of activity at sunspot minimum….
We find a starting time of August 2008 with minimum occurring in November or December 2008 and maximum of about 66 in June of 2013. The predicted numbers are available in a text file, as a GIF image, and as a pdf-file.
And that means solar cycle 24 would be on the modest side compared to recent cycles. But changes in the solar forcing just aren’t the big dog anymore when it comes to driving climate change, as I discussed here: “A detailed look at the Little Ice Age.”
The Naval Research Laboratory and NASA reported last year that, “if anything,” the sun contributed “a very slight overall cooling in the past 25 years.” The study, “How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006,” found, “According to this analysis, solar forcing contributed negligible long-term warming in the past 25 years and 10% of the warming in the past 100 years.” A major 2007 study demonstrated “over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.“
Related studies can be found on Skeptical Science. Dr. Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, has a good post on this subject, “The Waxing Sun and Warming Climate.” Real Climate also has an interesting post, “Solar spectral stumper” on a study that would have important implications, if true, but which they doubt is true.
Bottom Line: As long as we continue doing little or nothing to reverse global emissions trends, every decade this century is likely to (temporarily) hold the record for hottest decade.
FRONT
The recent Nature Article on UV and warming/cooling is quite interesting, and the denialiati is spinning it in all possible directions, not considering that it could mean that what they have claimed for years is dead wrong. Not that the variations in the 11 year cycle matters much in the big picture, though.
I have also found it curious why they have been pushing the cooling meme for so long. They are indeed potentially digging their own grave, so the logic could be that they figure that if they are right (in the very short term), it will be a win, and if wrong, the MSM will not report on the failure. So far, that is the case. I have seen very little written on the failure of their claim that the 2008 cooling would continue in 2009 and 2010.
It would have been safer for the anti science hordes to simply claim that “it’s natural”, no matter if temps were going up or down.
They are right about one thing, though: the natural drivers are all turned to the cool setting. The very fact that we are still warming rapidly should give some food for thought.
OT…
What’s your take on the GMU investigation of the Wegman scandal? I’m not drawing any conclusions about GMU, but what I’m particularly curious of is why it took them so long to reach this stage.
Interesting post. The recent minimum has certainly been unexpectedly long, and I’ve heard a few people (although not that many) suggesting that it indicated some sort of fundamental change. I guess not…
The SOURCE study does seem to be particularly odd, and I can’t say I’ve been able to make much sense of it. I’m also wondering if there’s some kind of instrumentation issue (as the post at realclimate suggests).
Looking through the data at different wavelengths (see here: http://lasp.colorado.edu/lisird/sorce/sorce_ssi/ts.html) it looks as if results for wavelengths above 300nm (ie those from the SIM instrument) are all over the map. What’s up with the results for 947.35nm? Is it just saturating the detector?
Good article and very informative. I am presuming that 2012 corresponds to the next el nino which was very large in 1998 and more modest in 2010 but the temps were almost as high.
How do they predict this stuff?
” I’m particularly curious of is why it took them so long to reach this stage. ”
They won’t get anymore money from the Heartland Inst. to host denier conferences.
It doesn’t matter if the past decade was the hottest on record and it doesn’t matter what nonsense the deniers say and believe; as can be seen in the lack of media coverage on both issues. Silly comments from an old yet revered journalist about what might happen in the 2012 election got more press coverage this weekend than any of the denial talk from candidates for THIS YEARS election or the Global Work Party. It has become a nonissue. It may come back as a real issue at some future unspecified date but for now it is dead. Even progressive journalists who might bring it up say that since cap ‘n trade will be so very expensive to the economy it cannot be considered at this time. No truthful messaging is forthcoming from the administration or our legislative leaders about the threat that climate disruption poses to future generations or what the real cost of cap ‘n trade will be.
Prediction for the new disinformer meme: The 2010s will be the hottest decade on record because the sun was so active, not because of our greenhouse gases. The meme that the globe hasn’t warmed in the last 10 years will also still be around, as will the memes that the globe is cooling and temp records are corrupt so we can’t tell what the globe is doing–self-contradiction never goes out of style with the antiscience crowds.
Tucker: There should be a few more events such as the fires in Siberia to wake people up. Very sadly, something like that should happen to the US to shift attention to the climate.
Jetstreams on the sun, that’s neat. Another way to look at it I suppose is like ocean currents with no land mass on earth. I know we used to think of it like a rubber band being streched in the middle and when positive and negative got close enough sunspot activity occurred. The jetstream discovery sure makes sense and makes things easier. The Nature piece is interesting and in the years ahead will provide a lot more info. I was in a blog converstion a few months ago about the measured flux was diverging from the sunspot count. A simple assumption was that eventually they would fall back in line. Now I wonder if that falls in line with what nature says. And this is just a blog idea but that could mean the mins aren’t as min as earlier thought and the Max is not as Max as we thought.
Large Swaths of the World are Drying Up
http://planetsave.com/2010/10/11/large-swaths-of-the-world-are-drying-up/
“Most climate models predicted that this phenomenon would increase with the rise in global warming, and that’s exactly what happened from 1982 to the late 1990’s, according to new research published in the latest edition of the online journal Nature.
But in 1998 this increase in evapotranspiration, which had been measured at seven millimetres per year, slowed dramatically in some locations, and stopped entirely in others. In other words, large portions of our planet are drying up, releasing less water because it’s simply not there anymore.”
A more active sun would be nice. I kinda miss the days when I could throw up a dipole on 20 meters and talk to OZ for a few hours in the morning and Europe in the afternoon and early evening from here in Toronto.
That anticipation is tempered by the possibility that we may get a solar maximum and El Nino at the same time.
Thanks for that cheery thought Gord.
I’ve been keeping my eyes firmly focused on the positive benefits of a hopefully lengthy La Nina. What happens afterwards is not among my happier dreams.
Astrometrical recurrence of conjunctions similar to the time of Dalton Minimum isn’t expected for a while, if one wants to go astrological about this…;-) otherwise the fuel pumps in the two-stroke engine of magnetismally driven ionized gas in the fusion depth in the sun had a bit of hiccup, I guess. Yes, some liquids were involved in writing this.
Joe, a technical point, it would only take one supervolcano (VEI-8) to profoundly affect global climate. You meant the larger volcanic eruptions (VEI-7) we are familiar with in the historic record.
VEI = Volcanic Explosivity Index. It’s logarithmic so 8 is 10 times more powerful than 7.
/pedant
A recent study published in the journal nature has found evidence that the deep solar minimum may have exerted a warming rather than a cooling effect on global temperatures, because during solar minimum UV declines and visible light increases even though TSI decreases. And vice vera with solar maximum. If the findings are correct, the next solar cycle should exert cooling not warming.
[JR: Don’t hold your breath. In any case, GHGs have overwhelmed the solar forcing.]
#16 (SE): The study is interesting, but if proven correct, it means that the skeptic hyped correlation between temperature and solar cycles is wrong. The “it’s the sun” argument is based on that correlation.
The correlation is actually quite good until approx 1975 where the solar activity flattens out but temperatures continue to climb.
Skeptics still claim that solar activity has increased for the past 30 years, however they also embrace the new study, not considering that the proposed cooling effect from increased solar activity would kill the “it’s the sun” argument. Not even deniers can have it both ways.