Will Solar Cycle 25 be annihilated?

PhysOrg.com and others are writing about a talk in New Mexico where solar physicists have hypothesized that the Solar Cycle 25 will be delayed or it won't occur at all.



The black region on the picture indicates the absence of activity near the Sun's poles. This activity should be occurring over there as a preparation for the Solar Cycle 25 expected to begin around 2020. Note that we entered Solar Cycle 24 a few years ago and a cycle lasts 11 years in average.




A missing jet stream and fading sunspots are among the other hints that the next cycle will be suppressed and we may enter a new Maunder-like minimum.



The butterfly diagram shows that the solar activity should be concentrated near the poles of the Sun at the beginning of the cycle, and then move closer to the equator.

Will it also mean a colder climate on Earth? Maybe. Well, I've been looking at those correlations and I wasn't impressed by the degree of correlation in recent years. So it's plausible that it will make some impact but I would tend to bet against a big impact.



Frozen Thames in 1677, in the middle of the Maunder minimum; the trends around 2020 would be more likely to resemble the middle of a milder Dalton minimum (1790-1830).

It seems very unlikely to me that the variable overall solar output itself is responsible for whole degrees of temperature change on the Earth; after all, it's changing at most by 0.1 percent which should correspond to a tenth of a degree only. If the solar activity makes a big difference, it's through the effects of the magnetic field on charged particles entering (or present in) the Earth's atmosphere, and or much bigger relative variations of the ultraviolet portion of the solar spectrum.

However, if you asked me whether it is reasonably likely that 2020 will be cooler than 2010 - well, my answer would surely be Yes, it is conceivable. The odds are about 50% that 2020 will be cooler than 2010. It's surely refreshing to see the media jumping on a new bandwagon - see the surprising headlines below - but I won't join them.

• Sun enters 'hibernation', cooling possible - Sydney Morning Herald, NineMSN
• What does the decline of sun spots mean for the Earth and its climate? - Alaska Dispatch
• A sun with no sun spots? What that could mean for Earth and its climate - Christian Science Monitor
• Solar forecast hints at a big chill - MSNBC blogs
• How a weather lull on the sun affects Earth - MSNBC

Lots of climate interpretations over there... Well, we will see.

See also NASA pages on Solar Cycle and SolarHam.com.

Rational thinking at Daily Kos

Anthony Watts has noticed a glimpse of a rational reasoning about the climate at one of the seemingly least likely places: one of the largest community servers dedicated to American communists and other extreme leftists, the Daily Kos. Their weatherdude has asked the community to

Stop saying everything is because of climate change. Just stop it.

The author actually realizes that there is no detectable trend in any of the extreme events and that claims that every latest unpleasant weather event is due to man-made climate change prove that the authors of these claims are dishonest fanatical biased jerks and crooks (he uses slightly different words, but the content is the same).

Among the 400+ comments, you surely find hardcore voices that "this diary is deeply troubling" but from a more general perspective, I feel that weatherdude will get away with this blasphemy against the far leftists' sacred cow. In fact, you will find many voices in the discussion that are even more skeptical than weatherdude.

Interview: Is climate change caused by solar inertial motion?

The questions were asked by Mr Vítězslav Kremlík M.A., a historian and a blogger at klimaskeptik.cz; see original URL

An interview with Ing. Ivanka Charvátová, CSc. from the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague). The story of one politically incorrect scientific discovery.

(Translation of the original Czech interview published at Osel.cz in May 2011 - link - also by V. Kremlík)



Motion of the barycenter of solar system relative to the Sun.

Your field of study in the Geophysical Institute is solar inertial motion (SIM). Could you explain what it is?

It is a movement of the Sun around the barycentre (centre of gravity) of our solar system. This motion is due to the varying position of the planets, especially the giant planets.

Already Sir Isaac Newton in his PRINCIPIA (1687) intuitively came to the following conclusion: “… since that centre of gravity (centre of mass of the solar system) is continually at rest, the Sun, according to the various positions of the planets, must continually move every day, but will never recede far from that centre.” This effect is not insignificant. The Sun moves across an area the size of 4.3 solar radiuses, i.e. 0.02 AU or 3.106 km. As a coincidence, the average solar speed is around 50 km/hr. Just like the speed of a car driving downtown. The first study about SIM was written by P.D. Jose in year 1965.

You are the author of quite a breakthrough in this field of study. What is it?

First I studied the SIM periodicity and in 1987 I came to survey the geometry of this motion. I discovered the solar motion can be classified into two elementary types. Motion along a trefoil-like trajectory governed by the Jupiter-Saturn order. And another motion type which is chaotic. This gave us a precise homogeneous basis, upon which it became possible to study the solar-terrestrial and climatic variability. You may find it comforting that no matter how the Sun wiggles, every 179 years it comes back to a regular trefoil path. It is important to note, that the periods of chaotic motion coincide with the long-term minima in solar activity such as the Wolf Minimum (1270-1350), Spörer Minimum (~1430-1520), Maunder Minimum (~1620-1710) or Dalton Minimum (~1790-1840). During the trefoil periods the ST-phenomena are stable – the sunspot cycles are 10 years long, volcanic activity is muted and in the middle of the trefoil period there is a temperature maximum down here on Earth.




Later I discovered also a 2402 year long cycle of solar motion. After the lapse of this period the Sun always enters a segment, when for almost 370 years it moves continuously along the trefoil trajectory. This is when the natural conditions are stable, there is a long-term thermal maximum. The latest symmetry of the motion trefoils was around 25 AD. The NASA scientists called this 2402 yr cycle as “Charvatova Cycle”. The prospective solar motion can be calculated in advance (celestial mechanics), which gave us brand new solar-predictive capabilities. So far our predictions exploit the observation that the same solar motion trajectory tends to generate similar phenomena. (I was the only one in the whole world who got the 23rd sunspot cycle prediction right). The physical mechanism is not known yet.



Figure 1: The trajectory of the Sun centre divided into two basic motion types: trefoil trajectory according to JS-ordering (top) and disordered (chaotic) (bottom). The Sun returns to a trefoil trajectory, which always lasts for 50 years, once every 179 years. The chaotic segments correspond to long-term minima of solar activity (see above). The dark yellow circles in the top images represent the Sun.

What made you study solar motion?

In the 1980s the director of our institute was academic Václav Bucha. At some conference abroad he met the renowned American geologist and climatologist Rhodes W. Fairbridge, who was currently studying solar motion along with J.H. Shirley from JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), NASA, Pasadena. Mr. Bucha could smell important topics miles away, so we decided to research this too.

Did the world notice your discovery?

Even before my major discovery came, Prof R.W.Fairbridge contacted me after I published an article about SIM periodicity in Paris. It was published under my former name Jakubcová. He and J.H.Shirley published an article in Solar Physics at the very same time. R.W.Fairbridge wrote me a very friendly letter of praise. There was a communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia in that time, so any post coming from the Capitalist West was inspected by censorship. Surely you can imagine what a fuss there was about this letter. Not only it had NASA on the envelope, but on top of that Prof Fairbridge mentioned in the letter, that he knew Prague because he had been here in 1968 during the Prague Spring at some Geology Conference. And he mentioned to have seen the “eastern visitors”, the tanks of the occupants invading Czechoslovakia. He and Jim Shirley were so excited at my trefoils that when they edited the Encyclopaedia of Planetary Sciences in the early 1990s they invited me to write the main article on “Solar Motion” there. I was the only author from the whole Eastern Block in that very Encyclopaedia. And I was the most cited one.

Did you two meet in person?

No, we did not. But we maintained very lively correspondence. He used to send me articles that were not available in my country. He also invited me to write an article to the Proceedings published on the occasion of his 80th birthday anniversary (published in the Journal of Coastal Research.)

Another well known researcher who studied solar motion is Theodor Landscheidt. Do you know each other?

We do not and I believe he is not alive any more. We agree that in the first half of the 21st century the solar activity might be lower and even the temperatures might go down. But he does not cite me and I cite only one of his studies.

Apparently there are lots of scientists who explain climate change by other factors, not merely by CO2. However in the Czech Republic, where you live, most people know only one climate sceptic. Your president Václav Klaus.

Oh my. I would rather not comment on that. I only browsed through his book “Blue Planet in Green Chains” in the bookshop.

There are many climate sceptics in the world, they have their organisations, especially at the American or Canadian universities. Many professors of theirs have contacted me. For instance Prof. O. Manuel, the former chief researcher of the Apollo project. They even published a book “Slying the Sky Dragon“, where they document the scandals of the climate change research and thus also the uncertainties in the temperature measurements of the last 40 years or so.

The UN climate panel (IPCC), which is so harshly criticised by your president Klaus, has had lots of scandals lately. Have you heard about Climategate?

Of course. The director of CRU (Climatic Research Unit) P.D. Jones had to step down.

What does the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4 2007) say about solar motion?

Nothing at all. They are allergic to SIM. Their whole research fails to consider the solar-terrestrial phenomena (solar, geomagnetic, volcanic activity etc.) and they take into account only temperatures since 1860. However in Europe we have a number of continuous instrumental temperature data sets dating back to mid 18th century. The Jesuits started the measurements. With my colleague we processed these data and we showed their relation to solar motion and published an article on it in the Climatic Change journal, Stanford University. In mid 18th century the temperature was as high as in 1940 (both in the middle of a trefoil). But was there any industry, air pollution? No. They even fail to take into account the climate reconstructions (temperatures, proxy data) derived from tree-ring width 18O or 10Be isotopes in ice cores etc., though they are already available for periods deep in the past and are of good quality at least for the Holocene period.

But how do they explain why every 180 years there is a long-term temperature maximum? How do they explain the significant temperature maximum around 1000 AD, when even Greenland was settled? How do they explain the long-term minima?


They don’t. They pretend it did not happen.

Explaining climate change by other factors, not only by greenhouse gases, it is almost a heresy in our times. Were you aware of this when you discovered the trefoils of yours?

In 1987 when I realised there are trefoils in the solar motion (note: there are trefoil symbols in the gothic cathedrals too), I shivered. I realised immediately, that it is connected with almost everything, that nobody was going to do the work unless I do and that I would have to face unbelievable enmities. I raised my hands to the sky and I almost cried: “Why me?!” On top of that, it was exactly 300 years after Sir Isaac Newton, in his PRINCIPIA, formulated his intuitive conclusion about solar motion.

You are from a Christian family. Did you face any persecution under the communist regime?

My maiden name is Kryšpínová. The brother of my grandfather, a school headmaster, was a famous constructor of steam locomotives and he even became a director of the ČKD company. Unfortunately, we lived in the same house as the family of powerful communist bureaucrats. The mother of Vasil Mohorita was an influential Communist Party secretary in Prague 7. When I was finishing my elementary school, she rang a bell in our place and she yelled at me that a relative of the bourgeoisie ČKD director would never be allowed to study at any secondary school! Times changed, today my uncle Vojta is in the textbooks of the Transport Faculty of the Prague Technical University (ČVUT) as a constructor of world fame. He even has a street named after him, he has his stamps etc.

How did you solve it?

My uncle Vojta advised my parents to send me to the other grandparents to Jilemnice, at the foot of the Krkonoše Mountains. My grandfather was an engraver who printed cloths, almost worker class, so we though this might be acceptable to the communists. It worked, I even had the support of the grammar school headmaster in advance. It was a fine school. It had great teachers, including some scientists who were expelled there from universities for political reasons. This school was established as early as in 1909 when my country was part of the Austrian Empire and it was one of the few secondary schools where lectures were in the Czech language. Many Czech artists studied there such as the song writer Jiří Šlitr, actor Stanislav Zindulka, photograph Zdenko Fejfar or the director Karel Palouš. It is unbelievable, that now some madman wants to close this great school. Only Hitler was so insolent to do that. There are protests, demonstrations, so far in vain.

Yet the communist regime let you study at a university

I went to ČVUT (Czech Technical College), the Faculty of Civil Engineering, since my father was a civil engineer. The communists did not censor technical fields so much. I did not enjoy the first grades much, meliorations, road construction, surveyor work, but in the higher grades we could specialise – higher maths, (early) computers, cartography and others. I chose astronomy. In the building of the old Technical College at Karlovo Square, the magnificent Prof. Emil Buchar chaired the “Institute for Astronomy and Elementary Geophysics”. He always took only a couple of students. I was the first woman among them. This autumn it is the 110th anniversary of his birth.

You work at the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. How did you get here?

The end of my studies was coming soon, when suddenly one day, late at night, the telephone rang. Prof Buchar called that the next day I was to go to the Geophysical Institute at 9 AM for an interview. He informed me he had already registered me. So I went there and I passed. I have been working here ever since.

Aren’t you sorry that after 20 years SIM is still not in the elementary school textbooks? That climate changes are still explained only by CO2, as if climate was influenced by no other factors whatsoever?

Publishing of my (our) articles has always been a bad dream. Some editors rejected our article without review, saying their readers would surely not be interested. Another editor told me, that they would not allow having anything about SIM published in their magazine! I even received a “peer review” consisting of a single sentence: “All articles about solar motion should be banned!” In spite of all these enmities, we succeeded to have articles about SIM and ST-relationship published in renowned world journals with high impact factor (e.g. New Astronomy (Harvard University, IF 2.2), Surveys in Geophysics (IF 3.1) or Climatic Change (Stanford University, IF 4.)

And my results are in the prestigious textbook of physics for American universities – “Fundamentals of Physics“.

What welcome did solar motion research get among the scientists in your country?

The enlightened ones, and they are many, support it and help me a lot. The others use this topic for target practice. I was sorry to hear dr. Grygar, Czech astronomer and member of the Czech branch of CSI, compares SIM to some astrology. I wonder when he will grow tired of doing that. And our climatologists? I represent our institute in the Czech National Climate Programme. These people “research” only greenhouse effect vs temperatures. I call them “heaters”. Sometimes I feel like a lone Hussite warrior – myself against all. They deny the existence of solar influence on climate let alone the influence of the whole solar system. Most of them refuse to talk to me, most of them even do not say hello, when we meet. Even now when many world journals publish articles about the influence of the Sun on climate. Probably this requires more time. Many discoveries had to wait, some very long. I do not waste my time fighting windmills. God will sort it out when the right time comes.

And what about the Czech media? What is their attitude to solar motion? Has there been any documentaries on TV about this?

Some two years ago people from the ČT2 television channel came to me and we filmed a half an hour interview for some TV magazine. I was sceptical. Will you really broadcast it? Sure, it’s already in the TV Guide. And then, some 2 hours before the broadcast, some powerful person called them and banned the broadcast.

My only media “presentation” was when I was invited to an entertainment TV contest on the PRIMA TV channel (The “Guess Who I Am” programme). It was fun and I used the opportunity to sneak a short description of the trefoils and solar motion into my speech.

But your work is known and cited abroad

It is. I am very cited in both Americas, Canada, I am cited by the Germans, Italians, Australians, Scandinavians, recently even by the Chinese. I am cited even in other fields of study, for instance in the journals Nuclear Physics, Neutron Repulsion Journal ... In 2009 as part of the European Geophysical Union congress there was a Great Panel on Sun and Climate. I had an invited talk there. And I had another invited talk at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Brazil 2010.

I hear you are cited also by the scientists who study exoplanets? How is it related?

Yes, I am cited by the Germans, the astronomers from the Heidelberg University. I suggested that we might expect barycentric motion in the stars, which manifest variable irradiance. Which means such stars probably have planets. I wrote this for CTS (Centre of Theoretical Studies) in year 1995, when no exoplanet was known yet. Now we know over 400 of them.



Figure 2 No, these are not jewel designs. These are four examples of barycentric path of stars with exoplanets (from Perryman and Schulze-Hartung, Astronomy& Astrophysics 525, A65, 2011).

Is there any message you would like to send to the readers?

When you fight for a good cause, you must never give up. I am from a family of keen followers of the Scouting traditions. My father was a founding member of the 5th Group of Water Scouts in my country. As a Boy Scout he had the honour to welcome our first president, the founder of the first independent Czechoslovak Republic, when T.G. Masaryk was returning from emigration. Thanks to his resilience my father succeeded with many things in spite of the communists. And I have a personal example too. To keep sane during the communist era I privately translated the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. My translations could be published only after the end of the communist regime, on the 100th anniversary of her birth (Modrý večer, ODEON, 1990, translated by Ivanka Jakubcová). Ms Anna had a difficult life. In the Stalinist era she was persecuted, she could not publish her poetry for decades, her son was imprisoned in Gulag for almost 20 years. But look now - her poetry is read by the whole world.

Interviewed by
Mgr. Vítězslav Kremlík, the founder of the Czech Climate Skeptic website www.klimaskeptik.cz

(The Czech text was authorised by ICH)

Profile:

born 3. 12. 1941 in Jilemnice, Czechoslovakia

education: ČVUT, Faculty of Civil Engineering, subject: geodetic astronomy and geophysics               

doctorate: CSc. 1991

current position: Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences since 1963 (Institute website - link)

List of publications
(note: some of the publications are downloadable from Klimaskeptik.cz - link)

Bucha, V., Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M. 1985 Resonance frequencies in the Sun’s motion, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 29, 107-111.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M., 1986a The planetary system and solar-terrestrial phenomena, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 30, 224-235.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M., 1986b Is there any relation between the Sun´s motion and global seismic activity? Studia Geophys. et Geod., 30, 148-152.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M.: 1987 Correlation between solar motion, earthquakes and other geophysical phenomena, Annales Geophysicae, B, 135-142.

Charvátová-Jakubcová, I., Křivský, L. and Střeštík, J., 1988 The periodicity of aurorae in the years 1001-1900, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 32, 70-77.

Charvátová, I., 1988 The solar motion and the variability of solar activity, Adv. Space Res., 8, 7, 147-150.

Charvátová, I. 1989 On the relation between solar motion and the long term variability of solar activity, Studia Geophys. et Geod. 33, 230-241.

Charvátová, I., 1990a The relations between solar motion and solar variability, Bull. Astr. Inst. Czech., 41, 56-59.

Charvátová, I., 1990b On the relation between solar motion and solar activity in the years 1730-1780 and 1910-60, Bull. Astr. Inst. Czech., 41, 200-204.

Charvátová, I., 1995a Solar-terrestrial and climatic variability during the last several millennia in relation to solar inertial motion, J. Coastal Res., 17, 343-354.

Charvátová, I., 1995b Solar-terrestrial variability in relation to solar inertial motion, Center for Theoretical Study, CTS-95-04, March 1995.

Charvátová, I., 1995c Solar-terrestrial variability in relation to solar inertial motion, Center for Theoretical Study, CTS-95-08, 2nd Edition, November 1995.

Charvátová, I., 1997a Solar-terrestrial and climatic phenomena in relation to solar inertial motion, Surveys in Geophys., 18, 131-146.

Charvátová, I., 1997b Solar motion (main article), in: Encyclopedia of Planetary Sciences, (Eds. J.H. Shirley and R.W. Fairbridge), Chapman & Hall, New York, 748-751.

Charvátová, I., 2006 Solar motion (main article), in: Encyclopedia of Planetary Sciences, (Eds. J.H. Shirley and R.W. Fairbridge), Springer, Berlin, 748-751.

Charvátová, I., 2000 Can origin of the 2400-year cycle of solar activity be caused by solar inertial motion?, Annales Geophysicae, 18, 399-405.

Charvátová, I., 2000 The cycle of 2402 years in solar motion and its response in proxy records, Geolines, 11, 12-14.

Charvátová, I., 2007 The prominent 1.6-year periodicity in solar motion due to the inner planets, Annales Geophysicae, 25, 1-6.

Charvátová, I., 2009 Long-trm predictive assessments of solar and geomagnetic activities made on the basis of the close similarity between the solar inertial motions in the intervals 1840-1905 and 1980-2045, New Astronomy 14, 25-30, doi: 10.1016/j.newast.2008.04.005.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 1991 Solar variability as a manifestation of the Sun’s motion, J. Atmos.Terr. Phys., 53, 1019-1025.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 1995 Long-term changes of the surface air temperature in relation to solar inertial motion, Climatic Change, 29, 333-352.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 2004 Periodicities between 6 and 16 years in surface air temperature in possible relation to solar inertial motion, J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys., 66, 219-227

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 2007 Relations between the solar inertial motion, solar activity and geomagnetic index aa since the year 1844, Adv. Space Res., 40, 7, 1026-1031, doi: 10.1016/j.asr.2007.05.086.

Paluš, M., Kurths, J., Schwarz, U., Novotná, D. and Charvátová, I., 2000 Is the solar activity cycle synchronized with the solar inertial motion?, Int. J. Bifurcation and Chaos, 10, 2519-2526.

Paluš, M., Kurths, J., Schwarz, U., Seehafer, N., Novotná, D. and Charvátová, I., 2007 The solar activity cycle is weakly synchronized with the solar inertial motion, Physics Letters A, 365, 421-428, doi: 10.1016/j.physleta.2007.01.039.

Charvátová, I., Klokočník, J., Kolmaš, J. and Kostelecký, J., 2011 Chinese tombs oriented by a compass: evidence from paleomagnetic changes versus the age of tombs, Studia Geophys. et Geod. 55, 159-174.

New Danish experiment confirms cosmoclimatology

While the results of the CLOUD experiment will be published in 2 or 3 months, another competing experiment has just revealed its results in Geophysical Research Letters:

Aerosol nucleation induced by a high energy particle beam (abstract)

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Danish celebration of the paper (autom. transl. to EN)

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Physics World (popular overview)

The five Danish authors have used a 580 MeV electron beam to ionizine the atmosphere-like content of their chamber. The graphs show pretty clearly that the formation rate increases with the radiation. At O(10,000) ions per cubic centimeter, the nucleation rate approximately doubles while the existing data are compatible with a linear dependence.




This is a very intense relationship. Note that the clouds in the atmosphere cool the Earth roughly by 10 times the warming induced by a CO2 doubling, so even 10% of the change of the cloud cover beats a doubled CO2. 10% of the change of the clouds corresponds to roughly 1,000 ions per cubic centimeter - in the regions of the atmosphere where the clouds are expected to form.

Of course, there are many other complicated mechanisms that decide about the aggregate amount of clouds but if the question is Do the cosmic rays influence the local and instantaneous nucleation rate, the answer is clearly Yes.

The Danish authors try to emphasize that the nature of the ionizing radiation is irrelevant which is why expensive colliders are a waste of money. Fortunately, the LHC - and even SPS - were not built just for the CLOUD experiment because that would be a waste of money, indeed. ;-)

Via Nigel Calder

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Endeavour with AMS finally launched

With more than a two-week delay, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was finally launched aboard the space shuttle Endeavour today. The launch was successful; see the first minute. AMS will also study the cosmic rays.

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By the way, Roy Spencer has shown that the climate sensitivity is approximately 1 °C by looking at the 1955-2010 ocean heat content.

CLOUD: cosmic rays producing lots of them

Nigel Calder has pointed out the following interview in Physics World about CERN's CLOUD experiment:



In that interview, CLOUD's boss Jasper Kirkby answers lots questions - like what are the cosmic rays and whether the climate scientists in the world agree that someone should be allowed to believe, as a heretic, that the clouds may affect the weather. ;-)

Kirkby is giving lots of relevant answers and he also credits Nigel Calder himself for some early motivation to build the experiment more than a decade ago.




The main punch line is that the experiment has found that the cosmic rays substantially increase the production of the aerosol seeds of clouds. They have also measured the detailed evolution of the size of those particles and within 2 or 3 months, we will see some published results.



See older TRF stories on cosmoclimatology.

CERN: CLOUD nucleates clouds as expected

Previous TRF articles about the experiment:

Sep 2006, Jun 2009, Nov 2009

The Nature Climate Blog has informed its readers that the first results of the CLOUD (cosmics leaving outdoor droplets) experiment at the Center of Europe for the Research of Nuclei (CERN) are ready to be published. The writer of the blog entry was probably shown the results.



The summary? They confirm that the clouds are being nucleated by the radiation at the rate that was expected in the newest models, whatever these models are (and be sure I would like to see some details, too). So the effect is surely nonzero.

Henrik Svensmark told me a year ago that the CLOUD experiment is somewhat redundant because the existence of the basic effect behind cosmoclimatology has already been pretty much established by their own experiments in Denmark. But it may be true that the CERN logo is needed for some additional people to notice.




So it's coming and the result is Yes, it works.

Note that as many children know, clouds have a big effect on the temperature of the Earth. They subtract something like 30 W/m^2 from the energy budget in average; this is about eight times more than the contribution attributed to the CO2 doubling in the man-made theory of climate change. If you wish, you would need to increase the CO2 concentration approximately by 256 to match the contribution of the clouds. ;-)

So even small variations of the cloudiness matter.

However, as Richard Lindzen has emphasized to me in June 2010 in Nice, one must avoid naive assumptions about the mechanisms that control the actual cloudiness expressed as the percentage of the sky. Cosmic rays may make it easier for clouds to appear.

But the result may be simply that the clouds get created 50 meters lower or 50 meters higher than they would be created without the cosmic rays; the overall percentage of the cloudy skies may be determined by something like "wind going up" and "wind going down", if you allow me to use a layperson's language and the percentage of both is 50%. The actual cloudiness is not 50% but you may imagine that a more complicated mechanism of this sort is at work and it makes the cloudiness pretty much constant.



However, Richard doesn't have a complete proof that the "cloudy subsidies" from the cosmic rays really have to cancel when it comes to their overall effect on the cloud cover. Some spectacular correlations similar to one above suggest that the cosmic rays could be correlated with the cloudiness for a good reason. And the cloudiness is known to be variable; it dropped by 3% in the 1980s, for example.

Moreover, you may argue that Richard overestimates the desire of Mother Nature to regulate herself and suppress all external effects - whether they're caused by carbon dioxide or cosmic rays - by powerful negative feedbacks. While I think that negative feedbacks ultimately prevail, I obviously don't feel that they're as powerful as Richard Lindzen's negative feedbacks. ;-)

These comments are just meant to convey the obvious message that a lab experiment doesn't settle all questions about the global climate, especially not in the long term. However, it's clear that the potential of the cosmic rays as a climate driver will be established by showing this local effect that will be as real as the infrared absorption by the greenhouse gases. Much more is needed to decide which of these effects actually matter for the weather and the climate in the real world, outside the lab.

Via Anthony Watts

Does increased solar activity lead to cooling?

Gavin Schmidt, BBC, and many others discuss an interesting paper about the Sun's role in our climate published in Nature,

An influence of solar spectral variations on radiative forcing of climate (abstract)

and written by Joanna D. Haigh, Ann R. Winning, Ralf Toumi, and Jerald W. Harder (UK, US). The authors focus on an important subtlety - the spectral dependence of the solar variations.




The number of sunspots oscillates with a period of 11 years or so, in average. However, the overall number in the 11-year cycle is modulated by slower cycles (or aperiodic processes), too. For example, there were almost no sunspots during the Maunder minimum (1645-1715).

This period is often associated with the Little Ice Age. The correlation itself is a phenomenological argument that a lower solar activity is cooling the Earth's surface while a higher solar activity is warming the surface.

Traditionally, people also looked at the total irradiance - the total energy in Watts per square meter that we're receiving from the Sun. And this total irradiance only changes by 0.1% between the solar minima and maxima - and should change the absolute temperature by 0.025% or so i.e. by 0.07 °C only. That's not enough to explain the bulk of the observed centennial changes of the temperature. However, this solar energy comes in many colors - literally. The photons have diverse frequencies - some of them belong to the visible interval; others are infrared; yet another group is ultraviolet; and some higher and lower frequencies are included, too.



Solar spectrum

The photons of different colors influence the Earth's atmosphere differently - even the signs may differ. And the numbers of photons at different frequencies are differently altered by the solar cycles and variations.

In particular, the new paper above has noticed that the ultraviolet radiation from the Sun has decreased approximately 5 times more rapidly (5 times higher a percentage) in the period 2004-2007 (when the solar activity was decreasing towards the recent minimum) than the total irradiation. Because of the ultraviolet photons' impact on the ozone layer, this could have led to some cooling (after some steps described in the paper).

So the authors analyze this possible impact in various ways.

Some of the media coverage is atrocious. For example, Richard Black of BBC includes the following religious paragraph:

But, they add, the research does not challenge the role of humanity's production of greenhouse gases as the dominant long-term driver of modern-day climate change.

If you simply check the new paper, you will see that this is a flagrant distortion of the truth. The paper has nothing whatsoever to do with greenhouse gases. For example, no reference to this junk appears anywhere in the long abstract. More precisely, the paper assumes that the effect of all CO2 on those changes is exactly zero. The paper attributes all the observed variability to the Sun and wants to know the details about this Sun's influence.

To implicitly say that the paper supports the notion of a man-made global warming is just a lie and Mr Black should be given a proper thrashing for that. It's plausible that the authors said such a thing "outside the paper", but it shouldn't be reported, especially because Mr Black has manifestly achieved this distorted "answer" by blackmailing the authors with a red button.

Feel no pressure, authors. "But tell me that the AGW deities are as great as they have always been." We know the greens' tricks and we can't be fooled even if the green is called black.

More seriously, i.e. removing discussions with dishonest journalists...

Although it has nothing to do with the questions studied by the paper, you may still believe that there are additional effects that have influenced, do influence, and will influence the changing temperature. And there surely are. However, if you want to believe that the most important extra components are man-made ones, the new paper will quickly drive you into a lot of extra problems.

If you look at the historical sunspot graphs, you will see that the number of sunspots has significantly increased between 1663 and 1762. I chose this particular century because the Central England dataset shows that the warming trend in that century, obtained by linear regression, was +0.86 °C per century of warming (the highest trend outside the 20th century I can find), pretty much tied with the 1909-2008 century.

This warming has generally been assumed to have something to do with the Sun. Now imagine, for the sake of the argument, that the Sun - whose activity was increasing during the 1663-1762 period - has actually contributed some cooling, for example by 1 °C, during the 100-year period. If that is true, then some other effects had to be responsible for +1.86 °C of warming, to cancel the cooling effect of the Sun, and to add the +extra 0.86 °C of warming observed in Central England.

And these other effects were almost certainly natural in origin. Note that James Watts sold the first steam engines in 1776 which came more than a decade after the century we studied.

So in our scenario, effects different both from CO2 and from the solar activity had to warm the Earth (or Central England) up by +1.86 °C per century - which is three times the warming we have observed during the 20th century. Clearly, if that's the case, the man-made warming caused by the recent level of industrial activity is even more negligible than previously thought, relatively to these extra natural effects even when you integrate it over a century.

I don't personally believe the new paper's claim that a higher solar activity leads to a cooling on Earth. However, I do think that any "excellent" paper about the solar influence on the Earth's climate that will be published in the future should try to take the spectral dependence of the variations into account.

And that's the memo.

Solar panels return to the White House

This is a Nobel prize week so let us look at one story from the everyday life of Nobel prize winners.

Peace Nobel prize winner Barack Obama decided to show his appreciation for the newest 21st century technologies. So he will decorate the White House with the same gadgets that his fellow peace Nobel prize winner Jimmy Carter installed in 1979: solar panels.

See The Telegraph and others

Jimmy Carter is checking that his solar panels are heating the Sun and returning the energy we have borrowed from our star so that the life of our Solar System is sustainable. Meanwhile, his subordinated colleagues are impressed by Carter's knowledge of science: Carter looks like a professional physician. ;-)

Later, Ronald Reagan has removed the panels. While Reagan's peace Nobel prize was given to Mikhail Gorbachev, he had another virtue relatively to Jimmy Carter, one that also has "some" value for the U.S. presidents: unlike Carter, he was actually a great president.




Obama originally didn't want to install the solar panels. But because the 156th most influential environmental website called Green Fascist, or Grist (click) for short, wrote that "environmentalists need a new president" because Obama hasn't installed any solar panels atop the White House which proves "his unwillingness or inability to confront our great planetary crisis", Barack has changed his mind and decided to install the panels, after all.

Another fellow peace Nobel prize winner, Al Gore, is also urging Obama to drill holes around the White House because the interior of the Earth is extre-hehehe-mely hot, several million degrees. You may think that several millions of degrees of warming is even more than 0.6 °C of warming which has caused the global climate disruption. But you shouldn't forget that the geothermal degrees are "friendly, environmentalist degrees".

At any rate, I think that the White House is a sufficiently important political and historical building that it shouldn't be polluted by similar kitsch. Clearly, the amount of energy that they will produce - if measured in dollars - is completely negligible relatively to the White House budget.

The president's promotion of this fad is just another signal for the people: you should be working on it regardless of any historical or aesthetic or other values. But feel no pressure: it's your own choice.

---

Meanwhile, EPA has awarded $1.9 million to 76 eco-terrorist groups whose very goal is to deny the existing laws and justice and replace them by new fascist laws that will be imposed by the self-appointed champions of the new "environmental justice", one that has nothing to do with justice as we have known it for centuries.

Under normal conditions, EPA should co-operate with other parts of the U.S. government in fighting against these illegal activities. However, the EPA itself has been thoroughly contaminated by environmental activists who don't care about the law and justice - and these "insiders" are transferring the taxpayers' money directly to their fellow eco-terrorists' pockets.

Will the 2013 solar flare return us to the Stone Age?

Fox Business News Channel brought the "top physicist" (right after Al Gore, Lee Smolin, and Joe Romm) Michio Kaku who explained that we're doomed in 3 years:

Every 11 years the [Sun's] north pole and the south pole flip, releasing a burst of radiation. But, every 100 years or so, a monster Tsunami from the Sun emerges which could literally cause trillions in property damage. […]

It could paralyze the economy of the planet Earth. In 1859 we had a gigantic solar storm which knocked out telegraph wires back then, 150 years ago. If that had happened today it would knock out almost all our satellites, knock out power stations, there would be food riots around the country because refrigeration would stop, airplanes would probably crash without radar. […]



And again, this is a once in a century, once in two centuries storm…

We do have them and we have to worry about them. […]

We’d be thrown back 100 years.

Every 100 years, we're thrown back 100 years just by the solar storms, we're told. Because there are dozens of types of similar catastrophes, it is clear that every 100 years, we're thrown back several millennia. ;-)

It sounds scary, doesn't it? One year after the Earth collapses because of the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012 and after another doomsday prescribed by Nostradamus, we will face yet another Armageddon. Fine. You may buy insurance from me. What is going on?

My friend Olda Klimánek has written some amusing details about the story.



First, some background

The Sun is changing over time. There are approximately 11-year-long cycles of solar activity. The number of sunspots - a sunspot is a little mottle on the Sun that you can see through a telescope - reaches the minimum every 11 years. We have just seen one of the "cleanest" minima in decades a year or two years ago. Almost no sunspots for many long months. But it's over: the Sun shows us some sunspot activity again.

Every 11 years, the Solar magnetic field changes the direction - from South to North, if you wish. Only the absolute value (squared) matters for the number of sunspots. However, because you have a cycle with the "antiperiod" of 11 years, it's not hard to see that the genuine cycle is approximately 22 years long. After 22 years, the magnetic field of the Sun returns to the original state, including the sign.

This periodicity is not perfect, of course: there are also slower cycles (and perhaps also slower aperiodic phenomena) that change the behavior of the Sun every few centuries.

Some Czech media wrote that 2013 will be exceptional because the 11-year and 22-year cycles will reach a point of orgasm at the same moment. This is, as Olda explains, a complete misunderstanding of the cycles. These two cycles are synchronized so in each cycle, they're always in harmony (or disharmony) to the same extent. ;-) Clearly, they wanted to explain the 22-year peak by something else but it is not clear what the something else was.

Usually around the sunspots, the Sun sometimes produces an eruption called solar flare. Lots of radiation and protons with energies up to dozens of MeVs - a third of the speed of light, but usually much less - are ejected. (It's a high speed but the protons at the LHC carry 3,500 GeV at this point so the speed is 99.9999% of the speed of light or so.) Ionosphere of the Earth and long-wave communication is affected when the solar flare reaches our planet. But that's it.

Events: 1859 and 2013

So how did the Michio Kaku apocalypse in 1859 look like?

On September 1–2, 1859, the largest recorded geomagnetic storm occurred. Aurorae were seen around the world, most notably over the Caribbean; also noteworthy were those over the Rocky Mountains that were so bright that their glow awoke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.

People could see aurorae but they probably caused less trouble than Aurora in the 1917 Saint Petersburg, Russia. ;-) And some miners prepared a breakfast too early. That must have cost trillions of dollars. ;-) But the masterpiece of the story are the telegraphs that turned into perpetuum mobile devices. Clearly, the hungry robots, iPods, and Macs - once disconnected from the power grid - are going to stage an uprising in 2013, being driven directly by the energy from the solar flares. ;-)

I don't claim that all the observations in 1859 were bogus. There surely had to be some telegraphs that failed. But there's a lot of superstition and mythology surrounding such events, too. I personally think that a similarly strong event has occurred several times after 1859 again and almost no one has noticed. (Update: I take this sentence back after some commenters have convinced me that ice core data show an unusually high trace of beryllium-10 from 1859 that may be the highest in 2000 years.)

Why 2013?

Well, it's simple. The Solar Cycle 24 is predicted to reach its maximum in May 2013. And this maximum has to be spectacular, some people said.

In reality, such a maximum occurs every 11 years and just very recently, we thought that the ongoing solar cycle would be one of the least active ones: the sunspot number at the maximum was predicted to be e.g. 90, the lowest peak in 1928, and many people used it to argue that the reduced activity will induce a substantial cooling on Earth. A low activity would also seem to imply a low intensity and frequency of the solar storms and flares.

Nevertheless, two months ago, "NASA" warned of the 2013 apocalypse:

Telegraph, Telegraph video, WUWT, Google News

At least the Telegraph presented it in this way. They may be particularly scared because the 1859 solar storm has crippled a few telegraphs, too (see the picture for a brand new 1859 telegraph) - and telegraphs may sound even more obsolete and vulnerable today. ;-)

(More seriously, I believe that the telegraphs and grids in 1859 were much more shaky and the current electronic devices are much more robust when it comes to their resilience to perturbations.)

You will see that the whole story comes from Richard Fisher, the head of the NASA Heliophysics Division, who promotes his specialized discipline a little bit. But even though he was clearly selected as the advocate of the catchiest scenarios, he's not really saying much - and he's not hiding that what he's suggesting are mostly fantasies.

So I don't really understand why they think that something unusual - at the centennial time scale - should occur in 2013. In fact, I am convinced that this statement is wrong. By the way, Olda K. analyzes some similar statements about related solar events. Around August 3rd, 2010, the media were also writing about a comparably devastating effect of the Sun on our planet that was imminent.

Of course, nothing has happened.

It may be cool to speculate about catastrophes - to imagine that some of the catastrophic movies become reality - but once we entertain ourselves, we should still try to hard to distinguish the reality from the fiction. The reality is that unlikely and infrequent heliophysical (and other) events are unlikely and infrequent which means that unless you have a good reason to expect that they will occur, they will probably not occur anytime soon.

And that's the memo.

---

Thanks for the provocation to write it up to: Jaynie B.

Monstrous supernova & Eta Carinae

Figure 1: Picture via FoxNews (click).

NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory and terrestrial telescopes have detected the king of all supernovae, SN2006gy with mass estimated to be 150 solar masses, in September 2006. It was 240 million l.y. away and the brightness of the star was like 10 galaxies. The whole show took 70 days. Supermassive stars emit gamma rays before they die.



Figure 2: Eta Carinae, the doomed star (click).




Also, Eta Carinae, the most luminous star in the Milky Way, is expected to explode soon. It currently radiates as 5 million Suns and the eruptions may be isomorphic to what happened on SN2006gy before it went monstrous supernova. Eta Carinae could be the most spectacular explosion in the history of modern civilization, they say. Well, they probably mean the not-so-modern civilization 7000 years ago because this is when those things we are just observing happened. ;-)



Figure 3: SOHO looks into the Sun.

If you care, the g-mode waves have been finally detected by SOHO on the surface of the Sun. I suppose that the term "g-mode" actually refers to "l=4" in the terminology of spherical harmonics where "l=012345" is called "spdfgh". Unless it stands for "gravity": anyone knows the answer? Although the strength of these waves whose origin is gravitational seems to be smaller than predicted theoretically, such a discovery could indicate that the core of the Sun is spinning and our star resembles a supernova. A similar conclusion could influence our counting of solar neutrinos as well as our ideas about the possible solar influence on the climate. See FoxNews.

NASA: Sun-climate connection found

In May 2006, NASA announced significant changes on the solar surface.

Another big-brand contribution to peer-reviewed denier literature emerged this week. As we have already reported, NASA has found Sun-climate connection in Old Nile records.



More precisely, Alexander Ruzmaikin, Joan Feynman, and Yuk Yung have found a non-trivial correlation between annual water levels in Cairo (left picture) on one side and the number of solar auroras (right picture) on the other side between 622 A.D. and 1470 A.D. See

• NASA press release
• Paper in Advances of Space Research by Feynman only
• Paper in Journal of Geophysics research by all of them, full text

Among other conclusions, in a Fourier-like decomposition, there are oscillations with a period of 88 years and with a period of 200+ year both in the river records as well as the aurora records.

Another peer-reviewed article added later

Charles A. Perry, Evidence for a physical linkage between galactic cosmic rays and regional climate time series, Advances in Space Research

Sci-fi movie: Sunshine

It's 2057 and the Earth is freezing over. (By the way, back in 2007, after two spring days in Cambridge, the snow is back!) A group of heroes has a simple task: to re-ignite the Sun.



Brian Cox who works for the LHC was an advisor for this movie. See an article in the Telegraph and the Sunshine movie website.

Solar resonant diffusion waves

At the beginning of this International Heliophysical Year, Robert Ehrlich offers a new theory what is the main driver of terrestrial climate change:

• Solar resonant diffusion waves, astro-ph/0701117,

in (peer-reviewed) Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics (URL). The diffusion waves modulate the dependence of various quantities on the distance from the center of the Sun; the relevant distance is between 0.21 and 0.25 solar radii. These effects are meant to account for fluctuations of the terrestrial temperature at the sub-megayear timescale.

The author uses various methods that will probably be difficult to understand for the scientific consensus - formerly known as the average and worse-than-average climate scientists - for example the Fourier transform. On page 15 you may see how his theory predicts three frequencies of the time-dependence very accurately. I am very impressed by the figure 2 and the simple formula behind it. Ehrlich predicts that the dominant frequencies giving peaks in the Fourier transform should be

• f_n = f₁ n²

and his figure 2 shows a remarkable agreement with observation for "n=2,3,4". Now, the statement that some frequencies are proportional to a square of an integer sounds pretty fundamental - almost like the spectrum of the Hydrogen atom - and one should look carefully before dismissing such an interesting observation.

Ehrlich believes that his theory should supersede the conventional explanations based on the Milankovitch cycles - where the main driver is encoded in the quasiperiodically oscillating parameters of the orbit of our planet - and he enumerates some of these problems that could be solved in his setup.

Via Benny Peiser.

Robert Bussard: IEC fusion

ITER's competitor

The practical peaceful realization of thermonuclear fusion is usually associated with hot plasma confined by strong magnetic fields. See, for example,

• Goldston talking about fusion,
• ITER - fusion reactor,
• Two billion kelvins at Z-machine.

However, Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of the scanning television, proposed a different framework to achieve fusion in 1924: the fusor. Hot ions are directly injected into the reaction chamber. This mechanism has already become a practical source of neutrons. Today we call the process inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion. Recently, a breakthrough was announced within this technology and this talk from the last week offers some details about it:

• Robert Bussard: Should Google go nuclear? (92-minute video)

Dr. Bussard who received his PhD in Princeton described on the amateurish website fusor.net in March 2006 that he could produce power that exceeded the previous records of this approach by five orders of magnitude. He did so several times before the device blew up due to mechanical stress degradation: that device was paid for by Donald Rumsfeld. Bussard now asks you for $200 million. The first million will be spent to build a more robust demonstrator in 2007.



His envisioned clean reactor, supported by favorable scaling laws, would burn boron-11 (Z=5) and ordinary hydrogen-1 (Z=1) into pure helium (Z=2): an excited and therefore unstable carbon-12 nucleus (Z=6) decays into helium-4 and an unstable beryllium-8 (Z=4) that later decays into two helium-4 nuclei, too. No neutrons, no garbage.

Bussard who is employed in the private sector and who has founded his Energy-Matter Conversion Corporation (E-MC²) is critical about the official U.S. institutions responsible for the fusion program that he also co-founded. In this letter, he mainly criticizes lawmakers from the Democrat Party who primarily care about their financial and political victories in their districts and who often like to fight against industry and good new ideas from the commercial sector.

The previous scientific talk for Google Inc. that we discussed was

• Washington Taylor: Googol is not enough

SKY experiment: cloud nucleation by cosmic rays

This is an update about the CLOUD story. A Danish experimental team has experimentally demonstrated that negative ions created by high-energy cosmic rays increases the creation of nuclei of the clouds.

Recall that the significance of this finding is that because the increased solar magnetic activity has reduced the cosmic rays in the last century, it has also decreased the amount of clouds and positively contributed to the temperature.

The observation of this effect may upgrade the cosmic rays theory of the climate to a competitor of the greenhouse gas theory, to say the least.

More facts:

• Nir Shaviv's sciencebits
• JunkScience
• SpaceDaily
• Foxnews
• Danish press release
• A description of the experiment
• A Copenhagen description
• The peer-reviewed paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society A
• Animation (compressed)

Cosmic rays will create clouds at CERN

A new central article about the cosmic/solar climate connection on this blog has been created

Paul Krapivsky (B.U.) has pointed out a rather interesting new article in Nature, volume 443.

• A cosmic connection (PDF)

I could only read the PDF with Acrobat Reader 4.

You must be a subscriber to be allowed to click the link above. Jeff Kanipe describes an experiment that will be performed at CERN in Switzerland and that will fully start in 2010. The experiment will study the formation of clouds in a C.T.R. Wilson's cloud chamber as a function of the intensity of (artificial) cosmic rays sent from the synchrotron into the cloud chamber at different levels of humidity.

Warning: This story is not about the Large Hadron Collider (click), another (and much larger) experiment at CERN!

What is the purpose of this toy? There seems to be a disagreement between many astrophysicists, nuclear physicists and related scientists on one side and most climate scientists on the other side. The astrophysicists tend to believe that the Solar and galactic cosmic rays are important to determine the cloud formation and therefore the climate on the Earth. The climate scientists usually believe that the main driver of the climate is something completely different.

CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets) have a chance to resolve this question.




Many arguments have appeared in literature that indicate that the cosmic rays matter. Svensmark and Friis-Christensen of Denmark have argued in 1997 that the cloudiness between 1987 and 1990 declined by 3 percent or so, just like the number of cosmic rays reaching the Earth; the original driver of the cosmic rays intensity were the fluctuating sunspots. This argument has been extended to longer periods of time.

Also, Nir Shaviv, who has a blog, and Ján Veizer - a Slovak-Canadian emeritus professor - have argued that the ice ages in the last millions of years may have been correlated with the motion of the Solar system through the galactic arms which caused variations in the cosmic ray flux. The general mechanism is always the same: higher amount of cosmic rays is supposed to create a higher amount of clouds which should cool the Earth. The previous blog text about solar forcing is here.

Additional sources:

• Preprint of the CLOUD collaboration
• CLOUD website
• Shaviv's blog
• His comments on the Nature article
  
• Svensmark and Friis-Christensen (PDF) 1997 (264 cits)
• Shaviv-Veizer 2003 (38 cits)
• Rahmstorf et al. criticism of Shaviv-Veizer 2004 (8 cits)
• Knud Jahnke's criticism of Shaviv-Veizer 2005 (0 cits)
• Nir Shaviv's rebuttal of Jahnke 2006
  
• Scafetta-West 2006 (0 cits)
• Foukal et al. new criticism of solar models in general 2006 (0 cits)

The criticism of Rahmstorf et al. seems somewhat weak to me. After less than one page of negative words whose essence or justification I don't quite understand, they present graphs showing the correlation of CO2 and temperatures. No one has any doubts about it.

We have already explained why we know that the temperature is the primary driver and the gas concentrations are its consequences in this correlation. But this correlation still doesn't explain why the temperatures (or gas concentrations) evolved exactly the way they did. Shaviv and Veizer have a possible galactic model, Rahmstorf et al. - just like Royer et al. (27 cits) - have no model.

Peter Foukal might know what he is doing. But realclimate.org "could quibble with [Foukal's] use of paleo-reconstructions, their climate modeling approach, and the rather cursory treatment of the substantial body of work relating to amplyfying mechanisms due to UV/ozone links" but they liked the conclusions, so the paper got an "A" from them in an article named much like a recent not-quite-serious book about physics.

Scafetta and West (Geophysical Research Letters) find a significant correlation between the pre-industrial temperatures and the total solar irradiation - unexplainable by existing climate models - and estimate the contribution of the Sun to the 20th century warming as 50%.

Back to the big picture and CLOUD

In this disagreement of two communities, the astrophysicists are arguably smarter than the climate scientists and they are less politicized. But science has a slightly different criterion to decide who is right: an experiment.

This experiment costs 9 million euro and 55+ physicists and atmospheric scientists who work on it find it very conceivable that the cosmic rays are crucial for the whole climate - in sharp contradiction with the myth about a "consensus otherwise" in various newspapers and left-wing blogs. Within climate science, I think that such experiments are among the best things to try because they look at the real possible microscopical mechanisms that could matter. Real science can sometimes cost real money. ;-)

Good luck to CLOUD.

Incidentally, the sticker "heliophysics" two lines lower will lead you to 10+ articles; many of them are related to the role of the Sun for the climate.

Solar forcing

One of the most obvious phenomena that are important for determining the climate on the Earth is the solar activity. The Sun is important because we receive 99.998% of energy from this rather well-known star (the rest are mostly geothermal heat sources). Recall from the text

• Earth's energy balance

how those averaged 342 Watts per squared meter (one quarter of 1370 W/m^2, the solar constant) coming from the Sun are absorbed and/or reflected.

If the solar constant changes, the equilibrium temperature of the Earth changes, too. You can use the Stefan-Boltzmann law to have a rough idea about the effect. Because the heat (power) emitted by the Earth goes like

• IR emission = const T^4

where T is the temperature in Kelvins, you can see that each change of the temperature by 0.2% (around 0.6 Kelvins because we live in nearly 300 Kelvins) requires a 0.8% change of the solar constant because of the fourth power; this relation is the black body value of temperature sensitivity. 0.8 percent from 342 W/m^2 is about 3 W/m^2, way too much. In fact, we should count these 0.8 percent from the actual IR emission only, which is about 2/3 of those 342 W/m^2, more precisely 235 W/m^2. Still, you might need a change of 2 W/m^2 or so to explain the warming by 0.6 Kelvins during the 20th century.




The real "bare" change of the solar constant in the last 100 years was probably smaller, about 0.4 W/m^2. However, Nir Shaviv in

• physics/0409123 (plus a published version of that article)

proposed a mechanism, including a calculation, that attributes a very important amplifying role to the reduced cosmic ray flux. (See also astro-ph/0209252.) The reduced intensity of the cosmic rays decreases the formation of the low-level clouds (through a suppression of their condensation cores). This change allows more solar rays to reach the surface of our planet which results in warming. With this mechanism accounted for, Shaviv changes the bare estimate of 0.2 Kelvin degrees resulting from the 0.4 W/m^2 increase of the solar constant to an improved estimate of 0.4 Kelvin degrees.

The reason why I write about these mechanisms right now is that

• CO2 science

has just posted a text about the solar forcing. You should notice that the calculated increase of the temperature - written as 0.4 or 0.5 degrees, according to the exact source - is a majority or nearly all of the observed 20th century warming which was around 0.6 degrees.



Surely, some numbers will be recalculated, modified. New terms will be added and others will be ignored in the future. But the main message of this exercise is that there are definitely other terms that are likely to be as important as the greenhouse effect or even more important. It would be completely irrational to pick one particular term - the greenhouse effect of the carbon dioxide - and create new ministries responsible for this single term.

The full answer to an important question - for example, what temperatures do we expect in 2050 - has many other terms and even the sign of the sum may differ from the sign of one individual term. When you get an idea about the sign of one term in a sum, you are still pretty far from a full calculation.

In 2003, Nir Shaviv and Ján Veizer studied the effect of galactic cosmic rays on the

• Phanerozoic climate

and found that 2/3 of the changes could be attributed to the passages of the solar system through the spiral arms of the Milky Way. Assuming that the rest is attributed to carbon dioxide, they obtain 0.5 Kelvins as the likely value of the climate sensitivity, with the probability that the value exceeds 2 Kelvins being below 1%.

Some people might be interested in the citation counts: the Shaviv-Veizer paper has 38 citations right now while its main competitor,

• CO2 as the primary driver of the Phanerozoic climate

has 25 citations now, despite the heavy omnipotent bias promoting CO2. But whoever wants to have a strong opinion should actually try to read both of these papers and perhaps even the 8-citation vague and critical paper by RealClimate.ORG's Rahmstorf et al.

Previous climate science article:

• Correlation between CO2 and temperature

Global warming on other planets

Mars, Jupiter, Triton, Neptune, Pluto, and others share the fate of Earth

Jupiter

A new storm and a new red spot on Jupiter hints at climate change, USA TODAY and dozens of other sources explained yesterday. The temperatures are expected to change by as much as 10 Fahrenheit degrees at different places of the globe. At least close to the new spot and to the equator, nothing less than global warming is expected.

New observations of Jupiter's climate change were released in 2008: click the number.



Neptune

The climate of Neptune - more precisely its reflectivity - was recently changing. Lockwood and Hammel argue in Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 34 (2007) that the trends on Neptune reveal suggestive correlations of brightness of Neptune with the temperature trends on Earth, indicating their common solar origin - although I am not quite sure whether the sign is as expected.

Buy Czech President Václav Klaus' amazing book, "Blue Planet in Green Shackles". (Click.)

Triton

Triton is Neptune's largest Moon. Some people believe that it used to be an asteroid. Global warming was detected on Triton. Between 1989 and 1998, the temperature jumped by 5 percent on the absolute (Kelvin) scale. The same relative increase would raise the Earth's temperature by 22 degrees Fahrenheit in 9 years. See thousands of other pages about the global warming on Triton.

Enceladus

Another moon of Saturn's, Enceladus, would be also expected to be frozen and cold. Suddenly, Cassini has informed us that Enceladus generates its own heat. Its high temperatures seem to be incompatible with calculations based on solar energy itself, according to existing models.

Saturn

Saturn itself has a rather warm southern pole, and the temperatures in that region suddenly jumped by 3-5 Kelvin degrees. Well, it's warm because it's been exposed to sunshine for quite some time but the magnitude of the temperature jumps is not trivial to calculate.

Pluto

What's going on with Pluto? Well, yes, your guess is right. There is global warming on Pluto. Pluto's atmospheric pressure has tripled in 14 years, and the associated increase of temperature is estimated to be around 3.5 Fahrenheit degrees, despite the motion of Pluto away from the Sun.

Mars

Of course, the global warming on Mars is a well-known story. Between 1975 and 2000, Mars warmed up by 0.65 Celsius degrees, much faster than Earth: see Nature 2007. The warming has been used by this blog to discover the Martians. More seriously, we have explained that the dramatic and speedy melting of the Martian icecaps is caused by the greenhouse effect. 95% of "their" atmosphere is made of carbon dioxide; that's slightly more than 0.038% of our atmosphere.

The warming trend on Mars is undeniable. Some people have tried to blame the global warming on NASA's rovers. Such accusations are pretty serious because NASA is already preparing plans to occupy Mars using the greenhouse effect, as ordered by George Bush. ;-)




Venus

This planet doesn't belong to this list of planets where recent warming has been demonstrated. But it is interesting to talk about the greenhouse effect there.

Venus, our planet's evil sister, has already been identified as unusable for life because of ... yes, because of the greenhouse effect that occured in the past. Last month, the Venus express gave us some new hints why Venus has such a thick atmosphere that generated global warming.

Venus' distance from the Sun is about 70% of the distance Sun-Earth. Because of the second power, this means that there is twice as much solar radiation per area over there. Because of the fourth power in the Stefan-Boltzmann law, it means that you expect about 20% higher temperatures in comparison with Earth on the Kelvin scale which would mean, if Venus were a black body, that the temperature would still be still below 100 Celsius. But they are about 470 Celsius on Venus.

Venus is clearly not a black body and the greenhouse effect is important for raising its temperature. But you should notice that Venus' atmosphere has 90 times higher pressure than the terrestrial atmosphere and 96% of it is carbon dioxide! The Earth only has 380 parts per million of CO2, and if you divided it by 90 to get the corresponding fraction of the Venus atmosphere, you get about 4 parts per million. There is more than 100,000 times less CO2 density here than on Venus! If you used a linear relationship between the CO2 concentration and temperature boost, you would see that the expected increase of the Earth temperature due to CO2 is 400 Celsius divided by more than 100,000 which is a few millikelvins - a totally negligible amount! The actual strength of the greenhouse effect on Earth will be stronger - because the first molecules matter more - but it won't be exceedingly stronger. At any rate, when numbers are taken into account, you shouldn't expect any substantial influence of CO2 on Earth.

But let us return to the planets that are known to be currently warming.

Earth

The Earth is currently experiencing warming, too, although a less dramatic one than the previous examples. However, there is apparently a huge difference. The warming on the previous planets and moons was natural. On the other hand, the warming on Earth couldn't evolve naturally: it is caused by the humankind, evil corporations, and their intelligent design, most left-wing scientists believe. The warming trends can't have anything to do with the Sun whose activity is now highest in the last 1000 years: it is unethical to propose that the Sun plays any role, consensus scientists argue.

A comparison

You may ask the consensus scientists: why is there such a difference between the explanations for the warming of the Earth and the other planets and their moons? It's because the Earth is the center of the Universe, they would answer. You could also ask: why do all these planets and moons indicate warming? Shut up, the consensus scientists would answer.

Some of them would tell you that your paradox is resolved by the anthropic principle: the people on Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, Mars, Triton, and other celestial bodies cannot complain about the anthropogenic global warming because... because these people don't exist! :-)

The debate is over, Al Gore, our prophet, has announced. Terrestrial global warming, caused by the human sins, is no longer a political issue: it is now a spiritual issue. Now it's time to punish the heretics who deny that the Earth as the center of the Universe is special because of the humans who were created to the image of God - and because of their sins and SUVs.




This looks like a story about some silly priests from the 16th century Catholic Church - a story about the Dark Ages that most of us heard in the basic school. But unfortunately, what we are describing here are influential people in the 21st century such as one who delivers a speech on the picture above.

People who believe, much like the Church in the 15th century, that the divine truth is determined by consensus. People who believe that we should prefer awkward hypotheses if they support our spiritual values. People who believe that questions and independent thinking should be silenced. People who will almost certainly write dozens of unsubstantiated comments below this article.

More seriously, I don't claim that the trends observed on all these celestial bodies prove their solar or cosmic origin although the agreement of the signs is suggestive. But what these trends certainly do is to remind all rational people that there is always natural variability on any celestial body as long as it has any structure or internal dynamics and the only questions are the quantitative ones: how large this natural variability is and what effects are the most important ones in driving it. Denying that there is a lot of natural climate change would be extraordinarily silly.

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