Solar Lull Could Cause Colder Winters In Europe

Taco Cowboy writes "Since September of last year scientists have been wondering what's happening to the Sun. It's supposed to have reached the peak of its 11-year cycle, but sunspot and flare activity remains much quieter than expected. Experts now think the recent cold snap that hit North America and the wet weather that hit part of Europe might be linked to the eerie quietness of the Sun. According to the BBC, solar activity hasn't been this low in 100 years, and if activity keeps dropping, it may reach levels seen during the 'Maunder Minimum,' an 'era of solar inactivity in the 17th Century [which] coincided with a period of bitterly cold winters in Europe.' It wouldn't have a big effect on global temperatures, just regional ones. Why? The sun's UV output drops during these lulls, and the decreased amount of UV light hitting the stratosphere would cause the jet stream to change course. Prof. Mike Lockwood says, 'These are large meanders in the jet stream, and they're called blocking events because they block off the normal moist, mild winds we get from the Atlantic, and instead we get cold air being dragged down from the Arctic and from Russia. These are what we call a cold snap... a series of three or four cold snaps in a row adds up to a cold winter. And that's quite likely what we'll see as solar activity declines.'"

Comments

Not the sun

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sun does not effect climate. Only carbon.

Only carbon.

Re:Not the sun

[hey!]

Seriously, you have captured the essential mindset of the denialists: there can only be one cause for anything. That assumption underlies most of the denialist arguments.

One of the common one is, "Wasn't the Earth warmer in the past? Without industrial carbon emissions?" I've seen that trotted out by politicians against climate researchers, as if (a) that were news to them and (b) it had never occurred to them that something other than CO2 could drive climate change. The other favorite on the denialist hit parade is "carbon lagged warming in past warming periods." Again, they say this as if the climate scientists had never considered this, when the very information they're quoting *comes* from climate science.

Or how about this one: "Mars is warming too, and there's no carbon emissions on Mars."

These arguments are mind-boggling simple-minded, and they're all rooted in a simple, implicit proposition: CO2 either explains all warming episodes everywhere over all time, or it explains *none* of them.

Re:Not the sun

[sideslash]

Seriously, you have captured the essential mindset of the denialists: there can only be one cause for anything. That assumption underlies most of the denialist arguments.

Maybe it makes you feel good to think that, but the AGW skeptical material I've read certainly doesn't match that characterization. Maybe the fluff posted in the comments section on YouTube or Fox News or MSNBC etc.

Am I wrong? Why don't you link to a post in one of the major climate skeptic websites that shows this "can be only one cause for anything" attitude you describe. Or maybe you're just making stuff up in an attempt to portray your opponents in debate as fools.

Re:Not the sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not the "denialists" saying that CO2 is the only cause of climate change, idiot

Re:Not the sun

[sideslash]

People in general are good at making fools out of themselves. That is why Doing Science Right (tm) involves disclosing your source data, frequently blurting out to the world everything that may possibly be wrong with your approach, and placing trust in an experiment or model's results only as far as commensurate with the demonstrated reliability of those results.

For anyone keeping score, several of the alarmists have made fools of themselves as well. James Hansen comes to mind as an example of a cargo cult scientist.

Re:Not the sun

[bunratty]

How is that unscientific? Warming caused by excess CO2 in the atmosphere was predicted long before it was ever observed. Isn't that the scientific method, coming up with a hypothesis that makes predictions, then testing the predictions against observations? If we had not observed the warming, you'd have a point, but we've seen not only warming, but also melting ice and sea level rise.

Re:Not the sun

[TubeSteak]

On the other hand the "alarmist" logic is: "we already know the cause of the warming, it is humans saturating the atmosphere with too much CO2, we just need to gather and/or create the evidence to support this theory". That's called inductive logic, and is just as unscientific as what you describe coming from the "denialists".

You seem to be creating a strawman for the express purpose of knocking it down.

These "alarmist" scientists are the same type who told us that CFCs were creating a hole in the ozone layer.
We went to great lengths to eliminate CFCs, then lo and behold, the ozone layer fixed itself.

"Real" science comes from gathering evidence and basing your theories on the evidence gathered. You then determine what it might take to falsify your theory and try as hard as possible to falsify it.

Holy shit! Just like what happened with the ozone layer!
The Ozone Hole Alarmists were right!

All I see from the "alarmist" camp is people trying to support their theories at all costs, calling things causation where there is barely correlation, and making very little if any effort to falsify their theories. This behavior is more akin to religion than any sort of science.

Then you haven't looked very hard.
The weight of "Real" science is behind the "alarmists" and not at all behind the "denialists".

Re:Not the sun

[Orp]

On the other hand the "alarmist" logic is: "we already know the cause of the warming, it is humans saturating the atmosphere with too much CO2, we just need to gather and/or create the evidence to support this theory". That's called inductive logic, and is just as unscientific as what you describe coming from the "denialists".

"Real" science comes from gathering evidence and basing your theories on the evidence gathered. You then determine what it might take to falsify your theory and try as hard as possible to falsify it.

All I see from the "alarmist" camp is people trying to support their theories at all costs, calling things causation where there is barely correlation, and making very little if any effort to falsify their theories. This behavior is more akin to religion than any sort of science.

False equivalency is false.

Guess what? A lot of the "alarmist" are the same scientists doing the research. Sure, people get attached to theories, but do you realize that the best possible thing to happen to a scientist is for him/her to make a discovery that tosses the widely accepted hypotheses on their head? In other words, if a scientist did a rigorously peer reviewed study which indicated that, say, it's a reduction in neutrinos from the sun somehow, oh, say tweaking aerosol concentrations, leading to a strong causal relationship between this phenomenon and observed global warming - while also showing that the greenhouse effect of CO2 was much less of a factor than previously thought - that person would be fricking king of the scientific world.

The tired repeated bleatings of non-scientists who have not spent their careers repeatedly getting their work shredded by reviewers [this being the norm, not the exception] on the path to eventual publication do absolutely zilch to move things forward regarding understand what's really going on. The simple-minded idea that climate science is some sort of "alarmists versus skeptics" battle is laughable; this false equivalency between two imagined camps, each claiming to know the truth, is entirely imagined by ignorant people. Unless you've actually done science and gotten your work published in decent journals, these opinions mean absolute diddlyshit; nothing more than mental masturbation splooging text on the screen, masquerading as informed debate.

Re:Not the sun

[hey!]

Just to make it clear to folks who haven't followed this, the "ozone hole" is not a fixed feature of the Antarctic; it's like weather, it grows and shrinks in different years based on local atmospheric conditions, causing many to have declared premature victory. However the ozone levels in the Antarctic have stabilized and are expected to recover to pre-industrial levels over the coming decades.

This is not a case of the problem "fixing itself", it's a case of people deciding to take effective action by banning ozone depleting chemicals (thank you President Reagan).

Re:Not the sun

[amiga3D]

No no no. Only denialists are fools. Global warming proponents are superior intelligent beings who are never wrong and always have the answers if only all the illiterate peons would listen to them everything would be okay.

Re:Not the sun

[hey!]

I haven't been around that long. But from what I remember the weather is, once again, as cold and wet as it was when I was a kid.

This brings up a very important point. "Global warming" is a phenomenon where the atmosphere -- particularly the troposphere -- has more energy. That doesn't mean that that the climate in your neck of the woods is necessarily going to be warmer and drier.

We're talking about a 0.6 degree C average temperature increase or thereabouts in the last 50 years. If the climate in your home town was 0.6 C warmer, *you wouldn't even notice*. From the point of view of whether you need to point on a sweater when you go outside it is meaningless.

But if you consider there's something like 10^21 cubic meters of troposphere that's a lot of energy

Consider the Coriolis force; you can't *feel* it. It makes no difference whether you walk east or north, the effect is too small to measure. But it has an enormous effect on the atmosphere, because the atmosphere is huge. The same can be said for a 1 C increase in temperature; it's not much hotter, but it's a vast amount of energy that affects the movement of huge air masses. Those changes could well make your neck of the woods colder, because air (e.g. the polar vortex) is moving more often in ways it only did rarely years ago. On the other hand other places (e.g. Greenland and Alaska) may be experiencing unusual warm patterns. Average those anomalies out over the entire globe, and you get very slight global temperature increases out of a patchwork of extremes.

So the kind of mental test you are proposing ("is it warmer outside my house than it would have been thirty years ago?") has very little bearing on "global warming". A), it's not *global*. B) globally averaged, temperatures aren't very much warmer under "global warming".

Re:Not the sun

[TapeCutter]

Reagan also pushed for and won an international "cap and trade" treaty for sulphur emissions which has dramatically reduced "acid rain" around the globe during the past couple of decades. Thatcher was his BFF at the time and I think it's no accident she had the same ideas, she was after all an Oxford trained chemist and was the first world leader to speak out about AGW. By today's standards Regan (and Thatcher) would be considered "too soft on greenies" to lead the republican party, kind of amazing what corporate FUD can do to peoples attitudes in such a short time.

Re:Not the sun

[TapeCutter]

Or there could be something else causing global warming

Thanks captain obvious, here's the IPCC attribution graph. Aside from the predicted warming, numerous other phenomena have been predicted by climate models and then observed in nature, eg: "stratospheric cooling" and "polar amplification".

The last nail in the "something else" coffin was during the 50's when spectrometers became sensitive enough to see that the CO2 absorption spectra was interleaved with the H2O spectra rather that blocked by it. Back then AGW was detectable but the only reason they were looking at all was due to their inability to explain the magnitude of the ice age climate changes from orbital wobbles alone. The original warming prediction was made ~1900, both the 1900 and 1950's predictions did not take into account the growth rate of the FF burning industry, the original predicted a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 concentrations in about 3kyrs not 300yrs.

Re:Not the sun

[bunratty]

I clearly heard the congressman say "When you see warming, why do you automatically assume it's manmade?" and "If it was warmer during the Medieval period, how could we blame it on CO2 emissions?" He's asking questions, but they're loaded questions. They make a presumption that scientists automatically assume warming is manmade and all due to CO2 emissions. He not saying AGW is not happening, but he's implying that arguments that suggest CO2 emissions are causing warming are dumb by the way he's asking those questions. He doesn't sound like he's honestly trying to learn the science, but rather he seems to have a chip on his shoulder.

OB: Global warming

[rueger]

Aha! Weather in some places that's colder or warmer than others! With stuff happening on the Sun.

Obviously Global Warming is a fiction created by neo-Luddite Green party members.

And communists. Yeah. Communists.

Re:OB: Global warming

[bill_mcgonigle]

Weather in some places that's colder or warmer than others!

Truly unprecedented in history.

Regardless of the predictive value of our models, let's raise some taxes.

Re:global cooling

[Immerman]

So would a second "Maunder Minimum" now be a good thing because it buys us a little more time to get our act together? Or a bad thing because it lets us keep our heads in the sand even longer so that we get hit all the harder and faster when the sun returns to its normal behavior?

Not that we have solar observations going back long enough to detect long-term cycles, but another 50+ year minimum starting up now when it could make it much easier to avoid the worst permanent climate changes would be almost enough to get me believing in intelligent intervention.

Maunder Minimum

[Taco Cowboy]

Just a link to add for the " Mauder Minimum " that was mentioned in TFA -

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml

Hope this helps !

Before this turns into a derpfest...

[Orp]

The NCAR link is probably the best for relating this to climate change:

So could a lengthy drop in solar output be enough to counteract human-caused climate change? Recent studies at NCAR and elsewhere have estimated that the total global cooling effect to be expected from reduced TSI during a grand minimum such as Maunder might be in the range of 0.1 to 0.3 Celsius (0.18 to 0.54 Fahrenheit). A 2013 study confirms the findings. This compares to an expected warming effect of 3.0C (5.4F) or more by 2100 due to greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, even a grand solar minimum might only be enough to offset one decade of global warming. Moreover, since greenhouse gases linger in the atmosphere, the impacts of those added gases would continue after the end of any grand minimum.

So perhaps a serious lull in solar activity could put some feeble brakes on global warming, slowing it down... temporarily, only to charge back when the sun gets over its issues.

I'm a meteorologist, not a climate guy, but I find the hypothesis that the current solar lull is responsible for the recent cold snaps in the northern hemisphere to be extremely dubious. Much more tenuous than the hypothesis that the meandering jet stream is happening due to the reduction in the north/south temperature gradient due from a reduction of Arctic ice cover, which itself is physically feasible but still not shown very conclusively.

The best way to get a grip on these issues would be to run many, many ensembles of weather models and coaxing out statistical links. And this is where weather/climate modeling is going, for good reasons... but as all the armchair slashdot climatologists will (perhaps rightly) point out, models have issues... but they are getting much better and ensembles help a lot to provide a handle on the probability that forcing A is causing response B.

Maunder Minimum

[fyngyrz]

The Maunder Minimum is the degree of deviation from the white line allowed before the trooper cites you for being drunk. Even without exceeding the Maunder Minimum, poor performance here combined with "blowing an .08", a (very low) standard for fellatio (the theory being that you'd have to be *really* drunk to perform that poorly*), can combine to annoy the trooper into issuing a ticket. Tomorrow, we're going to re-discover "Boyle's Laws of Gasses", which dictates performance of glassware with insufficient bong fluid. Now put away your books; time for a pop quiz: Coke, or Pepsi?

* Scale normalized 0.0~~1.0 as per International Standards Req. 4:20, para 69, lines for two.

Re:global cooling

[bunratty]

Ah, finally the real objection to believing in AGW comes to light... you're afraid of your political opponents gaining power. But just for a moment consider that we may need to actually reduce carbon dioxide emissions for legitimate reasons. Can you think of a way that we could do that without the commie pinkos taking over? Let's get creative.

Re:global cooling

[Immerman]

Greenhouse gas heat capture is reasonably well understood, even if many of the secondary effects are still being discovered. While completely unrealistic, eliminating carbon emissions tomorrow would do quite a bit to stabilize the climate, if we were very, very lucky the global climate wouldn't change much by the end of the century and after that the crisis situation would largely be over and global climates would likely remain reasonably stable thereafter. We're probably past the point of getting the climate back to the state it was in a century ago without massive geoengineering, but we can still work towards mitigating the changes.

As for the benefits - a big one would be a biosphere not confronted by a second major extinction event to exacerbate the one were already in the midst of (human hunting, fishing, farming, and (more recently), toxic pollution has devastated the biosphere over the last few millenia). We're going to be hard-pressed to sustain the ~10 billion people the global population is expected to stabilize at by mid-century without any climate troubles. If our farmland is being rendered non-viable by climate shifts that problem will be much, much worse. For example it's looking likely that without serious changes in climate policy in the near term, within a century or two corn mostly won't be a viable US crop except in the northernmost states. Canada will have become much more suitable, but that will mean devastating ecologically important wilderness areas, and while farms are fairly easy to move, you can't just up and move all the processing plants and other infrastructure, and refitting a century worth of infrastructure to process whatever crops, if any, are suited to the new climate is liable to be very expensive if even possible. Now imagine that happening to every crop, everywhere on the planet, simultaneously. Extremely expensive. Not to mention that during the transition period you're going to have vast regions of agricultural land that has become non-viable for one crop but not yet viable for another. And we'll also have all those more extreme weather patterns to contend with as the forcing factors from polar temperature differences weaken and stop forcing the weather to follow predictable patterns from year to year. We're already seeing the polar wind belts becoming weaker and more meandering, which allows weather patterns that would once have swept across the country to get trapped in the eddy currents to cause severe protracted storms in some places and droughts in others.

Global famine is looking like a very real possibility, and that would likely destabilize world peace more thoroughly than anything we've seen in centuries. Peace is one of those luxuries you strive for once not starving to death has been taken care of.

So basically yes to all of your possibilities. But we're not talking about an increase from today, we're talking about avoiding, as much as possible, a massive decrease in all of them. It's looking like some decrease is inevitable - estimates are that we're already harvesting the global ecosystem (farming, fishing, logging, etc) at a rate ~40% higher than is sustainable (we're "spending the capital" and doing long-term damage to environmental productivity). Getting efficient we could possibly support 10 billion people in comfort sustainably, but that's a tall order, and probably not even remotely possible if climate change are powerfully undermine our productivity. And what exactly do you suppose will happen in the intervening time if the global population is forced to be reduced by 1/2 or 3/4 within a few generations?

Re:global cooling

[the eric conspiracy]

Another denialist myth, misquoted.

Al Gore bought some waterfront property. In CA. On a hill. It's very unlikely the sea level will rise some 80' during his lifetime considering the expected rate is less than 1" per year.