Sunspots 2014: Big Surprises – ‘The current ‘pause’ in global warming may last for many more years to come, perhaps accompanied by some cooling’
Sunspots 2014: Two Big Surprises
http://www.thegwpf.org/sunspots-2014-two-big-surprises/
The newly proposed revisions to the sunspot record going back to 1749 will have some effect on global warming predictions. The current “pause” in global warming may last for many more years to come, perhaps accompanied by some cooling.
Rare spotless day observed on July 18, 2014. Credit/spaceweather.com
A rare spotless day on the sun on July 17-18, 2014 triggered public speculation that an already stunted Cycle 24 was nearly over. Such is not the case. Defying the odds for so late in a sunspot cycle, another solar sunspot maximum was set last month. Another one is coming this month.
In other major news, a long needed revision to the 400-year sunspot record was proposed. It’ll be the first change made to the sunspot record since it was first established by Rudolf Wolf back in 1849. The changes will affect long-term climate and other dependent scientific studies.
One effect of the proposal will be to reduce modern sunspot totals. That will wipe out the so-called “Modern Maximum” and make the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, the weakest in 200 years.
Cycle 24 solar sunspot progression
New solar maximum set in July. Credit/SILSO data, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels
After four straight months of steep declines in monthly sunspot counts, July reversed the trend and increased slightly.
The Royal Observatory of Belgium released July’s average monthly sunspot count on August 1, 2014. Despite the mid-month spotless day, the sunspot number increased and it grew solar maximum again for the sixth straight month.
Cycle 24 still remains the weakest solar cycle in 100 years. It’s nowhere near NASA’s forecast smoothed peak. Data indicating weak sunspot activity over the next couple cycles remain strong.
Cycle 24’s new smoothed solar maximum peak inched up from 76.0 spots/day to 77.3 spots/day. With the increase in sunspot activity in July there will probably be two or three more months setting new sunspot maximums before the sun starts fading inexorably towards minimum.
When that change finally arrives, long-term indicators suggest the next sunspot cycle will be much weaker than this one. That could portend a general cooling trend for earth, if history serves as a guide to future behavior.
Extended periods of inactivity – like the Spörer, Maunder and Dalton minimums – were all accompanied by cooler earth temperatures. Conditions today mimic Cycles 3, 4 and 5 which marked the beginning …
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Helsinki Times: ‘Hundred-year period of increased solar activity coming to end’
The space climate is undergoing an extremely interesting phase – a 100-year period of heightened solar activity is coming to an end.
The sun and weather are the favourite topics of discussion every summer. Kalevi Mursula, professor of space physics at the University of Oulu is interested in both but his interest goes beyond the atmosphere. Mursula studies space climate, including radiation and particles in our solar system.
At the moment, the space climate is undergoing an extremely interesting phase.
The engine of the space climate is the sun, which exerts is influence on its environment by emitting light and releasing solar wind, a stream of charged particles. Now a 100-year period of heightened solar activity is coming to an end.
Keeping tabs on solar activity is important.
Increased solar activity refers to strong solar winds and electromagnetic eruptions called solar storms. When coming into contact with the Earth’s atmosphere, these eruptions may disrupt the functioning of electric devices and communication networks.
Last week, Helsingin Sanomat reported physicist Dr. Pete Riley’s calculations indicating that the likelihood of a disruptive solar storm over the next decade is 12 per cent.
“All our data on space particles are from the period of heightened solar activity. It’ll be interesting to see how the decrease in the activity affects the space climate.”
The task is made easier by the large quantity of data available to scientists as solar radiation is being monitored on dozens of wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Researchers also gather additional information by observing the particle concentration in the near-Earth space.
Observing the past
But the Academy of Finland’s Centre of Excellence, the Research on Solar Long-term Variability and Effects (ReSoLVE) team, led by Mursula, is not satisfied with the current state of knowledge.
The scientists at the centre want to find out what has occurred in the sun’s activity over the past 150 years.
“We have both direct and indirect observations on solar activity available to us. For example, the number of sunspots have been observed for a long time.”
Information dating even further back can be gathered from drillings on ice caps, which contain isotopes that make it possible to draw conclusions on earlier changes in solar activity. These isotopes indicate that the sun was exceptionally active during the 20th century but periods of even greater activity took place thousands of years ago.
The reason behind the …
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New paper finds excuse #32 for the ‘pause’: ‘Explanations of the so-called ‘warming hiatus’ remain fragmented & implications…unclear’
New paper: “explanations of the so-called ‘warming hiatus’ remain fragmented & implications…unclear”
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/08/new-paper-explanations-of-so-called.html
A new paper published in Nature finds excuse #32 for the 18 year “pause” in global warming that sophisticated IPCC climate models failed to predict. According to the paper, the IPCC models didn’t predict the pause because they are too complex, but if a model with “reduced complexity” and the already known changes of natural variability is used, all is well.
The simpler model uses observations of ENSO, solar activity, and stratospheric aerosols to retrospectively predict the known climate change, not nearly as challenging as making a true prospective prediction of climate change before the natural variability is known.
The authors state, “the explanations of the so-called ‘warming hiatus’ remain fragmented and the implications for long-term temperature projections are unclear,” but that their less complex model including a greater role for natural variability explains the “pause.”
Natural variability, radiative forcing and climate response in the recent hiatus reconciled
Markus Huber
& Reto Knutti
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Nature Geoscience (2014) doi:10.1038/ngeo2228
Received
06 March 2014
Accepted
17 July 2014
Published online
17 August 2014
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Global mean surface warming over the past 15 years or so has been less than in earlier decades and than simulated by most climate models1. Natural variability2, 3, 4, a reduced radiative forcing5,6, 7, a smaller warming response to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations8, 9 and coverage bias in the observations10 have been identified as potential causes. However, the explanations of the so-called ‘warming hiatus’ remain fragmented and the implications for long-term temperature projections are unclear. Here we estimate the contribution of internal variability associated with the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) using segments of unforced climate model control simulations that match the observed climate variability. We find that ENSO variability analogous to that between 1997 or 1998 and 2012 leads to a cooling trend of about −0.06 °C. In addition, updated solar and stratospheric aerosol forcings from observations explain a cooling trend of similar magnitude (−0.07 °C). Accounting for these adjusted trends we show that a climate model of reduced complexity with a transient climate response of about 1.8 °C is consistent with the temperature record of the past 15 years, as is the ensemble mean of the models in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). We conclude that there is little evidence …