New, All Natural, Climate Change!

A common sense study from UW-Milwaukee.

Now the question is how has warming slowed and how much influence does human activity have?

“But if we don’t understand what is natural, I don’t think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand — first the natural variability of climate — and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,” Tsonis said.Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.

Veeerrryy Interesting. Read It All

Sunspots Still Scarce

Joseph D’Aleo says we are heading towards a record for sunspotless days in a year. We are sitting at #3 for the least this century, and heading for #2. Oh, by the way, that means it could get real cold for a long time. Check out all the facts below. ICECAP is the place to find this kind of information.

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

One of our loyal Canadian Icecap readers asked us to comment on the fact we are now at the end of November, in the top five years with the most sunspotless days the last century and heading towards a #3 or even #2 finish depending on how many spotless days we have in December. Here is a comparison of monthly spotless days in this cycle 23 minimum (red) versus the last cycle 22 minimum in the mid 1990s (blue).

See larger image here

Notice how quiet and prolonged this minimum has been compared to the last minimum. As of today, December 3, we have had 241 spotless days in 2008, enough to put us in a tie for 3rd place with 1954. Today will extend the latest string of sunspotless days to 14, 3 this month. If we match November’s 16 spotless days in December, we will be in a virtual tie for second place with 1912 (with 253 spotless days) behind just 1913 which had 311 spotless days (data source SIDC).

See larger image here

Notice how 2007 and 2008 are both in the top 10.

So far in the solar minimum after cycle 23, we have had 483 spotless days, the most since cycles 14-16, in the early 1900s. Note in cycle 14, three years came in the top 10 for spotless days, 1911, 1912, 1913.  This is the second year in this cycle in the top 10. 1912 was the second high spotless year after cycle 14.

QUIET SOLAR PERIODS ARE COLD PERIODS

Case in point the Maunder Minimum during the little ice age, virtually spotless for decades/centuries from the late 1400s to early 1700s. The early 1800 quiet sun period known as the Dalton Minimum was a mini ice age. Cold returned in the late 1800s and early 1900s with again a declining sun.

See this story in the Toronto Star by Adam Mayers from February 2007. It talks about 1911/12 winter, the worst winter of the century for that city.

“It may seem cold this week, but it is nothing, nothing, compared with the winter of 1912, a year that remains in the record books as the worst winter of the past 100 years. By mid-January, it was so cold Toronto harbour was frozen solid. By early February, the near-shore lake ice was a metre thick, and you could skate from Toronto to Hamilton if you had the time. By the middle of the month, everyone was taking bets on whether the lake was frozen over. By month-end, it was. It was the rumour that the lake ice was finally solid from Toronto to Rochester that brought a huge crowd to Sunnyside Park on the afternoon of Feb. 11, 1912. They wanted to witness what the Star called a once-in-a-lifetime experience, “a spectacle they had never seen before and may never witness again.”

Read more here (UPDATED). See David Archibald’s post on Warwick Hughes site on the evidence for and implications of another Dalton Minimum.

Polar Bears Sittin’ Pretty

Polar bears will be having an easy time in the Arctic after reading this from Joseph D’Aleo at ICECAP.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Arctic Ice Increase Well Ahead of 2007 Pace

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, Fellow of the AMS

A very cold polar vortex with a strongly positive Arctic Oscillation is causing arctic ice to increase rapidly and the extent is well ahead of last year on this date.

See full size image from Cryosphere today shows the side-by-side comparison here
Also see how in this image, the 2008 extent rapidly coming in line with other recent years and departing from 2007.

See full size image that shows extent by date for each of the last half dozen years
here

Snowcover is also rapidly increasing. recall last year even after the record low summer ice extent, by late January, the hemisphere was at an all-time record for extent of snow and ice.

See full size image of last week of last January snow and ice extent here.

When the arctic oscillation flips negative, some of the very cold air will make an early appearance into middle latitudes in North America and Eurasia. Watch for an early snowstorm.

See also this story on Watts Up With That on showing the arctic had less ice 6,000-7,000 years ago. See this comprehensive listing of recent story Scientists Counter Latest Arctic Warmth as Psuedoscience.

NASA: Least Sunspots Since 1954

Beware!The Ice Age Cometh. More evidence that the new ice age is coming. For all the hot air that Algore blows about global warming, the evidence is against him. Take a look at this from Science@NASA.

Sept. 30, 2008: Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the “blankest year” of the Space Age.

As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times.

“Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “We’re experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle.”

A spotless day looks like this:

The image, taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on Sept. 27, 2008, shows a solar disk completely unmarked by sunspots. For comparison, a SOHO image taken seven years earlier on Sept. 27, 2001, is peppered with colossal sunspots, all crackling with solar flares: image. The difference is the phase of the 11-year solar cycle. 2001 was a year of solar maximum, with lots of sunspots, solar flares and geomagnetic storms. 2008 is at the cycle’s opposite extreme, solar minimum, a quiet time on the sun.

And it is a very quiet time. If solar activity continues as low as it has been, 2008 could rack up a whopping 290 spotless days by the end of December, making it a century-level year in terms of spotlessness.

Hathaway cautions that this development may sound more exciting than it actually is: “While the solar minimum of 2008 is shaping up to be the deepest of the Space Age, it is still unremarkable compared to the long and deep solar minima of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” Those earlier minima routinely racked up 200 to 300 spotless days per year.

Above: A histogram showing the blankest years of the last half-century. The vertical axis is a count of spotless days in each year. The bar for 2008, which was updated on Sept. 27th, is still growing. [Larger images: 50 years, 100 years]

Some solar physicists are welcoming the lull.

“This gives us a chance to study the sun without the complications of sunspots,” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Right now we have the best instrumentation in history looking at the sun. There is a whole fleet of spacecraft devoted to solar physics–SOHO, Hinode, ACE, STEREO and others. We’re bound to learn new things during this long solar minimum.”

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As an example he offers helioseismology: “By monitoring the sun’s vibrating surface, helioseismologists can probe the stellar interior in much the same way geologists use earthquakes to probe inside Earth. With sunspots out of the way, we gain a better view of the sun’s subsurface winds and inner magnetic dynamo.”

“There is also the matter of solar irradiance,” adds Pesnell. “Researchers are now seeing the dimmest sun in their records. The change is small, just a fraction of a percent, but significant. Questions about effects on climate are natural if the sun continues to dim.”

Pesnell is NASA’s project scientist for the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a new spacecraft equipped to study both solar irradiance and helioseismic waves. Construction of SDO is complete, he says, and it has passed pre-launch vibration and thermal testing. “We are ready to launch! Solar minimum is a great time to go.”

Coinciding with the string of blank suns is a 50-year record low in solar wind pressure, a recent discovery of the Ulysses spacecraft. (See the Science@NASA story Solar Wind Loses Pressure.) The pressure drop began years before the current minimum, so it is unclear how the two phenomena are connected, if at all. This is another mystery for SDO and the others.

Who knew the blank sun could be so interesting? More to come…

Still think the Goreacle knows what he is talking about? I can only hope people will wake up to the fraud of Global Warming. The sunspots, and NASA (which are very reliable) refute what Algore is saying. Which would you believe. SnakeOil Salesman, or hard science?

h/t ICECAP

The Ice Age Cometh

More evidence that Global Warming is over. In reality, it is evidence it never started in the first place. Both are from ICECAP

Is This The Beginning of Global Cooling

By Allan MacRae

Many scary stories have been written about the dangers of catastrophic global warming, allegedly due to increased atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) from the combustion of fossil fuels. But is the world really catastrophically warming? NO. And is the warming primarily caused by humans? NO.

Since just January 2007, the world has cooled so much that ALL the global warming over the past three decades has disappeared! This is confirmed by a plot of actual global average temperatures from the best available source, weather satellite data that shows there has been NO net global warming since the satellites were first launched in 1979.

See larger image here.

Since there was global cooling from ~1940 to ~1979, this means there has been no net warming since ~1940, in spite of an ~800% increase in human emissions of carbon dioxide. This indicates that the recent warming trend was natural, and CO2 is an insignificant driver of global warming.

Furthermore, the best fit polynomial shows a strong declining trend. Are we seeing the beginning of a natural cooling cycle? YES. Further cooling, with upward and downward variability, is expected because the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has returned to its cool phase, as announced by NASA this year.

Global warming and cooling have closely followed the phases of the PDO. The most significant pattern of PDO behavior is a shift between “warm” and “cool” phases that last 20 to 30 years. In 1905, the PDO shifted to its “warm” phase. In 1946, the PDO changed to its “cool” phase. In 1977, the PDO returned to its “warm” phase and produced the current warming. In 2007-8, the PDO turned cold again, so we can expect several decades of naturally-caused global cooling.

Some scientists are predicting that this cooling will be severe, and is a greater threat to humanity than global warming ever was. Meanwhile, politicians are still obsessing about global warming.

And here’s another fine article from Anthony Watts.

Arctic Sea Ice Melt Season Officially Over; Ice Up Over 9% from Last Year

By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

We have news from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). They say: The melt is over. And we’ve added 9.4% ice coverage from this time last year. Though it appears NSIDC is attempting to downplay this in their web page announcement today, one can safely say that despite irrational predictions seen earlier this year, we didn’t reach an “ice free north pole” nor a new record low for sea ice extent. Here is the current sea ice extent graph from NSIDC as of today, notice the upturn, which has been adding ice now for 5 days:

Here is what they have to say about it: “The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era.  While above the record minimum set on September 16, 2007, this year further reinforces the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent observed over the past thirty years. With the minimum behind us, we will continue to analyze ice conditions as we head into the crucial period of the ice growth season during the months to come.

Despite overall cooler summer temperatures, the 2008 minimum extent is only 390,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles), or 9.4%, more than the record-setting 2007 minimum. The 2008 minimum extent is 15.0% less than the next-lowest minimum extent set in 2005 and 33.1% less than the average minimum extent from 1979 to 2000.

Determining with certainty when the minimum has occurred is difficult until the melt season has decisively ended. For example, in 2005, the time series began to level out in early September, prompting speculation that we had reached the minimum. However, the sea ice contracted later in the season, again reducing sea ice extent and causing a further drop in the absolute minimum.

We mention this now because the natural variability of the climate system has frequently been known to trick human efforts at forecasting the future. It is still possible that ice extent could fall again, slightly, because of either further melting or a contraction in the area of the pack due to the motion of the ice. However, we have now seen five days of gains in extent. Because of the variability of sea ice at this time of year, the National Snow and Ice Data Center determines the minimum using a five-day running mean value.

In addition, NSIDC will issue a formal press release at the beginning of October with full analysis of the possible causes behind this year’s low ice conditions, particularly interesting aspects of the melt season, the set-up going into the important winter growth season ahead, and graphics comparing this year to the long-term record. At that time, we will also know what the monthly average September sea ice extent was in 2008 – the measure scientists most often rely on for accurate analysis and comparison over the long-term.”

It will be interesting to see what they offer in the October press release. Plus we’ll be watching how much ice we add this winter, and what next year’s melt season will look like. Hopefully we won’t have a new crop of idiots like Lewis Gordon Pugh trying to reach the “ice free north pole” next year. Read more here.