In a number of posts this last year, we have addressed the unusually long and quiet solar cycles. A few weeks back, we noted the sunspot minimum seemed at hand as the month of June started with a series of cycle 24 sunspots and it appeared we would exceed the monthly sunspot number of 3.3 necessary to make the sunspot minimum (the lowest value in 13 month average) November 2008.
Well June despite numerous other small microdots characteristic of this cycle ended up with a monthly average of 2.6 which allowed December to drop from the 1.8 to 1.7 making December the earliest candidate for solar minimum. July would have to average below 3.5 in order for the minimum to move to January. It is unlikely to move to February as the month August would have to average below 0.5, the number in the month it will replace.
December had a 13 month average sunspot number of 1.7. Only three minima since 1750 had official minima below 1.7 (1913 1.5, 1810 0, 1823 0.1). Of course modern measurement technologies are better than older technologies so there is some uncertainty as to whether microdots back then would have been seen.
In a post Mt, Redoubt, a Quiet Sun and Your Morning Coffee, we showed how the solar cycle seems to have an influence on world production and spot market prices of coffee likely by influencing weather in the tropical growing areas. This year it may be enhanced by a developing El Nino which has similar results (all three favor an erratic monsoon season). Of course, the clueless Heidi Cullen no longer with The Weather Channel has already blamed that on global warming. We (WSI) have forecast that monsoon disruption for our ag clients since April with affects on coffee, rice, and cotton.
SOME OTHER INFLUENCES
ARGENTINA DROUGHT
Lower solar activity has a significant correlation with drought in Argentina. The last two years have seen a devastating drought in that country with major impact on winter wheat, corn and beans. This year’s drought is expected to produce lowest winter wheat yields in two decades. You can see the drought reflected in the satellite derived vegetation index (NDVI) (Source USDA Spot NDVI) which is a measure of the health of vegetation. The recent NDVI for South America is shown below. Note how the drought has extended into southern Brazil at times (Rio Grande do Sul) although recent rains have helped recharge soil moisture there. You can compare the NDVI with the correlation of precipitation rate with solar flux (Source NOAA CDC).
Hydrologist Dr. Will Alexander found in a multi-author study in the Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering, a strong correlation of rainfall and river flow in the Vaal River. He showed a deficit in the three years leading up the minimum and heavy rainfall in the three years following.
In all but one sequence (Vaal River 1965/66, data not available), the three-year totals after the minima of both river flow and sunspot numbers, are substantially greater than the three-year totals before the minima. This information demonstrates the close association between major variations in river flow and corresponding variations in sunspot activity, with a high degree of confidence.
There are several interesting features in this table. There is an almost three-fold, sudden increase in the annual flows in the Vaal River from the three previous years to the three subsequent years. This is directly associated with a six-fold increase in sunspot numbers. The second important point is the consistency in the range of sunspot numbers before and after the reversal. The totals for the three prior years varied between 25 and 60, and the totals of the three immediately subsequent years varied between 250 and 400. It is very clear that these are systematic changes associated with the sunspot minima, and are not random events. (Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering - Volume 49 Number 2 June 2007)
Given this study, one should expect the upcoming three years to be wet as we come off the protracted minimum although perhaps not as wet as some periods if the upcoming cycle is a dud. See much more with correlations with the upper atmosphere and with high latitude blocking (the arctic oscillation has been the lowest of the recent record for the June to mid-July period) in the full post here. Next week’s post is on the El Nino, now official (preview here).
Scientists Claim Earth Is Undergoing Natural Climate Shift.
The bitter cold and record snowfalls from two wicked winters are causing people to ask if the global climate is truly changing.
The climate is known to be variable and, in recent years, more scientific thought and research has been focused on the global temperature and how humanity might be influencing it.
However, a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee could turn the climate change world upside down.
Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.
“Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate,” researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.
Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other. Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift.
“In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century,” Tsonis said. “The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001.”
The most recent climate shift probably occurred at about the year 2000. 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. Read more here.
See how well the annual US temperatures (USHCNv2) synchronously changes with both the oceans (PDO + AMO) and sun (Hoyt Schatten Willson Total Solar Irradiance or TSI calibrated to ACRIM). Enlarged here. Similarities exist with the early 1960s.
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Longest streak of negative PDO since the Moon Landing By Alexandre Aguiar, MetSul Weather Center, Porto Alegre - Brazil
The new released data by the University of Washington indicates another negative month for the PDO. The value for the month of June was -0.31. According to the data from the University of Washington, the current streak of negative PDO is one of the longest in one hundred years. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is negative for 22 consecutive months. The last time the PDO had a positive monthly value was in August 2007.
Prior to that, since 1900, there were very few periods with so many consecutive months presenting negative values: 20 months from July 1998 to February 2000; 19 months from December 1974 to June 1976; 20 months from December 1972 to July 1974; 23 months from August 1966 to June 1968; 28 months from May 1961 to August 1963; 25 months from February 1955 to February 1957; and 36 months from July 1948 to June 1951. In other words, this is the longest period of consecutive months of negative PDO in four decades. The last time the PDO stayed negative for some many months in a row was just before the man landed in the Moon, a milestone the world will remember this July 20th 2009.
As cap-and-trade advocates tie their knickers in knots over so-called “global warming,” Mother Nature refuses to cooperate. Earth’s temperatures continue a chill that began 11 years ago. As global cooling accelerates, global-warmists kick, scream, and push their pet theory—just like little kids who cover their ears and stomp their feet when older children tell them not to bother waiting up for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
Consider how the globe cooled last month:
-- June in Manhattan averaged 67.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.7 degrees below normal—the coldest average since 1958. The National Weather Service stated July 1: “The last time that Central Park hit 85 in May...but not in June was back in 1903.” Icecap Note: The Weather Channel reported that New York City has experienced the 2nd coolest June 1 to July 13 period with an average temperature of just 68.4F. The coolest occurred in 1881 with an average temperature of 67.8F.
-- In Phoenix, June’s high temperatures were below 100 degrees for 15 days straight, the first such June since 1913. In California’s desert, Yucca Valley’s June average was 83.5, 8.5 degrees below normal. Downtown Los Angeles averaged 74.5 degrees, five below normal.
-- Boston saw temperatures 4.7 degrees below normal. “This is the second coldest average high temp since 1872,” veteran meteorologist and Weather Channel alumnus Joseph D’Aleo reports at Icecap.com. “It has been so cool and so cloudy that trees in northern New England are starting to show colors that normally first appear in September.” Looking abroad, D’Aleo noted: “Southern Brazil had one of the coldest Junes in decades, and New Zealand has had unusual cold and snow again this year.”
-- New Zealand’s National Climate Centre issued a June 2 press release headlined, “TEMPERATURE: LOWEST EVER FOR MAY FOR MANY AREAS, COLDER THAN NORMAL FOR ALL.”
-- South African officials say cold weather killed two vagrants in the Eastern Cape. Both slept outdoors June 26 and froze to death.
”FREAK SUMMER STORM DUMPS SNOW (HAIL) ON YONKERS,” the New York Post blared after a July 8 storm brought acccumulating hail to that city just north of Gotham. That same day, the high temperature reached 65 degrees at O’Hare International Airport, making it Chicago’s coldest July 8 since 1891. Meanwhile, in Melbourne, Australia, temperatures have been 10 degrees below average, while frost has covered lawns and windshields. On July 13, Albert Gore will appear in Melbourne to explain to Australians that they are shivering due to warming.
Simmer down, global-warmists retort. These are mere anecdotes, hand-picked to make them look silly.
Well, one would be foolish to challenge space-born satellites that gauge Earth’s mean temperatures ---cold, hot, and average. Here again, evidence of global cooling accumulates like snow drifts.
“There has been no significant global warming since 1995, no warming since 1998, and global cooling for the past few years,” former U.S. Senate Environment Committee spokesman Marc Morano writes at ClimateDepot.com. Citing metrics gathered by University of Alabama, Huntsville’s Dr. Roy Spencer, Morano adds: “The latest global averaged satellite temperature data for June 2009 reveal yet another drop in Earth’s temperature ... Despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled 0.74 degrees F since former Vice President Al Gore released ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006.”
Earth’s temperatures fall even as the planet spins within what global-warmists consider a thickening cloud of toxic carbon dioxide.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii consistently and reliably has measured CO2 for the last 50 years. CO2 concentrations have risen steadily for a half-century.
For December 1958, the Laboratory reported an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 314.67 parts per million (PPM). Flash forward to December 1998, about when global cooling reappeared. CO2 already had increased to 366.87 PPM. By December 2008, CO2 had advanced to 385.54 PPM, a significant 5.088 percent growth in one decade.
This capsizes the carbon-phobic global-warmist argument. For Earth’s temperatures to sink while CO2 rises contradicts global warming as thoroughly as learning that firefighters can battle blazes by spraying them with gasoline.
So, to defeat so-called “global warming,” there is no need for the $864 billion Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, the Kyoto Protocols, elaborate new regulations, or United Nations guidelines. Instead, let the cold times roll.
It is one thing to have a national debate about a serious problem, with adults differing over which solution might work best. Reasonable people, for instance, can dispute whether growing federal involvement would heal or inflame our healthcare system’s serious maladies.
But as so-called “global warming” proves fictional, those who would shackle the economy with taxes and regulations to fight mythology increasingly resemble deinstitutionalized derelicts on an urban street corner, wildly swatting at their own imaginary monsters.
Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
Anyone who denies global warming is in the pay of big oil. Remember that is what the big man, Al Gore, said in his movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. But like so much that Mr Gore says, it just isn’t true.
The above photograph (enlarged here), via Leon Ashby, shows demonstrators at Dockland Peninsula this morning.
Consider the 30-odd protesters who held placards outside the breakfast he spoke at this morning in Melbourne. The scruffy-lot, lead by a farmer Leon Ashby, were not there because someone paid them, but because they are outraged by Al Gore and what he has thrust on the world. In particular, his belief that we already have a climate crisis and that the only solution is carbon trading.
It might also sound well meaning. But it is going to be expensive. Indeed, quoting Ronald Bailey from Reason magazine, cap and trade in the US will be the largest corporate welfare program ever enacted in the history of the United States. And the corporations hope government is just as generous to them here in Australia.
Indeed if there were any in the pay of big oil at Dockland Peninsula this morning, they would have been inside applauding the big man.
Has the big end of town ever taken to holding placards? I don’t think so.
A protest like the one in Melbourne this morning was about the seemingly disempowered and disenfranchised attempting to be heard. Of course history is replete with stories of such groups finding their voice and a crowd - eventually. See post here.
James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book
Imagine how wonderful the world would be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. And definitely no need for the $7.4 trillion cap and trade (carbon-trading) bill - the largest tax in American history - which President Obama and his cohorts are so assiduously trying to impose on the US economy.
Imagine no more, for your fairy godmother is here. His name is Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, and he has recently published the landmark book Heaven And Earth, which is going to change forever the way we think about climate change.
‘The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,’ says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you’re unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority. Where fellow sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg or Lord Lawson of Blaby are prepared cautiously to endorse the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) more modest predictions, Plimer will cede no ground whatsoever. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, he argues, is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history.
To find out why, let’s meet the good professor. He’s a tanned, rugged, white-haired sixtysomething - courteous and jolly but combative when he needs to be - glowing with the health of a man who spends half his life on field expeditions to Iran, Turkey and his beloved Outback. And he’s sitting in my garden drinking tea on exactly the kind of day the likes of the Guardian’s George Monbiot would probably like to ban. A lovely warm sunny one.
What Heaven And Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere - to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction - is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods - such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall - were times of wealth and plenty.
All this is scientific fact - which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn’t trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality.
