Arctic NOT Ice-Free till 2060 at the Earliest!

According to the UK Met Office the Arctic will NOT be ice-free by the summer of 2020 as many climate "experts" continue to predict. Nope, it will be at least 2060 before that happens. Mark it on your calendars!

Also mark my prediction that "pigs will fly" in 2060, and "hell will freeze over" in the same year :^) Seriously, I have made predictions for 2052 and beyond in my free online novel. The beauty of making predictions fifty years in the future is that most of us will be dead by then and those who are alive will have forgotten.

Good news for the polar bears! Not so good for the shipping companies that planned trans-Arctic routes for transporting oil. Or for Global Warming alarmists.

The full text of the UK Met Office October 15th release is here. Key excerpts (with emphasis added):

"Modelling of Arctic sea ice by the Met Office Hadley Centre climate model shows that ice invariably recovers from extreme events, and that the long-term trend of reduction is robust — with the first ice-free summer expected to occur between 2060 and 2080. It is unlikely that the Arctic will experience ice-free summers by 2020.

"Analysis of the 2007 summer sea-ice minimum has subsequently shown that this was due, in part, to unusual weather patterns. ..."

"The high variability has made it difficult to attribute the observed trend to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, ...

"About half of the climate models involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment report, show that ice declines in steps — failing to recover from extreme years. The observed temporary recovery from the 2007 minimum in 2008 and 2009 indicates that the Arctic ice has not yet reached a tipping point, if such exists."

In other words, the low point for Arctic ice in 2007 was mostly due to Natural Cycles in the ocean currents and solar phenomena, and not Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) due to human release of formerly sequestered carbon. About half of the most recent IPCC climate models are wrong about Arctic ice. We are nowhere near any kind of tipping point.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still concerned about the continuing rapid increase in atmospheric CO2. However, we have decades to figure out how to deal with it most effectively without further wrecking our economies via the Cap and Trade scam. I hope the coming decades of stable temperatures, and perhaps a bit of Global Cooling, will allow cooler heads to prevail and chose something like a revenue-neutral Carbon Tax. That kind of Carbon Tax would require minimum government enforcement and political chicanery. It would be hard to cheat on. Most importantly, it would actually work to reduce carbon emissions over time, harnessing market forces to do so.

Ira Glickstein

BBC NEWS: What Happened to Global Warming?

OK, if you don't trust me on Global Warming, how about the good old BBC NEWS? (09 Oct 2009).

**********************************

"What happened to global warming?

"By Paul Hudson
"Climate correspondent, BBC News

"This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

"But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

"And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

"... last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years. Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers. But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself. ...

"One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up."

**********************************************************************************************

I've been on this case for quite a while. See my postings that go back over a year.

Ira Glickstein

The Sunspots are Coming! The Sunspots are Coming?

This colorful image is not an aboriginal prayer rug, but plenty of folks at NASA are "praying" it is evidence long-delayed Solar Cycle #24 has started or is about to start. As I reported last month in An "Inconvenient" Minimum and back in January in Where Have All the Sunspots Gone?, NASA previously predicted SC#24 would start late 2006 or early 2007. It is at least two years late.

No one can tell if the old cycle has ended until the new cycle has built up some steam over about a six month period. Well, the above Sunspot Prayer Rug may provide new evidence they may be able to declare SC#24 actually started last December or January.

DESCRIPTION OF FIGURE

The vertical axis is latitudes on the Sun, with the Sun's equator at the middle. The horizontal axis is years, from mid-1994 to the present. The red-yellow bands represent solar jet streams, thousands of miles below the surface of the Sun.

The vertical blue line at the left indicates when SC#22 ended and SC#23 started. Note that the start of a solar cycle is marked by a jet stream that initiates at about 45º North and South latitudes and spreads up and down as the years go by. SC#23 began in 1997 when the jet stream from SC#22 got down to what they call the "critical latitude" of 22º. NASA is excited that the jet stream from SC#23 is now down to about that critical latitude! That, they say, could (finally) mark the start of (long-awaited) SC#24.

DISCUSSION

Well, they could be correct - or not. The black contours on the Sunspot Prayer Rug represent sunspot activity. Note that the black contours representing SC#22 end in 1997. Nearly simultaneously, new black contours representing SC#23 sunspots begin in the mid-latitudes.

A possible problem with the NASA interpretation is that the SC#23 sunspots end in mid-2008, but the SC#24 sunspots have not cranked up yet, a year later. This is very different from the transition between SC#22 and SC#24 when the new cycle started in earnest immediately after the old cycle ended. Why is this transition so different from the previous one? Could the year-long sunspot pause indicate a more fundamental change in the Sun's internal, natural cycle behavior? Perhaps the idea that a new cycle will begin when the jet stream gets to 22º latitude does not apply in the current and very different situation?

HOW YOU CAN HELP NASA

A few weeks ago, I added a new feature to this Blog where you can watch the day-to-day development of the next sunspot cycle. Have a look in the right-hand column, just below the Dilbert comic for a NASA-supplied image of the Sun. That image will change daily and allow you to help NASA look for sunspots.

WHY DO YOU CARE ABOUT SUNSPOTS?

As described in a previous posting on this Blog, there is an historical connection between periods of low sunspot activity and cooling trends. If the start of SC#24 is further delayed, it is likely it will peak later and at a lower level than originally expected. If we are lucky enough to get a series of weak sunspot cycles, that may provide decades of cooling that may counteract the estimated 0.5ºC actual warming our Earth has experienced over the past 150 years.

Although CO2 levels continue to increase at a rapid pace, it appears the Global Warming trend has abated, or perhaps reversed a bit, over the past ten years. A bit of Global Cooling will give us breathing room to correct our excessive release of previously-sequestered carbon (coal, oil, gas) into the atmosphere. Right now, the politicos are hell-bent on imposing the Cap & Trade Scam that will further destroy our economy and not reduce Global Warming very much. Let's hope they will reject that approach and work on something more conservative that will actually work, such as the Revenue-Neutral Carbon Tax .

Ira Glickstein

Global Warming Tiger - Natural Cycles

This is the third of the series Global Warming - Tale of the Tiger.

Read the first posting in this series: Tale and a description of the figure to the left. I believe the apparent 0.8ºC increase in Global Temperature over the past 150 years is due to three major causes and one minor one, as indicated by the parts of the "tiger". (The second posting details Data Bias.)

NATURAL CYCLES
This posting is about NATURAL CYCLES that I estimate are responsible for about 40% of the apparent warming. In other words, 0.3ºC to 0.4ºC of the apparent 0.8ºC temperature increase is due to natural cycles not under human control.

You are familiar with three of the natural cycles that affect the energy input and heat balance of the Earth: 1) diurnal - the daily rotation of the Earth, 2) seasons - Earth's yearly orbit around the Sun, and 3) sunspots - 9 to 13-year magnetic cycles on the Sun. Sunrise to afternoon temperatures vary by 10ºC or more and seasonal temperatures by 40ºC or more.

However, these cycles have no long-term effect on surface temperatures. They are not the cause of Global Warming. However, when scientists are trying to detect long-term temperature variations of fractions of a degree, multi-degree daily and yearly variations complicate the task.

Individual sunspot cycles are not long enough to have significant effects on global temperatures. However, when a multi-decadal series of especially short-strong cycles, or long-weak cycles occur, there are significant effects, see (7) below.

Three more natural variations are called Milankovitch cycles: 3) eccentricity of Earth orbit around the Sun, 4) axial tilt, and 5) precession. These changes do not increase or decrease the total amount of solar radiation falling on the Earth. However, they change the relative distribution between the polar and equatorial regions. It turns out that the more energy that falls on the polar regions, the more the Earth warms, and vice-versa. These cycles run from 19,000 to 400,000 years and they are the most likely cause of the approximate 100,000 year glaciation cycles seen in the ice core records. Over the past 20 thousand years or so, according to ice core data, the Earth has warmed by over 10ºC. During most of that time, human activity had no effect on global temperatures. The Milankovitch cycles may have contributed 0.1ºC or more to the 0.8ºC apparent Global Warming over the past 150 years.

Another set of cycles of interest are: 6) multi-decadal oscillations of the oceans, including the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (20-30 years), Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (15-20 years) PDO and IDO, El Nino-Southern Oscillation (3-8 years) ENSO, Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (70 years) AMO, and others. These cycles are associated with temperature variations of 1ºC or more, and they may have contributed 0.1ºC or more to the 0.8ºC apparent Global Warming over the past 150 years.

The last cycle of interest is: 7) multi-decadal magnetic activity variations on the Sun. As I noted above, individual sunspot cycles, per se, are not associated with significant global temperature variations. However, a series of especially short and strong cycles may be associated with multi-decadal warming trends. Conversely, a series of especially long and weak cycles may be associated with multi-decadal cooling trends. See Solar variation for an excellent discusion.


CORRELATION OF TEMPERATURE WITH SUNSPOT NUMBER TRENDS


The figure (from Solar variation, with annotations in green and pink by Ira) compares global temperature with CO2 and Sunspot Number. [Click the diagram for a larger version.]


The upper dark red curve shows how temperatures have increased by an apparent 0.8ºC over the past 150 years. Note that there was a dip around 1860, another around 1910, and a third around 1950. A small, relatively short rise followed the 1860 dip, a larger, longer rise followed the 1910 dip, and the 1950 dip was followed by a very long and strong rise. That last rise has triggered current Global Warming fears.

The middle blue curve shows how CO2 has increased steadily since 1850, with a particularly rapid rise from 1960 to the present. (The reason the blue curve gets brush-like after 1960 is better measurement equipment that captured seasonal variations.) The correlation between CO2 rise and temperature rise has lent credence to the theory that rising CO2 levels are the main cause of Global Warming.

The lower yellow curve shows sunspot number variations. The thin line shows the individual 9 to 13-year sunspot cycles and the thicker line is the multi-cycle average.

My annotation shows, in green, the sunsport cycles that peaked below 80 sunspots/day. Note the correlation between those low cycles and the dips in global temperature experienced about a decade later. Annotations in pink indicate the sunspot cycles that peaked above 110 sunspots/day. Note that the peaks are correlated with those more active sunspot cycles.

In particular, note that six of the last seven sunspot cycles have peaked above 110 and that correllates with the global temperature rise from 1950 to 2000. However, since 1999 there has been a stabilization of global temperatures and, since 2005, a dip of nearly 0.2ºC in the non-smoothed data. That dip is NOT correlated with any dip in CO2 level rise - indeed CO2 levels are rising faster than ever.

Therefore, it is plausable that CO2 levels, while significant, are NOT the primary cause of Global Warming.

So, what is the main cause? Well, look at the thick yellow smoothed sunspot curve. It has been on the downswing for the past decade! The latest averages are below 80!

Couple that with the two-year (and counting) delay in the expected start of sunspot cycle #24. In 2006, NASA experts predicted cycle #24 would start at the end of 2006 or early 2007 and that it would be a doozy, peaking over 150! But, here at mid-2009 #23 has probably not ended yet nor has #24 started. So, NASA's latest prediction is that #24 will be be a weak kitten, peaking at 90. (I predicted, back in January that it would peak even lower, at 80. Also see an "Inconvenient" Minimum.)

CONCLUSIONS

Sunspot activity is better correlated with global temperature than CO2 levels. It is probably responsible for about 40% of the apparent Global Warming we have experienced over the past 150 years and over 0.3ºC of the actual warming. If the coming sunspot cycle is further delayed and if it is as weak as expected, that could stabilize global temperatures for a decade or more and give us breathing room to control CO2 levels in a conservative way.

Ira Glickstein