If 1996 was so quiet, why was 1998 so warm?

Reply: Strong El Nino in 1998.

Nice photo!

Reinforces my earlier point that solar irradiance is at it's lowest level of the last 50 years. In fact, if things continue as they have since 2007, this may be as low as the 1911 to 1913 stretch.

However, global warming hasn't slowed an we can expect a return to record high global tempertures as soon as the next el Nino arrives (or maybe even sooner with rising CO2 levels).

Consider that the global average temperature is currently near the warmest since records began, but solar activity is at the lowest!

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2008/sep/sep08.html

The combined global land and ocean surface average temperature for September 2008 tied with September 2001 as the ninth warmest since records began in 1880, according to an analysis by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

Brrrrrrrrr!

I wonder how my SUV caused the sunspots to disappear?

I can't wait to hear how the AGWers blame modern human activity for the upcoming cold years.

Wow!

Let's see if I understand the correlation here that confirms colder temperatures for the future.

As the number of sunspots have decreased over time since the 1950's:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/28/Sunspot_Numbers.png/800px-Sunspot_Numbers.png

and solar irradiance has also held steady or shown a slight decreasing trend since the 1950's:
http://www.eawag.ch/organisation/abteilungen/surf/publikationen/2007_long_term_recon

and the worldwide temperatures have risen since the 1950's:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif

Yep, that settles it for me.

Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/10/20/lorne-gunter-thirty-years-of-warmer-temperatures-go-poof.aspx

There are many out therelike me who do not countenance the idea that human co2 and warming is a crisis or soon to be one. Once again, this should not preclude action to significantly reduce emissions.

No spots, but sun still feeling warm in bright sun

Brett-i dont know how to thank you enough for bringing this post to us. ive been in awe looking at the various pictures of the sun all day today. i also took the time to read the last 100 blogs on the site and can understand how it provoked all the religious comment.

for me the pictures of mercury and venus transiting the sun are all i need to see to reaffirm my belief in the sun as the major factor in what happens on the planet. once again thanks for this awesome post

Global warming hasn't only slowed, it stopped. Hasn't warmed in a decade, and it's been cooling for seven years. But I'm sure if we go another decade or two without any warming, the Climate alarmists will be still be talking about a "long term trend" cherry picked with a starting point right around the end of the Little Ice Age LOL.

Acutally, sunspots have indeed been poping up, and they have been of the Cycle 24 variety. Sadly, they are few in number. A spot here and a spot there. This is, however, encouraging news that the new cycle is underway, albeit very slow in starting. There will be no Maudner Minimum (or whatever it's called). Here's hoping things get churning in the coming months, and WARM the earth in the process!

Andrew: There's a 3- to 8-year lag between changes in solar irradiance and oceanic response, depending on the study you find. So there's still a few years for the oceans to react to the current solar minimum. Your comment "or maybe even sooner with rising CO2 levels" assumes that CO2 is a significant driver. It's not. Lots of people who blog here would be happy to debate that with you, and probably will. Also, keep waiting for that El Nino. It's not going to happen this year, not with the SOI rising the way it has been.

Fantastic pictures! It's easy to see how a small variance on such a large and close star can alter our climate.

Thanks for this link Brett ... I'll be sharing it with a bunch of folks.
These photos make me a believer in solar warming.
Truly awesome power.

And the presence or lack of sunspots has what to do with climate, Brett? It's sad how much science you ignore in order to post stuff like this.

Reply: Steve, the main reason for the post was to link to the great photos on the Boston Globe. I thought the images were beautiful and many on this site would appreciate the link.I figured I would also post the latest picture of the blank sun. Sunspots or not, analysis of the sun is science. Some believe that there is a link between the sun's activity and the earth's climate, other's dispute that or say that the impact of these cycles is very small. I suspect that you are probably the only person on this comment section that would come away "sad" from a post like this. Cheer up and have a nice day sir.

Andrew,

"global warming hasn't slowed "

really?

Then how do you explain this -- http://icecap.us/images/uploads/GISSvs_Hansen.JPG (Hansen A is the 'no reduction of CO2 scenario and C is 'Human CO2 contribution leveled starting in 2001') reality certainly does look like 'Global Warming' has stopped.

Another view is here http://www.nationalpost.com/893554.bin. Clearly global temps are not increasing anymore and haven't been for some time. There is even an indication of the beginning of a decline, although not long enough for any trend to be declared.

We're just beginning to see the effects of the reduction of the heliosphere and solar wind because the reduction has just now reached the edge of the heliophere with the effect of allowing more GCR to penetrate to earth. BTW, it isn't solar irradiance that is the issue, it's the Sun's magnetic field.

Go to
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/realtime-update.html
That shows the actual sunspots today (about 15 of em). The picture you display is a generic picture of the sun.

Reply: Thanks Maxwell, yes, I can see that there are several very small spots.

Patrick,

Let's look at the curve you referred to earlier:
http://www.nationalpost.com/893554.bin

Let us assume the current year is 1984 with no other data beyond that point in time. Can you see a larger cooling trend of about 0.5C that occurred from 1980 to 1984?

Now let's jump to the year 1988, again without any other data beyond that point. The temperatures are in a steady to slightly upward trend and the trend line from 1980 to 1984 would have to shifted up due to the temperature record through 1988. The trend line would no longer show the sharp downward curve, but would be flatter for the entire period of 1980 to 1988.

Now let's jump up to the current time in that chart. It just happens to be remarkably the same 0.5C of cooling from 2004 to 2008 that we saw in 1980-1984. The sharp downward trend lines for the two 4-year periods would be the same if the data beyond each of those points did not exist.

The whole point is the sharp downtrend in the trend line curve that you see for 2004-2008 does not show the effects of temperatures in the future and the downward trend that is so highly noted in this chart could easily be shifted upward if they rise even slightly in the next 4 years.

Your assumption that the downward moving trend line will maintain the same rate of decline for the next 4 years is highly questionable just based on the pattern of variance noted for the past 30 years.

Andrew states that global warming hasn't slowed and yet his link shows that overall temperature for September has dropped three years in a row. Maybe not yet a trend but well on the way to being one.

Reply: Possibly. But, it is just focusing on one month. I prefer to use the whole year.

if temps now are warm, imagine what they will be like if the sun becomes active again.

Once again, this should not preclude action to significantly reduce emissions.

REPLY: You mean reduce capitalism, especially from the United States. At any rate, here's the cycle 24 web site. It's pretty cool. An awesome variety of images of old el sol!

No Sunspots. Further evidence that Glo-BULL Warming is a CROCK!!!!!!

The more I read about the influences of the sun on earth the more I am filled with awe and wonder. It is complex. For example, consider the fact the center of the earth is iron, and changes in the sun alter the earth's magnetic influences, which influences cosmic rays, which influences clouds, which influences the amount of sunlight reflected and the amount of heat bounced back downwards, depending on the height of the cloud.

In some ways the complexity is hidious. It makes me dizzy to try to even grasp the edges. I doubt Hansen has it all figured out and tucked into his computer models.

Dennis,

The period since 1950 is known as the Modern Maximum, which began with solar cycle 18 (1944-1954).

It seems a little disingenuous for you to note that the solar activity is in decline since the 1950 peak without also noting that the solar activity within the extended period of the modern maximum is the highest since before the time of Christ (I mean, the modern maximum wasn't named for the year 1950 alone was it?), and that there only a few occurrences since the beginning of the interglacial period where solar activity was higher than the present maximum.

It remains to be seen if the maximum is over. The conventional wisdom prior to SC24 and its extended start was that SC25 would see the end of the maximum and a start of a minimal period. I understand that physicists believed that they could predict activity levels two cycles out. But it seems that the predictions of SC25 are now questionable as SC24 seems to not be following the game plan. Likewise, the newer concerns that SC24 is the start of a new maunder may also be unfounded. We may not know for another 5-6 years up to two decades which if any are correct.

Brett: Thanks for the pictures - I've never seen anything like them.

Dennis,

No matter how you look at the curves, they aren't keeping up with IPCC projections.

"You mean reduce capitalism, especially from the United States."

HAHAHA...the right-wingers are still going on and on preaching your sermon. This despite the fact that most of the country isn't listening to you anymore.

In any case, the lack of sunspots should be great news to the anti-environment crusaders on the right. They can continue to distract from the discussion and proclaim that we need to reinvest more money-we-don't-have on fighter jets and golden parachutes.

Mark - Denver, CO:
If 1996 was so quiet, why was 1998 so warm?

Reply: Strong El Nino in 1998.

Posted by Mark - Denver, CO | October 20, 2008 10:37 AM

So where did all the heat energy come from to drive ENSO?

OK...Let's try this again......

Once again, this should not preclude action to significantly reduce emissions.

REPLY: You mean reduce capitalism, especially from the United States. At any rate, here's the cycle 24 web site. It's pretty cool. An awesome variety of images of old el sol!

http://www.solarcycle24.com/

No Sunspots. Further evidence that Glo-BULL Warming is a CROCK!!!!!!

Hang on there are a few blemishes top right corner!

Thats why we are getting some global cooling!

Maxwell,

Actually, the sunspot number for today is zero (0). You need to look at the correct photo of the sun. For the SOHO site that would be here:

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_igr/512/

and at Spaceweather.com that would be this photo:

http://www.spaceweather.com/images2008/21oct08/midi512_blank.gif?PHPSESSID=gt77if6j6tag7idtas9jqa1ud7

Mark B: "The period since 1950 is known as the Modern Maximum, which began with solar cycle 18 (1944-1954)."

OK I will agree with you that it represents the maximum sunspot period.

We also know that at the same time of this Modern Maximum, the global temperatures cooled down from their peak in the 1930's to a minimum in the subsequent 20-year period of 1950-1970:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/themi/g17.htm

So what we have here from the 1950's is the temperatures dropped to a minimum for the 20-year period following a sunspot maximum period. And now the relationship most are trying to say here is that we are at a sunspot minimum and therefore the temperatures for the next 20 years will also drop to a minimum? How can the sunspot number and temperature relationship show an inverse relationship in the 1950-1970 period and then go into a complete reversal to develop a positive relationship for this current sunspot minimum?

Not warm today, here in western MD we had some ice pellets mixed with snow flakes this evening, and yesterday mornings low was 21 and Sunday 20.

Steve Bloom,

Here's some very simple knowledge for you, Steve. It may be hard for you to comprehend as it does not come from Real Climate.

This is about the power of the star we live very close to and why that star controls the climate.

The sun is a furnace. That furnace keeps us warm, but only if the Earth continues to rotate. If the Earth stops rotation, the Sun's power would bake us on the lit side and without the Sun's rays, we would freeze solid on the dark side, all within a very very short period of time.

At the moment, the Sun and Earth rotation cycles, tilt and magnetic forces, are the perfect combination to keep our climate and seasons fairly constant and keep us alive.

Simple experiment:

Go outside on a summer day, keep looking up at the Sun until the skin on your face bubbles and peels off from 3rd degree burns and then try to tell the doctors that a rise of 30 ppm of CO2 burned your face off.

Andrew said: However, global warming hasn't slowed an we can expect a return to record high global temperatures as soon as the next el Nino arrives (or maybe even sooner with rising CO2 levels).

Check the GISS records and you will find that the oceans have cooled and the atmosphere has dropped more temperature in the last two years than we gained in the last century. The last 9 years have an overall average dro of about 0.4 deg/century and N. Am gained 0.3 deg last century. Global warming failed after 1998. We have been cooling for almost ten years and the el Nino cannot come close to accounting for this cooling. Try the NA and PDO which even NOAA admits switched to cooling two years ago as it switches every 30 years or so. This is the key to the Gleissberg cycle and 1998 was the recent peak. We are going down folks and I do not think the planet cares if the news likes to think otherwise.

Oh, and CO2 cannot warm a planet. If you read up on the thermodynamics of the "greenhouse" effect, no gas has such properties and the effect proposed by Arrhenius in the 1800's was never proven, even today. In fact, if we were dominated by CO2, we would be cooler. CO2 as a GHG is a political scam not supported by real science and, in particular, the troposphere at -80 deg C cannot heat the lower atmosphere at +15 deg C. Just plain impossible. Plus the fact that absorbing and re-emitting IR does not constitute warming of a gas. Temperature is kinetic energy and IR is not. A tiny amount of IR energy might be converted to KE by collisions between absorbance and emission, but at double the CO2 we are talking 0.01 deg, an amount in the who-cares range. Positive forcing factors like water vapor at also a fantasy - it is actually a very powerful negative forcing factor, another fact gleefully ignored and rewritten by the IPCC.

S Colton PhD Biochem

There seems to be a bit of confusion concerning the correlation between solar activity and climate sensitivity. Both the timscale (decades) and measurment (TSI) may be wrong. Both De Vries and Edyy have argued as far back as the 1950s that changes in the BE10 isotope over centuries give better indications of solar activty than does irradience over decades. The changes of irradiance between the peaks and vallies of any given solar cycle is only 0.1%. Yet, changes in the BE10 isotope (used as a proxy) coorelate well with changes in ice core samples used to track long term temperature variations. BE10 also corresponds well with solar radii variations as well as variations in solar luminosity.

The point here is that multi- century regional climate variations track better using BE10 and not TSI. However, none of our current GCM models can model climate sensitivty due to changes in solar luminosity or solar radii variations. This is still too new of a field for this kind of precision in climate modeling. As far as I know, none of the GCMs can accurately predcit even small changes in either the Walker or Hadley Cells.

Dennis:

You wrote: "So what we have here from the 1950's is the temperatures dropped to a minimum for the 20-year period following a sunspot maximum period. And now the relationship most are trying to say here is that we are at a sunspot minimum and therefore the temperatures for the next 20 years will also drop to a minimum? How can the sunspot number and temperature relationship show an inverse relationship in the 1950-1970 period and then go into a complete reversal to develop a positive relationship for this current sunspot minimum?"

Good questions, and I don't have the answer (other than PFM). I suspect that there is a significant time lag between the increase / decrease of solar activity and the time that cumulated effects are felt on earth.

As is frequently pointed out here correlation does not equal causation, but there is a strong correlation between sunspot activity and global temps in nature's record. I also suspect (but don't have the time to investigate) that correlation is only valid over time, and not closely tied to individual sunspot cycles (otherwise the temps would cool every time there is a minimum within the cycle and in the transition between cycles).

I would note however that the same relationship that you pointed out between solar and global temps also exists between CO2 and global temps. CO2 was certainly on the rise during the period that temps decreased '50-1970s; still on the rise during the modern increase since 1979; and still on the rise as temps have trended downward since 2001.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Dennis -- In answer to your fine questions, I wish I had thought of this first rather than ascribing it to PFM, which seems a little unpoetic in retrospect -- at least compared to Shakespeare.

Mark B,

Yes the short-term relationships for both CO2 and sunspots are highly questionable. My only reason for using the short-term 20-year comparisons in my response to you was because of these majority of arguments about the expected cooling for the next 20 years based on a short-term relationship that appears questionable.

That is why my original comparison of sunspots and global temperatures was looking at a more long-term 50+ year record. The relationship of CO2 and global temperatures looks a lot better in the long-term 50+ year comparison than does the relationship of sunspots and global temperatures over that same period.

I do acknowledge that the sunspot and global temperature relationship looked much better prior to 1950. But since the sunspot numbers have been decreasing since 1950 while global temperatures are rising appears to be the cause of some other factor then just that simple sunspot and global temperature relationship prior to 1950.

There is also a possible explanations why the relationship of sunspots and global temperatures did not correlate well back in the 1950-1970 period was due to the global particulate pollution levels. After 1970, due to the passage of the Clean Air Act and as the particulate levels decreased over time, the increase in solar insolation could explain the higher temperatures. But since a majority of commenters here do not feel that man has any influence what-so-ever of the climate change outside of localized spots, they most likely will not agree with this explanation either, even though it provides a good basis for the negative correlation of 1950-1970 sunspot and global temperature data.

SabinColton | October 21, 2008 10:46 PM --- You need to learn the physics:

http://members.aol.com/bpl1960/Greenhouse101.html

Both pages, please.

It's funny watching the Deniers make up brand new variables to explain away things they can't seem to answer. First, we had Deniers making up brand new oscillations like the "North Pacific Residual," apparently since the rest of the osciallations in their oscillation-dictionary didn't explain the Earth's warming.

Now we have JP telling us that -nonononononononono -- we should measure the BE10 isotope to get a true reading on the sun! Everyone knows that TSI is the most complete measure we have on solar output, but since that hasn't correlated well with the temperature increase since 1950, now Deniers want to come up with brand new variables to measure with.

I have an idea. Let's come up with a new oscillation called the AGWO: Anthropogenic Global Warming Oscillation. Of course, this oscillation may not complete its full cycle until several hundred years after fossil fuels are exhausted, but that's neither here nor there.

Mark: You wrote, "It's funny watching the Deniers make up brand new variables to explain away things they can't seem to answer. First, we had Deniers making up brand new oscillations like the 'North Pacific Residual," apparently since the rest of the osciallations (sic) in their oscillation-dictionary didn't explain the Earth's warming."

Hmm. I didn't even use the term North Pacific Residual in this thread.

First, it might help your argument if you attempted to spell oscillation correctly each time you use it.

Second, your reliance on denigrating terms for those whose opinions differ from yours draws attention to the weakness of your argument and highlights your inability to grasp processes that drive climate change. The North Pacific Residual exists. As its name implies, it is calculated as the difference between the North Pacific SST anomalies and Global SST anomalies, calculated the same way as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. Those, like yourself, who are unable to cope with even simple arithmetic processes such as that, employ derision in their arguments to attempt to discredit the opposition. And like your past efforts, you've failed.

Third, you'll note in my posts on SST I take no stance on AGW. I report only what the data presents, which is why my blog is linked to by both AGW proponent and AGW skeptic websites. If you believe my representations and discussions of Smith and Reynolds SST data are wrong, feel free to download the data, create your own graphs, and present your own findings.

If the intent of your above comment was to discredit me or my blog posts, then I find your attempt laughable.

Have a nice day.