Global Cooling Coming? Archibald uses solar and surface data to predict 4.9°C fall (!)

David Archibald, polymath, makes a bold prediction that temperatures are about to dive sharply (in the decadal sense). He took the forgotten correlation that as solar cycles lengthen and weaken, the world gets cooler. He refined it into a predictive tool, tested it and published in 2007. His paper has been expanded on recently by Prof Solheim in Norway, who predicts a 1.5°C drop in Central Norway over the next ten years.

Our knowledge of they solar dynamo is improving, and David adds the predicted solar activity ’til 2040 to the analysis. Normal solar cycles are 11 years long, but the current one (cycle 24) is shaping up to be 17 years (unusually long), and using historical data from the US, David predicts a 2.1°C decline over Solar Cycle 24 followed by a further 2.8°C over Solar Cycle 25. That adds up to a whopping 4.9°C fall in temperate latitudes over the next 20 years. We can only hope he’s wrong. As David says ” The center of the Corn Belt, now in Iowa, will move south to Kansas.”

He also predicts continuing drought in Africa for another 14 years, with droughts likely in South America too.

If he’s right, it’s awful and excellent at the same time. Cold hurts, but wouldn’t it be something if we understood our climate well enough to plan ahead?

See his post below for all the details…

- Jo

Some correlations...from Watts Up With That?:

What in the world is going on with global temperatures?

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Posted on January 26, 2012 by Anthony Watts

Multiple indicators show global temperatures headed down this month, and fast.

by Joe D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

As shown above (see the datapoint in the square box), the UAH AMSU daily temperatures are the coldest for the globe at 600mb of all the years tracked since 2002 (warmest 2010, previously coldest 2009).

The new Dr. Ryan Maue reanalysis based global temperature anomalies has declined dramatically this month – almost a full degree Celsius!

Forecasts for temperature 8 days in advance are appended to the reanalysis values.

Is this a reflection of the stratospheric warming pushing the cold to middle latitudes?

The cross section suggests that initial warm burst has ended. Often they repeat as the cold reloads and dumps again.

His article on WUWT:

First Estimate of Solar Cycle 25 Amplitude – may be the smallest in over 300 years

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Posted on January 25, 2012 by Anthony Watts

Guest post by David Archibald

Predicting the amplitude of Solar Cycle 24 was a big business. Jan Janssens provides the most complete table of Solar Cycle 24 predictions at: http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/SC24.html

Prediction activity for Solar Cycle 24 seemed to have peaked in 2007. In year before, Dr David Hathaway of NASA made the first general estimate of Solar Cycle 25 amplitude:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10may_longrange/

Based on the slowing of the Sun’s “Great Conveyor Belt”, he predicted that

“The slowdown we see now means that Solar Cycle 25, peaking around the year 2022, could be one of the weakest in centuries.” He is very likely to have got the year wrong in that Solar Cycle 25 is unlikely to start until 2025.

In this paper: http://www.probeinternational.org/Livingston-penn-2010.pdf,

Livingston and Penn provided the first hard estimate of Solar Cycle 25 amplitude based on a physical model. That estimate is 7, which would make it the smallest solar cycle for over 300 years.

This is figure 2 from their paper:

Livingston and Penn have been tracking the decline in sunspot magnetic field, predicting that sunspots will disappear when the umbral magnetic field strength falls below 1,500 gauss, as per this figure from their 2010 paper:

Dr Svalgaard has updated of the progression of that decline on his research page at:

http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston%20and%20Penn.png

With data updated to year end 2011, the line of best fit on Dr Svalgaard’s figure of Umbral Magnetic Field now intersects the 1,500 guass sunspot cutoff in 2030:

Using the Livingston and Penn Solar Cycle 25 amplitude estimate, this is what the solar cycle record is projected to look like:

And, yes, that means the end of the Modern Warm Period.

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Further reading:

Sun Headed Into Hibernation, Solar Studies Predict -Sunspots may disappear altogether in next cycle.

NASA Long Range Solar Forecast – Solar Cycle 25 peaking around 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries.

Alaska gets it first.....from WUWT:

Alaska On The Rocks

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Posted on January 27, 2012 by Willis Eschenbach

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

From the “weather is not climate” department, the sea ice is in early and thick in Alaska. It makes me shiver just to look at the picture. They had to use an icebreaker to get fuel to Nome.

Figure 1. The Bering Sea region in Alaska. Anchorage is at the upper right. The Aleutian peninsula and chain runs down to the lower left. Ice covers all of Bristol Bay, and extends well out from the shore to the west. Photo Source

I fished commercially up there, in the Bering Sea. I’ve lived in a container in the Peter Pan Cannery boatyard in Dillingham, and gill netted for the noble salmon in Bristol Bay, drunk too much and worked it off laughing in a blazing hot steam bath with some Yupik guys trying to roast me out the door by cranking up the heat. I’ve made great money in driving sleet arguing with the herring regarding the eventual fate of their roe in Togiak, and seen the walrus hauled ashore in their thousands on Round Island. Those fisheries kill a man or two a year, plus the usual crushed hands and feet and the like. But I haven’t fished the January Bering Sea crab fishery, the one made famous as “The Deadliest Catch”. Figure 1 shows why I don’t do that.

The Bering Sea ice this year is in early, and it’s thick. Not only that, it’s moving south fast. The crab fleet has some $8 million dollars of gear in the water, and the ice is moving south at twenty miles an hour. Usually ice comes in later and thinner, and moves south at three miles an hour. Boats are tied up to the Dutch Harbor docks. At St. Paul Island, out of the photo to the left, the crab boats usually sell their loads to the processor boats. It is also totally iced in. Millions of dollars have already been sunk into moving the crab boats and the processor boats and the crab pots to Dutch. If this cold continues, the season will likely be a total bust.

My point in this post? Awe, mostly, at the damaging power of cold. As a seaman, cold holds many more terrors than heat. When enough ice builds up on a boat’s superstructure, it rolls over and men die. The sun can’t do that. The Titanic wasn’t sunk by a heat wave.

The thing about ice? You can’t do a dang thing about it. You can’t blow up a glacier, or an ice sheet like you see in the Bering Sea above. You can’t melt it. The biggest, most powerful icebreaker can’t break through more than a few feet of it. When the ice moves in, the game is over.

Now me, I’m a tropical boy. My feeling is that well-behaved ice sits peacefully in my margarita glass, making those lovely cold drips run down the outside, and giving me a brain freeze when I hold the glass to my forehead.

But when ice jumps out of my glass and starts running all around painting the landscape white and solidifying the ocean and falling on my head and freezing my … begonias, well, at that point the fun’s over. I call that “water behaving badly”.

And if you want to worry about a climate related occurrence, I certainly wouldn’t worry about the dread Thermageddon™, the long-foretold and ever-receding premature heat-death of civilization.

I’d worry about water behaving badly …

Best of the cold to my friends in Alaska, stay safe on the ocean, and my regards to all,

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