Articles Tagged "David Archibald"

Figure 1: Heliospheric Current Sheet Tilt Angle 1976 – 2012

The heliospheric current sheet tilt angle is currently at 67°. Solar maximum occurs when it reaches 74° – so a little bit further to go.

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.

Solar Cycle 24 is now three years old and predictions of the date of solar maximum have settled upon mid-2013. For example, Jan Janssens has produced this graph predicting the month of maximum in mid-2013, which is 54 months after the Solar Cycle 23/24 minimum in December 2008:

For those of us who wish to predict climate, the most important solar cycle attribute is solar cycle length. Most of the curve-fitting exercises such as NASA’s place the next minimum between 2020 and 2022 (eg: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/06/nasas-november-solar-prediction/). Solar minimum in December 2022 would make Solar Cycle 24 fourteen years long, which in turn would make the climate of the mid-latitudes over Solar Cycle 25 about 1.0°C colder than the climate over Solar Cycle 24.

Archibald Speech Rally Canberra 16th August 2011

My first duty to you today is tell you what is happening to the climate. What is happening is cooling. The oceans started cooling in 2003, and the atmosphere is following. There has been no warming since 1998.

In fact, the temperature of planet today is almost the same as it was when satellites first started measuring it in 1979. No one under the age of 32 has experienced global warming. Some of us predate that and remember the heavy frosts of the nineteen seventies. Those frosts are returning, and worse. Solar activity is weakening, and will remain weak for another 22 years.

We in this blessed country will be spared the worst of it, but a large portion of the grain belt in the northern hemisphere will have crop failures due to longer winters and early frosts. Canada will go from being a large exporter of grain to becoming a frequent importer. As long as Australia remains a net food exporter, we will benefit from the shorter Northern Hemisphere growing season.

For us, climate is a non-problem. Carbon dioxide’s heating effect is real, but minuscule. The one hundred parts per million that we have added to the atmosphere in the last one hundred years has heated the planet by one tenth of a degree. We will add another hundred parts per million over the next fifty years. The total of two tenths of a degree will be very welcome by mid-century.

When I started out in climate science in 2005, the climate people ignored the solar physics community. A casual perusal of the literature though indicated that the difference in climate outcome from Dikpati’s (NASA) estimate for Solar Cycle 24 amplitude of 190 and Clilverd’s (British Antarctic Survey) estimate of 42 amounted to 2.0°C for the mid-latitudes.

Since then, the prognostications of astute scientists with respect to Solar Cycle 24 amplitude have come to pass. Some commentators though are over-reaching and predicting a recurrence of the Maunder Minimum. We now have the tools to predict climate out to the mid-21st Century with a fair degree of confidence, and a repeat of the Maunder Minimum is unlikely. A de Vries Cycle repeat of the Dalton Minimum is what is in prospect up to the early 2030s and then a return to normal conditions of solar activity, and normal climate.

The three tools we have to predict climate on a multi-decadal basis are the solar cycle length – temperature relationship, the logarithmic heating effect of carbon dioxide and Ed Fix’s solar cycle prediction. Let’s start with the solar cycle length – temperature relationship, first proposed by Friis-Christensen and Lassen in 1991. This is the relationship for Hanover, New Hampshire:

Dr Svalgaard has an interesting annotation on his chart of solar parameters – “Welcome to solar max”:


Graphic source: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png

Could it be? It seems that Solar Cycle 24 had only just begun, with solar minimum only two and a half years ago in December 2008.

The first place to confirm that is the solar polar magnetic field strength, with data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory:

Intro by Anthony Watts - Below is a slide presentation given by David Archibald in Melbourne on February 5th. He’s asked me to repeat it here for the benefit of all. I’m happy to do so. He covers climate issues, oil and coal, plus Thorium reactors in this presentation of 110 slides.

He also touches on his upcoming book, which we’ll have more on later. In the meantime, his current book is still available here

Slides below, be patient while they load. There is a wealth of information here. A PDF is also available. – Anthony

CLICK for WUWT download and see David Archibald NCC Power Point 5th February 2010 - (PDF file 6.2 MB)

Updated below by "The Institute of World Politics"

James Marusek emailed me to ask if I could update a particular graph. Now that it is a full two years since the month of solar minimum, this was a good opportunity to update a lot of graphs of solar activity.



Figure 1: Solar Polar Magnetic Field Strength

The Sun’s current low level of activity starts from the low level of solar polar magnetic field strength at the 23/24 minimum. This was half the level at the previous minimum, and Solar Cycle 24 is expected to be just under half the amplitude of Solar Cycle 23.

The first thing to be aware of is that the warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongly logarithmic. Of the 3°C that carbon dioxide contributes to the greenhouse effect, the first 20 ppm has a greater effect than the following 300 ppm. By the time we get to the current level of 388 ppm, each 100 ppm increment will produce only about 0.1° of warming. With the atmospheric carbon dioxide content currently rising at about 2 ppm per annum, temperature will rise at 0.1° of warming every 50 years. ,

If that is true, you will ask, how does the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) get its icecap-melting figure of 6°C for doubling of the pre-industrial level 280 ppm to 560 ppm? It is widely accepted that, in the absence of feedbacks, doubling would produce a rise of 1°C. The IPCC climate modelling assumes that the feedback from this rise will be positive; that is, that the extra heat will result in more water vapour in the atmosphere, which in turn will cause more heat to be trapped, and the system compounds away until 1°C gets turned into 6°C. As described, the Earth’s climate would be tremendously unstable, prone to thermal runaway at the slightest disturbance.

The real world evidence says the opposite. In late 2007, Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama published a paper analysing data from the Aqua satellite. Based on the response of tropical clouds. Dr. Spencer demonstrated that the feedback is negative. He calculates a 0.5°C warming for a doubling of the pre-industrial carbon dioxide level. Global warming, as caused by carbon dioxide, is real but it is also minuscule, and will be lost in the noise of the climate system.

The Gods punish excessive hubris, but Anthony has invited me to comment on Dr Hathaway’s most recent Solar Cycle 24 prediction:

The number is still wrong.

Hathaway’s number is 64. The best estimate is 48, the same as Solar Cycles 5 and 6. We still have four years to solar maximum so there is plenty of time for activity to build. With the F10.7 flux at 75 as I write this, the trajectory is very flat.

The shape is wrong.

Strong cycles are front-loaded. Weak cycles are symmetrical. This is a weak cycle so the decline will be as long as the ramp up. Dr Hathaway has the Solar Cycle 24/25 transition in 2020. It will be in 2022.