Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

I started out as a true believer that sunspots (or something that changes in sync with sunspots, like heliomagnetism, cosmic rays, solar wind, etc.) had a strong effect on the weather. When I was a kid I read that the great British astronomer William Hershel had said that British wheat prices were affected by the sunspot cycle. Made sense to me …

So when I started looking into the question, I figured it would be a piece of cake to find evidence supporting the connection … but nothing in climate science is simple. I started by looking into Hershel’s claim, and I was going to write it up … but then I found a scientific paper entitled “On the insignificance of Herschel’s sunspot correlation“. I hadn’t put much time into my research, and it was much better than my poor attempt. It clearly showed that Herschel was … well … not to put too fine a point on it, completely wrong.

Undaunted, I continued to look for correlations, and I’ve done so from time to time ever since. At this point I’ve looked in more than 20 places, and found no correlation. I append these studies at the end of this post.

Yesterday, a chance comment about sea surface temperature (SST) gave me a new thought about how to look for the signal. In general, I’ve looked at various time-series records of some parameter—river levels, lake levels, cloud amounts, volcanoes, and the like. I’ve analyzed them either with Fourier Analysis or CEEMD analysis.

Anyhow, the idea I had was to divide monthly gridded temperature datasets into months where the sunspots were higher than the median sunspot number for the period, and months where sunspots were lower than that media. Then, I’d subtract the gridcell-by-gridcell average of the low-sunspot months from that of the high-sunspot months. If the theory that low sunspot cycles were associated with low temperatures were true, I’d expect to find a positive difference between the two.

Since the original idea was about sea surface temperature (SST), I thought I’d start with that. The best gridded SST dataset I know of is the Reynolds OI dataset. It starts in 1981, and uses a mixture of satellite and surface data. From the NOAA site:

The NOAA 1/4° daily Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (or daily OISST) is an analysis constructed by combining observations from different platforms (satellites, ships, buoys) on a regular global grid. A spatially complete SST map is produced by interpolating to fill in gaps.

It’s available here as a NetCDF document. Figure 1 shows the result of the analysis.

Figure 1. Average of high-sunspot-number months minus the average of low-sunspot-number months, Reynolds Optimally Interpolated Sea Surface Temperature. “High-sunspot” months averaged 135 sunspots; “low-sunspot” months averaged 26 sunspots.

As you can see, not only is the difference very tiny, it has the wrong sign. If low sunspot numbers actually lead to low temperatures, then high minus low should give a positive result. But in this case, it’s a negative result, and it’s only four-hundredths of one degree. In other words … no sign of sunspots affecting the SST.

Next, I thought I’d take a look at a global dataset. I used the Berkeley Earth gridded land and ocean data. I picked an arbitrary cutoff date of 1950, because observations before that start getting sparse. The data is available here as a NetCDF document. I did the same thing, dividing it into high-sunspot and low-sunspot months, and subtracted the low from the high. Figure 2 shows the results.

Figure 2. As in Figure 1, but with the Berkeley Earth global temperature data. Over this period, “High-sunspot” months averaged 155 sunspots; “low-sunspot” months averaged 33 sunspots.

Once again … same result. Wrong sign, tiny difference, no apparent effect of sunspots on the global temperature.

This finding is supported by a CEEMD analysis of the datasets. Here are the results for the Reynolds data:

You can see the sunspot peak (red line, Empirical Mode 6) at about 11.5 years. There’s nothing to match it in the Reynolds OI SST data. And here’s the corresponding chart for the Berkeley Earth data:

In this longer dataset, the sunspot period is 11 years, closer to the long-term average. And as with the Reynolds data, there is no 11-year cycle in the temperature records.

Conclusion? Once again, I’ve looked for a solar signal and found none.

Does this mean that the sunspot cycle doesn’t affect surface weather?

Nope. It just means that I haven’t been able to find one. Might be out there, but I’m up to 25 places or so that I’ve looked without finding it.

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12:32 AM here, my eyelids are drooping. Hang on, let me go outside … ah, great lungfuls of crisp air on a starry moonless night have me back in shape. Can’t hear the ocean, the wind is wrong. It’s 38°F, or 6°C, the forest is quiet, life is good. I’ll leave this here and come back to trim it up for publication in the morning.

11:30 AM, next morning. Sun is out, the tiny bit of the ocean I can see from our house is shining in the sunshine …

Ah, dear friends, what a world this is!

Best to all,

w.

PS: When you comment please quote the exact words you’re discussing, so we can all understand your subject.

FURTHER READING: Here are my previous posts on the subject.

Congenital Cyclomania Redux 2013-07-23

Well, I wasn’t going to mention this paper, but it seems to be getting some play in the blogosphere. Our friend Nicola Scafetta is back again, this time with a paper called “Solar and planetary oscillation control on climate change: hind-cast, forecast and a comparison with the CMIP5 GCMs”. He’s…

Cycles Without The Mania 2013-07-29

Are there cycles in the sun and its associated electromagnetic phenomena? Assuredly. What are the lengths of the cycles? Well, there’s the question. In the process of writing my recent post about cyclomania, I came across a very interesting paper entitled “Correlation Between the Sunspot Number, the Total Solar Irradiance,…

Sunspots and Sea Level 2014-01-21

I came across a curious graph and claim today in a peer-reviewed scientific paper. Here’s the graph relating sunspots and the change in sea level: And here is the claim about the graph: Sea level change and solar activity A stronger effect related to solar cycles is seen in Fig.…

Riding A Mathemagical Solarcycle 2014-01-22

Among the papers in the Copernicus Special Issue of Pattern Recognition in Physics we find a paper from R. J. Salvador in which he says he has developed A mathematical model of the sunspot cycle for the past 1000 yr. Setting aside the difficulties of verification of sunspot numbers for…

Sunny Spots Along the Parana River 2014-01-25

In a comment on a recent post, I was pointed to a study making the following surprising claim: Here, we analyze the stream flow of one of the largest rivers in the world, the Parana ́ in southeastern South America. For the last century, we find a strong correlation with…

Usoskin Et Al. Discover A New Class of Sunspots 2014-02-22

There’s a new post up by Usoskin et al. entitled “Evidence for distinct modes of solar activity”. To their credit, they’ve archived their data, it’s available here. Figure 1 shows their reconstructed decadal averages of sunspot numbers for the last three thousand years, from their paper: Figure 1. The results…

Solar Periodicity 2014-04-10

I was pointed to a 2010 post by Dr. Roy Spencer over at his always interesting blog. In it, he says that he can show a relationship between total solar irradiance (TSI) and the HadCRUT3 global surface temperature anomalies. TSI is the strength of the sun’s energy at a specified distance…

Cosmic Rays, Sunspots, and Beryllium 2014-04-13

In investigations of the past history of cosmic rays, the deposition rates (flux rates) of the beryllium isotope 10Be are often used as a proxy for the amount of cosmic rays. This is because 10Be is produced, inter alia, by cosmic rays in the atmosphere. Being a congenitally inquisitive type…

The Tip of the Gleissberg 2014-05-17

A look at Gleissberg’s famous solar cycle reveals that it is constructed from some dubious signal analysis methods. This purported 80-year “Gleissberg cycle” in the sunspot numbers has excited much interest since Gleissberg’s original work. However, the claimed length of the cycle has varied widely.

The Effect of Gleissberg’s “Secular Smoothing” 2014-05-19

ABSTRACT: Slow Fourier Transform (SFT) periodograms reveal the strength of the cycles in the full sunspot dataset (n=314), in the sunspot cycle maxima data alone (n=28), and the sunspot cycle maxima after they have been “secularly smoothed” using the method of Gleissberg (n = 24). In all three datasets, there…

It’s The Evidence, Stupid! 2014-05-24

I hear a lot of folks give the following explanation for the vagaries of the climate, viz: It’s the sun, stupid. And in fact, when I first started looking at the climate I thought the very same thing. How could it not be the sun, I reasoned, since obviously that’s…

Sunspots and Sea Surface Temperature 2014-06-06

I thought I was done with sunspots … but as the well-known climate scientist Michael Corleone once remarked, “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in”. In this case Marcel Crok, the well-known Dutch climate writer, asked me if I’d seen the paper from Nir…

Maunder and Dalton Sunspot Minima 2014-06-23

In a recent interchange over at Joanne Nova’s always interesting blog, I’d said that the slow changes in the sun have little effect on temperature. Someone asked me, well, what about the cold temperatures during the Maunder and Dalton sunspot minima? And I thought … hey, what about them? I…

Changes in Total Solar Irradiance 2014-10-25

Total solar irradiance, also called “TSI”, is the total amount of energy coming from the sun at all frequencies. It is measured in watts per square metre (W/m2). Lots of folks claim that the small ~ 11-year variations in TSI are amplified by some unspecified mechanism, and thus these small changes in TSI make an…

Splicing Clouds 2014-11-01

So once again, I have donned my Don Quijote armor and continued my quest for a ~11-year sunspot-related solar signal in some surface weather dataset. My plan for the quest has been simple. It is based on the fact that all of the phenomena commonly credited with affecting the temperature,…

Volcanoes and Sunspots 2015-02-09

I keep reading how sunspots are supposed to affect volcanoes. In the comments to my last post, Tides, Earthquakes, and Volcanoes, someone approvingly quoted a volcano researcher who had looked at eleven eruptions of a particular type and stated: …. Nine of the 11 events occurred during the solar inactive phase…

Early Sunspots and Volcanoes 2015-02-10

Well, as often happens I started out in one direction and then I got sidetractored … I wanted to respond to Michele Casati’s claim in the comments of my last post. His claim was that if we include the Maunder Minimum in the 1600’s, it’s clear that volcanoes with a…

Sunspots and Norwegian Child Mortality 2015-03-07

In January there was a study published by The Royal Society entitled “Solar activity at birth predicted infant survival and women’s fertility in historical Norway”, available here. It claimed that in Norway in the 1700s and 1800s the solar activity at birth affected a child’s survival chances. As you might imagine, this…

The New Sunspot Data And Satellite Sea Levels 2015-08-13

[UPDATE:”Upon reading Dr. Shaviv’s reply to this post, I have withdrawn any mention of “deceptive” from this post. This term was over the top, as it ascribed motive to the authors. I have replaced the term with “misleading”. This is more accurate…

My Thanks Apologies And Reply To Dr Nir Shaviv 2015-08-17

Dr. Nir Shaviv has kindly replied in the comments to my previous post. There, he says: Nir Shaviv” August 15, 2015 at 2:51 pm There is very little truth about any of the points raised by Eschenbach in this article. In particular, his analysis excludes the fact that the o…

Is The Signal Detectable 2015-08-19

[UPDATE] In the comments, Nick Stokes pointed out that although I thought that Dr. Shaviv’s harmonic solar component was a 12.6 year sine wave with a standard deviation of 1.7 centimetres, it is actually a 12.6 year sine wave with a standard deviation of 1.7 millime…

The Missing 11 Year Signal 2015-08-19

Dr. Nir Shaviv and others strongly believe that there is an ~ 11-year solar signal visible in the sea level height data. I don’t think such a signal is visible. So I decided to look for it another way, one I’d not seen used before. One of the more sensitive …

23 New Papers 2015-09-22

Over at Pierre Gosselin’s site, NoTricksZone, he’s trumpeting the fact that there are a bunch of new papers showing a solar effect on the climate. The headline is Already 23 Papers Supporting Sun As Major Climate Factor In 2015 “Burgeoning Evidence No Longer Dismissible!…

The Cosmic Problem With Rays 2016-10-17

Normal carbon has six neutrons and six protons, for an atomic weight of twelve. However, there is a slightly different form of carbon which has two extra neutrons. That form of carbon, called carbon-14 or ’14C’, has an atomic weight of fourteen. It is known to be formed by the …

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February 4, 2020 at 08:19AM

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February 4, 2020 at 08:15AM

The first act of Mr Jonathan Brearley, the new CEO at the UK electricity and gas market regulator, Ofgem, has been to publish a Decarbonisation Programme Action Plan, a document that demonstrates that the regulator is no longer independent and is now an integral part of the climate change policy delivery mechanism which will consequently do nothing beyond lip-service to protect present consumers from the costs of the 2050 Net Zero target. This confirms concerns that as a long-term Whitehall policy insider and responsible in part for both the Climate Change Act (2008) and Electricity Market Reform (EMR), Mr Brearley was not an appropriate choice to lead the regulator.

In October 2019, Ofgem, the UK regulator for the gas and electricity markets, announced that Jonathan Brearley, its own Executive Director for Systems and Networks, would be succeeding Dermot Nolan as Chief Executive, taking over at the end of February 2020.

Mr Brearley’s Whitehall career is practically a history of modern British climate change policy. From 2002 to 2006 he served as “Head of Team” in Tony Blair’s Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (PMSU). The PMSU was at least in part responsible for the Energy Review of 2002, and for The Energy Challenge study of June 2006, amongst other things (a full list of the PMSU publications and of those to which it contributed can be found on the National Archives site).

From July 2006 until September 2009 Mr Brearley worked as Director of the Office for Climate Change (OCC), an offshoot of the Department of Environment (DEFRA) that formed the administrative nexus drawing together six other departments for work on the Climate Change Act (2008).

This experience led to a further appointment in late 2008 in Gordon Brown’s new Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), where he became Director of Energy Strategy and Futures, and then Director of Electricity Markets and Networks. In this latter position he is said to have “led the delivery of the Governments’ Electricity Market Reform (EMR) programme”, the programme which introduced Contracts for Difference (CfD), the subsidy scheme introduced to replace the Renewables Obligation (RO).

Mr Brearley continued to serve under the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, but in 2013 he resigned visibly and dramatically from DECC, with the Independent newspaper reporting a source to the effect that Brearley was “not happy… DECC is working to improve the investment climate and the Treasury is stopping it”.

For a short while after his resignation he ran his own consultancy, Brearley Economics Ltd, the clients of which are not publicly known, which was incorporated in March 2013, just before he left DECC, and was voluntary liquidated in 2016–2019 prior to his return to Whitehall in April 2018 with a position in Ofgem, as Executive Director for Systems and Networks, a position he held for only eighteen months before being promoted to the top job of Chief Executive Officer in October 2019.

It must at the least be questionable whether such a person was a suitable choice to act as the CEO of a regulatory body intended to protect the consumer interest. The majority of Mr Brearley’s civil service career has been marked by close and committed involvement in the creation of climate policies that impose high costs on consumers, yet he is now entrusted with overseeing the regulation of the markets just as his own policies, now augmented by the Net Zero target, come to maturity. He can, surely, be neither objective nor independent.

Did no one in Ofgem’s board ask themselves whether this candidate might have a conflict of interest? Did they ask, for example, whether Mr Brearley was in reality likely to side with the consumer against the costs of instruments which he himself had a very prominent role in creating, even, it seems, resigning in protest over Treasury attempts to rein in those costs? If they did so it made no difference to their choice.

From the point of view of the regulator’s wider reputation this appointment is like to prove a mistake, and, until Mr Brearley is replaced, Ofgem will, even in the eyes of only moderately suspicious members of the public, lack any credibility as a sincere and scrupulous guardian of the consumer interest.

Confirmation that these concerns are not merely theoretical can be found in Mr Brearley’s first act as CEO, the publication of the Ofgem Decarbonisation Programme Action Plan, which was released yesterday, the 3rd of February.

This document is in substance only a subservient echo of the Climate Change Act and its successor the Net Zero target.  Indeed, Mr Brearley’s own Foreword tells us as much:

“It is vital that as the regulator we are taking the steps to enable and encourage the decarbonisation of energy, playing our part in helping the government achieve its ambition. […] This action plan is just the start of Ofgem’s drive to play our role in achieving net zero by 2050”  (p. 3)

No independent and consumer-oriented regulator could have written in this way.

Moreover, the lip-service to “low-cost decarbonisation” is revealed for what it really is by the subtle reference, easily overlooked, to what Mr Brearley refers to as Ofgem’s “principal objective”, namely, “to protect both current and future consumers” (p. 3), a point reiterated in the main text of the document:

In line with Ofgem’s principal objective we will balance the benefits to future consumers of greenhouse gas reductions alongside the potential costs to current consumers. (p. 13)

Those words will ring an alarm bell for any student of Ofgem’s history. As I noted in a post here on Energy Comment in 2017: The Utilities Act of 2000 had described the overarching principal objective for energy regulation as the protection of the interests of existing and future consumers, wherever appropriate by promoting competition (for further details see this DECC analysis published in July 2011). This was a lucid and unconstricting brief. However, the Energy Act of 2010 [] amended this principal objective by defining “interests” thus in two separate paragraphs (16 (3) 1A and 17 (3) 1A referring to gas and electricity:

Those interests of existing and future consumers are their interests taken as a whole, including—

(a) their interests in the reduction of gas-supply/electricity supply emissions of targeted greenhouse gases; and

(b) their interests in the security of the supply of gas/electricity to them.

This change was of enormous importance, since an increasingly large part of the charges on the consumer were (and still are) the result of climate policy. In effect, the revision to Ofgem’s principal purpose made them unable to comment on the imposition of cost increases resulting from measures to mitigate climate change.

Mr Brearley’s Ofgem embraces this restriction with vigour. Since present consumers are finite in number, and the nebulous definition implicit in the term “future consumers” creates an infinite set, no balancing calculation can favour present consumers unless there is a discount rate, and of this there is no mention either in the Act of 2010 or in Ofgem’s commentary. But real consumers do discount the future, and this is not necessarily selfish; if parents, for example, failed to discount in order to maintain their own lives, there could be no future generations to be worried about.

The lack of discounting thus puts Ofgem on a collision course with real consumer, real human behaviour. Ofgem’s interpretation of the 2010 Act means that they will put only the weakest of brakes on the imposition of climate change cost burdens. Present consumers now have little or no voice.

Any hopes that Ofgem might in the future attempt to reverse this weakening of its powers, made  of course when Ed Miliband was Secretary of State and Mr Brearley was a senior director in DECC, must now be abandoned since Mr Brearley himself is in charge of Ofgem. Until there is a major overhaul this will be the status quo.

The defence that will be offered, of course, is that immediate high expenditure is simply prudent and precautionary. Ofgem writes in its Action Plan:

“We are clear […] that investing in the short term will save money in the medium and long term” (p. 4)

The misuse of the phrase “I/we am/are clear” in political declarations is by now a notorious give-away, and it is regrettable to find it in the statement of a regulator. Emphatic assertions of faith may pass with politicians, but are surely impermissible for an objective body entrusted with quasi-judicial oversight. From such an institution the public has every reason to expect careful calculation and argument, not unsupported fervency.

A great deal depends on this, for the short term investments about which the regulator claims to be so clear are not of a minor order. Mr Brearley’s new model Ofgem blithely reports the Committee on Climate Change’s estimate that power sector investment:

“may need to increase to around £20 billion (in 2019 money) per year by 2050, to cover “investment in renewables, firm low-carbon power, CCS, peak power and networks (including transmission and distribution)” (p. 10).

The cumulative sum, in fact unpublished, will be very large indeed. For comparison, the document itself notes that a mere £10 billion was spent between 2013 and 2017.

Similarly, in regard to heating Ofgem now reports without concern the CCC’s estimate that switching to low carbon heating “will require annual investment by 2050 of around £15-20 billion (in 2019 money), up from just £100 million in 2018” (p. 11).

Faced with such vast proposals for expenditure an objective regulator would require stringent cost benefit analysis and justification, but under Mr Brearley that not will happen, as the Action Plan explains:

“The challenges of net zero are stark and require us to step up our efforts to meet them. As energy regulator, we can create the regulatory framework to enable the appropriate investment, and help direct that investment where it is needed.” (p. 11)

There is only one way in which this can be understood. The ends are taken to justify the means, and Ofgem will collaborate with government to coerce the consumer into delivering a rate of return sufficiently high and secure to motivate investment.

As a supplementary reinforcement for this position Ofgem claims that the costs of the preferred energy supply, renewables in general and offshore wind in particular, are already very cheap:

“The dramatic reduction in offshore wind costs demonstrates that in the long term, low carbon energy can be cheaper than traditional fossil fuels.” (p. 4)

“Few commentators anticipated the recent rapid reductions in the cost of wind and solar power” (p. 9).

As a matter of fact, not everyone is convinced that there is significant substance to these apparent cost reductions, with some doubting, for example, that the capital costs of offshore wind, for example, have fallen much if at all. Hughes, Aris and the present author (2017) and Hughes (2019)  detected no dramatic fall in reviewing offshore wind capital cost data, a finding that has been replicated by a recent study of audited wind farm company accounts conducted by economists at the Aberdeen Business School of Robert Gordon University (Aldersey-Williams, J et al. “Better estimates of LCOE from audited accounts–A new methodology with examples from United Kingdom offshore wind and CCGT”, Energy Policy 128 (2019), 25–35). The authors of this latter paper appear broadly sympathetic to the renewables agenda but nevertheless write:

The most recent CfDs were awarded at a price (in 2012 terms) of £57.50/MWh, while the analysis here shows that modern wind farms typically have a LCOE of c. £100/MWh. Although […] the LCOE and strike price are only the same in a zero-inflation world, it is nonetheless clear that very significant reductions are required to wind farm costs to offer economic projects in the context of current strike prices.

Of this data-grounded concern Ofgem says not a word, and instead simply repeats the self-serving industry propaganda about falling costs. A truly independent regulator would not have filled up the cry in this way. On the contrary, it would instead have asked if the bids were too good to be true, and whether the CfD system were being exploited to obtain options for development that gain market position and inhibit competition. But Mr Brearley is, surely, not disengaged in this matter, since he himself oversaw the introduction of Contracts for Difference as part of the Electricity Market Reform (EMR) package. Being only human, it would be remarkable if he did not have a personal interest in declaring CfDs a success. He may even be quite blind to the possibility that things have gone wrong.

The publication of Ofgem’s Decarbonisation Programme Action Plan marks the final degradation of the United Kingdom’s electricity and gas market regulator. The process begun by the revision of Ofgem’s objectives in the Electricity Act of 2010 has been completed in 2020 by the appointment of Mr Jonathan Brearley, a long-term Whitehall climate policy insider who has interests that appear to conflict strongly with those of the consumer. Reform of the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets has long been regarded as needed; it is now essential.

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February 4, 2020 at 06:23AM

Ms. Tabuchi went to Yokosuka, Japan, to examine a controversial decision to invest heavily in coal.

Just beyond the windows of Satsuki Kanno’s apartment overlooking Tokyo Bay, a behemoth from a bygone era will soon rise: a coal-burning power plant, part of a buildup of coal power that is unheard-of for an advanced economy.

It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — at 17 different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the world needs to slash carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming.

“Why coal, why now?” said Ms. Kanno, a homemaker in Yokosuka, the site for two of the coal-burning units that will be built just several hundred feet from her home. “It’s the worst possible thing they could build.”

Together the 22 power plants would emit almost as much carbon dioxide annually as all the passenger cars sold each year in the United States. The construction stands in contrast with Japan’s effort to portray this summer’s Olympic Games in Tokyo as one of the greenest ever.

The Yokosuka project has prompted unusual pushback in Japan, where environmental groups more typically focus their objections on nuclear power. But some local residents are suing the government over its approval of the new coal-burning plant in what supporters hope will jump-start opposition to coal in Japan.

The Japanese government, the plaintiffs say, rubber-stamped the project without a proper environmental assessment. The complaint is noteworthy because it argues that the plant will not only degrade local air quality, but will also endanger communities by contributing to climate change.

Full story

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February 4, 2020 at 04:37AM