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via Real Climate Science
May 17, 2024 at 10:01PM
by Javier Vinós
Part 2 of a 3-part series. Part I is here.
The effect of the Sun on climate has been debated for 200 years. The basic problem is that when we study the past, we observe strong climatic changes associated with prolonged periods of low solar activity, but when we observe the present, we are able to detect only small effects due to the 11-year solar cycle. There are several possible explanations for this discrepancy. But the main question is how the Sun affects climate.
In this article we examine the effects on climate caused by the 11-year solar cycle over the last few cycles and their relation to recent climate change.
In its 5th Assessment Report, the IPCC used climate models to calculate the Sun’s contribution to warming. These models only take into account changes in the total energy coming from the Sun, which is known to vary by only 0.1%. Therefore, the IPCC’s answer is that the Sun has contributed nothing to the warming.[i] This is absurd given our knowledge of past climate and the fact that we passed through a 70-year solar maximum in the 2nd half of the 20th century, one of the most active periods of solar activity in thousands of years.
Figure after AR5, WGI, Ch. 5, FAQ 5.1, Fig. 1, pg. 393
The IPCC is ignoring a large body of evidence that the Sun affects climate in ways that cannot be explained by these energy changes alone. We have space to review only a few of these unexplained effects. Let’s start with the surface.
Most of the Sun’s energy reaches the surface of the planet. If this energy increases by 0.1%, then every point on the surface receives 0.1% more. One would expect this to cause a small overall warming, estimated by scientists to be two hundredths of a degree Celsius, which is undetectable. But that is not what is being observed. Several studies show that over the solar cycle, the surface is warming 4 times more than expected, 0.1°C, and it is doing so in an extremely irregular way with large spatial variations.[ii]
Figure from Lean 2017. The surface temperature response to solar cycle from observations using multiple regression from the 1996 minimum to the 2002 maximum. On the right are zonally averaged changes.
Going from a solar minimum to a solar maximum, some areas show more than 1°C of warming, while others show more than half a degree of cooling. This is not the effect you would expect. If we analyze the average for each latitude, we observe a very strong warming around 60°N latitude. But if we analyze the change at 20 km altitude, in the stratosphere, we observe something very curious. The response in this layer of the atmosphere is inverse to the response at the surface. Why is this important? The IPCC tells us that one of the fingerprints of warming due to our emissions is that we see warming at the surface and cooling in the stratosphere. But if the Sun also shows an inverse response between the two, then the observation is no longer evidence of guilt from emissions. It could be the Sun. It is also important to note that the part of the globe that has warmed the most during global warming (since 1976) is the land surface of the Northern Hemisphere, precisely the region that shows the greatest warming in response to a more active Sun, while the tropics have barely warmed at all.
Years ago, some scientists studied the rates of warming and cooling in the upper layer of the tropical oceans. They found that it follows a cycle similar to that of the Sun.[iii] However, there is a problem: the variation in the Sun’s energy is ten times smaller than it would need to be to cause these changes. Instead of thinking that this supported an indirect effect of the Sun on climate, most scientists ignored the study.
Figure from White et al. 2003. Upper, heat storage anomaly above the 22°C isotherm from 30°S to 30°N expressed in W (stored)/m2. Lower, solar irradiation anomaly.
In the Pacific, trade winds push warm surface water westward, bringing up deep, cold water off the coast of South America. This is called the Neutral phase. In some years, the trade winds become stronger and push the cold water toward the center of the Pacific, accumulating more warm water to the west. This is the La Niña phase. In other years, the trade winds blow more slowly or in the opposite direction, the cold water stops rising in the east, and the water in the central and eastern Pacific warms. This is the El Niño phase. This oscillation affects the weather of much of the planet and we must remember that it has three states, not two.
Since 1990, there have been countless studies on the solar cycle and El Niño. You will not find any reference to them in review articles, books or IPCC reports.
I set out to investigate this relationship using solar activity data and the Oceanic El Niño Index, which shows in blue the periods when the equatorial Pacific is cooler than average and in red when it is warmer. Since solar cycles have slightly different lengths, I divided both data series into segments of a solar cycle and then adjusted the length to be the same for all cycles. This statistical technique is called epoch analysis. In this way, the mean and variance of the data are determined for periods that coincide in their phase of the cycle. This revealed a pattern that indicates an El Niño response to solar activity. I looked at a period when the cycle is gaining activity, which is accompanied by La Niña conditions. I used the Monte Carlo method to determine the probability that this result was random, and the answer was only 0.7%. This means that there is a 99.3% chance that the La Niña conditions at this time in the solar cycle are due to the Sun.
Figure shows Epoch analysis of solar activity and Oceanic El Niño Index. X-axis is the variable length of a full solar cycle. Right curves show the mean and standard deviation of left curves. Red rectangle indicates the part of the data analyzed by Monte Carlo method.
Since the answer is clearer for La Niña, I analyzed the relative frequencies of each phase of the El Niño phenomenon. What is observed is that the Neutral condition years follow the solar cycle in their frequency with a delay of one or two years. Surprisingly, the frequency of La Niña is the opposite of Neutral. The solar activity determines whether it is a La Niña year or a Neutral year. The Sun’s effect on El Niño years is less clear. El Niño seems to have another cause, which could be the amount of heat accumulated in the ocean. The solar pattern is confirmed by a study of El Niño frequencies since 1900, because among the repeating peaks there is an 11-year peak, which is the frequency of the solar cycle.[iv]
Figure shows the relative frequency for Neutral years (orange) and La Niña years (blue) from the official (Domeisen et al. 2019) classification shown in the bottom squares. Frequency was calculated for a 5-year sliding window and Gaussian smoothed.
It is striking that with so much evidence and studies, the vast majority of scientists do not know that the Sun controls the very important El Niño phenomenon. But El Niño is a product of the action of the trade winds over the equatorial Pacific. To control El Niño, the Sun must control the atmospheric circulation.
We have known since 1988 that the Sun affects atmospheric circulation.[v] But like other effects of the Sun on climate, most scientists ignore this knowledge. This effect on the atmosphere may affect hurricanes in a much more significant way than global warming. The graph of the annual number of major hurricanes in the world (inverted) shows that the number of hurricanes tends to increase at or after the solar maximum.[vi]
Figure after Pielke & Maue 2024. Data for global major hurricanes (≥94 knots) from Ryan Maue, is an inverted and 3-year centered average. It displays a decadal periodicity.
How does the Sun manage to affect the atmosphere? In 1959, a scientist discovered that changes in the polar vortex seemed to respond to solar activity.[vii] This is a question that continues to be studied, and we are beginning to understand that much of the effect of solar activity on atmospheric circulation is due to this effect.
In the next graph, solar activity is represented in red. In purple at the bottom is the strength of the polar vortex.[viii] High values indicate a strong vortex and low values indicate a weak vortex. These values tend to show a large change from year to year. In blue you can see the cumulative wind speed that forms the polar vortex.[ix] When the curve goes up, it indicates that most of the time the speed is above average and the vortex is strong. When it goes down, it indicates the opposite.
This figure shows in red the monthly number of sunspots, in blue the cumulative anomaly of zonal wind speed at 54.4°N, 10 hPa (Lu et al. 2008), and in purple the mean vortex geopotential height anomaly at 20 hPa (NCEP, Christiansen 2010).
During Cycle 20 of low solar activity, the vortex wind was slower than normal and most years had a weak vortex. This corresponds to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when many winters were cold. Then came Cycle 21, which was very active. The wind speed increased, and there was only a weak vortex at the beginning and end of the cycle, when solar activity was low. In the late 1970s and 1980s the winters were warmer. Cycle 22 remained very active and the wind continued to be faster than normal, resulting in no weak vortex years. Winters continued to be warm throughout the 1990s. With Cycle 23, solar activity decreased again, leading to a decrease in wind speed. Weak vortex years returned. And also since the late 1990s, cold winters have returned, something that scientists who ignore the Sun’s effect on climate have trouble explaining.
The data I have does not cover solar cycles 24 and 25, but the correlation between low solar activity and cold winters continues, especially in eastern North America and Eurasia. Since the late 1990s, winters have tended to be colder across much of the Northern Hemisphere, while the Arctic has warmed, as the next figure shows.[x] The winter of 2024 was the coldest in Mongolia in decades. 6 million animals died, 10% of their population.[xi]
This figure shows the observed surface temperature trends for the months of January and February during the 1990–2015 period (Kretschmer et al. 2018).
Without understanding the effect of the Sun on the climate, this cannot be understood. None of this has anything to do with atmospheric CO₂. Acknowledging that the Sun controls the temperature of Northern Hemisphere winters implies that the sun has contributed to the observed warming, since much of the warming is due to increasing Northern Hemisphere minimum temperatures.
The Sun’s effects on the atmosphere also have a striking effect on the Earth’s rotation.
Since the middle of the 20th century, we have been able to measure the speed of the Earth’s rotation with great precision. In 1962, a French scientist realized that solar activity modified the rotation speed of the planet.[xii] Since then, this finding has been confirmed by dozens of studies. Climatologists are ignoring this finding.
I have also analyzed the data, and they leave no room for doubt. The Earth’s rotation increases twice a year, when winter arrives in each hemisphere. I chose to analyze the changes that occur between November and January because the change is smaller and more variable, allowing me to see the response better. This graph compares a high solar activity year with a low activity year. When activity is low, the rotation speeds up and each revolution is shortened by half a millisecond.
This figure shows the changes in the length of day in milliseconds for 2014 (red) and 2017 (black). IERS EOP C04 data with smoothing.
My analysis confirms what many researchers have found: the Earth’s rotation changes with solar activity. When solar activity is low, the rotation accelerates more between November and January, and when it is high, it hardly accelerates at all. The effect is disturbed by other phenomena that also affect the rotation of the planet, such as El Niño, but the 11-year cycle is clear. The result obtained in other studies with a different treatment of the data is similar. [xiii]
This figure shows in red solar activity (10.7 cm flux), in black the 3-point smoothed amplitude of the NH winter change in length-of-day, and in purple the result from Barlyaeva et al. 2014.
The effect of the Sun on the rotation has been known for 60 years, and yet no explanation has been given. Its cause must necessarily lie in changes in the angular momentum of the atmosphere. The exchange of angular momentum between the Earth and the atmosphere can be understood in terms of what happens to an ice skater when he turns. As the arms move away from the body, the spin becomes slower, and as they move closer, the spin becomes faster. The problem is that changes in angular momentum large enough to affect the Earth’s rotation cannot be caused by changes as small as 0.1% in the energy deposited on the surface by the Sun.
None of what you have just read is reflected in the IPCC reports, which ignores the large amount of evidence showing that the Sun’s effect on climate is not limited to a small change in energy. And none of this is in the climate models.
To recapitulate, we have seen that the changes caused by the Sun on the surface have inverse dynamic patterns to those of the stratosphere, which is the same fingerprint at CO2-driven warming. We have seen that the Sun causes temperature changes in the ocean far greater than expected, and that it influences ENSO, a major global climate phenomenon. We have seen that the Sun regulates the strength of the polar vortex, which affects the frequency of very cold winters in much of the Northern Hemisphere, and we have seen that it alters the rotation of the planet. None of this can be explained by a 0.1% change in the energy reaching the planet’s surface from solar minimum to solar maximum. There is something else. Something that has been studied since 1987 that can explain these effects. The IPCC knows about it and mentions it in its 5th report, but is unwilling or unable to understand its global significance.
It can be argued that the effects of solar activity on climate that we have analyzed are periodic. Solar activity varies cyclically every 11 years, El Niño gives way to La Niña, the vortex changes its strength every winter, and the rotation of the planet returns to what it was. However, there are two things indicating that there is a much stronger long-term effect, and therefore that solar activity has a cumulative effect on climate that we do not yet understand well. One is that, as we have seen, the winter temperature trends in the Northern Hemisphere change over decades with solar activity, causing a warming in the Arctic and a cooling in North America and Eurasia during the winter since the late 1990s, which has been going on for 25 years now because of the low solar activity that we have had in the 21st century. The other is that, as we saw in the first part, low activity for more than a century in the past was the cause of some of the major climate changes of the Holocene.
I have spent the last 10 years trying to understand how climate changes naturally, without preconceived ideas, by examining a huge amount of information and data. The evidence has led me to an alternative theory of climate change to that of the IPCC. It is not based on changes in solar activity, but, to my surprise, it explains them. There is much more to climate than the Sun, but the conclusion is that the 20th century solar maximum has been a major contributor to recent warming. And it is not lost on me that this means that controlling our emissions, which has become the main goal of the UN and the Western world, may not have much effect on future climate.
This article can also be watched in a 16-minute video with English and French subtitles.
References
[i] Masson-Delmotte, V., M. et al., 2013. Information from Paleoclimate Archives. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC. FAQ 5.1, Fig. 1 pg. 393.
[ii] Lean, J.L., 2017. Sun-climate connections. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science.
[iii] White, W.B., Dettinger, M.D. & Cayan, D.R., 2003. Sources of global warming of the upper ocean on decadal period scales. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 108(C8).
[iv] Deser, C., et al., 2010. Sea surface temperature variability: Patterns and mechanisms. Annual review of marine science, 2, pp.115-143.
[v] Labitzke, K. & Van Loon, H., 1988. Associations between the 11-year solar cycle, the QBO and the atmosphere. Part I: the troposphere and stratosphere in the northern hemisphere in winter. Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics, 50(3), pp.197-206.
[vi] Pielke Jr., R., & Maue, R. 2024. Global Tropical Cyclones.
[vii] Palmer, C.E., 1959. The stratospheric polar vortex in winter. Journal of Geophysical Research, 64(7), pp.749-764.
[viii] Christiansen, B., 2010. Stratospheric bimodality: Can the equatorial QBO explain the regime behavior of the NH winter vortex? Journal of climate, 23(14), pp.3953-3966.
[ix] Lu, H., et al., 2008. Decadal‐scale changes in the effect of the QBO on the northern stratospheric polar vortex. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 113(D10).
[x] Kretschmer, M., et al., 2018. More-persistent weak stratospheric polar vortex states linked to cold extremes. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 99(1), pp.49-60.
[xi] The New York Times, 2024. A Harsh Mongolian Winter Leaves Millions of Livestock Dead.
[xii] Danjon, A, 1962. La rotation de la Terre et le Soleil calme. Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Seances de l’Academie des Sciences, 254(17), p.3058.
[xiii] Barlyaeva, T., Bard, E. & Abarca-del-Rio, R., 2014. Rotation of the Earth, solar activity and cosmic ray intensity. Annales Geophysicae Vol. 32, No. 7, pp. 761-771.
via Watts Up With That?
May 17, 2024 at 08:02PM
By Viv Forbes — May 17, 2024
“Pumping gases underground is only sensible if it brings real benefits such as using waste gases to increase oil recovery from declining oil fields – frack the strata, pump in CO2, and force out oil/gas.”
Carbon-capture-and-underground-storage “(CCUS)” tops the list of silly schemes “to reduce man-made global warming.” The idea is to capture exhaust gases from power stations or cement plants, separate the CO2 from the other gases, compress it, pump it to the chosen burial site and force it underground into permeable rock formations. Then hope it never escapes.
An Australian mining company who should know better is hoping to appease green critics by proposing to bury the gas of life, CO2, deep in the sedimentary rocks of Australia’s Great Artesian Basin.
They have chosen the Precipice Sandstone for their carbon cemetery. However, the chances of keeping CO2 gas confined in this porous sandstone are remote. This formation has a very large area of outcrop to the surface and gas will escape somewhere, so why bother forcing it into a jail with no roof?
Glencore shareholders should rise in anger at this wasteful and futile pagan sacrifice to the global warming gods. It will join fiascos like Snowy 2, pink bats and SunCable (a dream to take solar energy generated in NT via overhead and undersea cable for over 5000 km across ocean deeps and volcanic belts to Singapore).
Engineers with buckets of easy money may base a whole career on Carbon Capture and Underground Storage. But only stupid green zealots would support the sacrifice of billions of investment dollars and scads of energy to bury this harmless, invisible, life-supporting gas in the hope of appeasing the high priests of global warming.
The quantities of gases that CCUS would need to handle are enormous, and the capital and operating costs will be horrendous. It is a dreadful waste of energy and resources, consuming about twenty percent of power delivered from an otherwise efficient coal-fired power station.
For every tonne of coal burnt in a power station, about 11 tonnes of gases are exhausted – 7.5 tonnes of nitrogen from the air used to burn the coal, plus 2.5 tonnes of CO2 and one tonne of water vapour from the coal combustion process.
Normally these beneficial atmospheric gases are released to the atmosphere after filters take out any nasties like soot and noxious fumes.
However, CCUS also requires energy to produce and fabricate steel and erect gas storages, pumps and pipelines and to drill disposal wells. This will chew up more coal resources and produce yet more carbon dioxide, for zero benefit.
But the real problems are at the burial site – how to create a secure space to hold the CO2 gas. There is no vacuum occurring naturally anywhere on earth – every bit of space on Earth is occupied by something – solids, liquids or gases. Underground disposal of CO2 requires it to be pumped AGAINST the pressure of whatever fills the pore space of the rock formation now – either natural gases or liquids. These pressures can be substantial, especially after more gas is pumped in.
The natural gases in sedimentary rock formations are commonly air, CO2, CH4 (methane) or rarely, H2S (rotten egg gas). The liquids are commonly salty water, sometimes fresh water or very rarely, liquid hydrocarbons.
Pumping out air is costly; pumping out natural CO2 to make room for man-made CO2 is pointless; and releasing rotten egg gas or salty water on the surface would create a real problem, unlike the imaginary threat from CO2.
In some cases, CCUS may require the removal of fresh water to make space for CO2. Producing fresh water on the surface would be seen as a boon by most locals. Pumping out salt water to make space to bury CO2 would create more problems than it could solve.
Naturally, some carbon dioxide buried under pressure will dissolve in groundwater and aerate it, so that the next water driller in the area could get a real bonus – bubbling Perrier Water on tap, worth more than oil.
Then there is the dangerous risk of a surface outburst or leakage from a pressurised underground reservoir of CO2. The atmosphere contains 0.04% CO2 which is beneficial for all life. But the gas in a CCUS reservoir would contain +90% of this heavier-than-air gas – a lethal, suffocating concentration for nearby animal life if it escaped in a gas outburst.
Pumping gases underground is only sensible if it brings real benefits such as using waste gases to increase oil recovery from declining oil fields – frack the strata, pump in CO2, and force out oil/gas. To find a place where you could drive out natural hydro-carbons in order to make space to bury CO2 would be like winning the Lottery – a profitable but unlikely event.
Normally however, CCUS will be futile as the oceans will largely undo whatever man tries to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. Oceans contain vastly more CO2 than the thin puny atmosphere, and oceans maintain equilibrium between CO2 in the atmosphere and CO2 dissolved in the oceans. If man releases CO2 into the atmosphere, the oceans will quickly absorb much of it. And if by some fluke man reduced the CO2 in the atmosphere, CO2 would bubble out of the oceans to replace much of it. Or just one decent volcanic explosion could negate the whole CCUS exercise.
Increased CO2 in the atmosphere encourages all plants to grow better and use more CO2. Unfortunately natural processes are continually sequestering huge tonnages of CO2 into extensive deposits of shale, coal, limestone, dolomite and magnesite – this process has driven atmospheric CO2 to dangerously low concentrations. Burning hydrocarbons and making cement returns a tiny bit of this plant food from the lithosphere to the biosphere.
Regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide is best left to the oceans and plants – they have been doing it successfully for millennia.
The only certain outcome from CCUS is more expensive electricity and a waste of energy resources to do all the separation, compressing and pumping. Unscrupulous coal industry leaders love the idea of selling more coal to produce the same amount of electricity, and electricity generators would welcome an increased demand for power. And green zealots in USA plan to force all coal and gas plants to bury all CO2 plant food that they generate. Consumers and taxpayers are the suckers.
Naturally the Greens love the idea of making coal and gas-fired electricity more expensive. They conveniently ignore the fact that CCUS is anti-life – it steals plant food from the biosphere.
Global Warming has never been a threat to life on Earth – Ice is the killer. Glencore directors supporting this CCUS stupidity should be condemned for destructive ignorance.
————-
Geologist Viv Forbes is the founder of the Carbon Sense Coalition.
via Watts Up With That?
May 17, 2024 at 04:02PM
By Jo Nova
Things are so bad in the world of electric cars that fields of the cars-of-the-future are appearing at ports in the EU. China has shipped 1.3 million EV’s there in the last quarter but they are piling up in car parks unsold. Countries within the EU are throwing money at customers to get them to buy EV’s, and companies are discounting too, but still it isn’t enough. EV sales fell by 11% across the EU and by 29% in Germany.
Across the Atlantic, something is going wrong in the USA too. The world’s top brand is renting space in shopping centres and airports in America to store the unsold cars.
Car dealers are warning they might not be able to sell many petrol cars, even when buyers walk in to buy them, because they can’t find enough EV buyers so they can meet the mandated target ratio. We might be at the start of a buyer freeze…
There are just extraordinary shots of cars lined up in EU ports:
By John Varga, The Express UK
Major EU ports are almost full to capacity with Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) that no one wants to buy. A slump in sales across Europe has caused parking lots at the Belgian ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge to fill up with the Chinese imports.
A spokesman for the Port of Antwerp-Bruges, the second largest in Europe, said: “This is what is happening in all European ports that handle large numbers of cars.”
And it’s a similar story in the US:
Mike Shedlock, ZeroHedge
Please consider Tesla’s Storing Unsold Inventory In An Abandoned Mall Parking Lot
Parking lots full of Tesla vehicles are becoming impossible to ignore as the electric automaker seemingly can’t sell enough cars and trucks to match its rate of production. According to its own figures, the electric automaker produced 46,561 more vehicles than it delivered to customers during the first quarter of 2024. Where are all these cars going? Parking lots at its factories, malls and airports.
By Matt Oliver, The Telegraph
Car salesmen face a shortage of petrol vehicles under Rishi Sunak’s net zero crackdown, one of Britain’s biggest dealership chains has warned.
Vertu Motors said sales of electric cars had “stalled” in the UK, raising the risk that manufacturers will miss sales targets mandated by law. Under the zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate, 22pc of carmakers’ sales must be electric this year with the target rising annually until it reaches 80pc in 2030.
But with manufacturers risking fines of £15,000 per car for breaching the rules, Vertu warned that many might simply throttle supplies of petrol and diesel cars to artificially boost their compliance.
With uncanny timing the Australian government has adopted the same rigged ratio of EV sales that isn’t working in the UK or the US, and they’ve done it the same week car magazines here are just starting to ask “Is the honeymoon over for electric vehicles in Australia?”
Australia is years behind the EV bubbles of Europe and America because we are the last rich nation on Earth that anyone would want to buy an EV in. We’re sparsely populated and 5,000 kilometers wide. Half the continent doesn’t have high voltage line within 100 kilometers of the road let alone a fast charger.
As luck would have it, sales for EVs in Australia were barely starting to take off, but EV sales declined in April for the first time since EV’s became “a thing”. It’s only a 5% slip, but it’s the trend, the trend…
h/t to Kim, CO2 Lover
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via JoNova
May 17, 2024 at 03:46PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 