Here is an interesting article providing more evidence of a direct link between solar activity and climate change.
Peter
source: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=15758
Evidence for sun-climate reported by UMaine scientists
PRESS RELEASE Date Released: Wednesday, December 22, 2004Source: University of Maine
A team led by University of Maine scientists has reported finding a potential link between changes in solar activity and the Earth's climate. In a paper due to be published in an upcoming volume of the Annals of Glaciology, Paul Mayewski, director of UMaine's Climate Change Institute, and 11 colleagues from China, Australia and UMaine describe evidence from ice cores pointing to an association between the waxing and waning of zonal wind strength around Antarctica and a chemical signal of changes in the sun's output.
At the heart of the paper, Solar Forcing of the Polar Atmosphere, are calcium, nitrate and sodium data from ice cores collected in four Antarctic locations and comparisons of those data to South Pole ice core isotope data for beryllium-10, an indicator of solar activity. The authors also point to data from Greenland and the Canadian Yukon that suggest similar relationships between solar activity and the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere. They focus on years since 1400 when the Earth entered a roughly 500-year period known as the Little Ice Age.
The researchers' goal is to understand what drives the Earth's climate system without taking increases in greenhouse gases into account, says Mayewski. "There are good reasons to be concerned about greenhouse gases, but we should be looking at the climate system with our eyes open," he adds. Understanding how the system operates in the absence of human impacts is important for responding to climate changes that might occur in the future.
Mayewski founded the International Transantarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) and is the co-author of The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change, published in 2002 with Frank White. The United States' ITASE office is located at UMaine.
Antarctic locations used in the paper include: Law Dome, a 4,576-foot high ice mound located about 68 miles from the coast facing the Indian Ocean and the site of an Australian research station; Siple Dome, a 2,000-foot high ice covered mound located between two ice streams that flow out of the Transantarctic Mountains into the Ross ice shelf, and the site of a U.S. research station; and two ITASE field sites west of Siple Dome where ice cores were collected during field surveys in 2000 and 2001.
The authors are Mayewski, Kirk A. Maasch, Eric Meyerson, Sharon Sneed, Susan Kaspari, Daniel Dixon, and Erich Osterberg, all from UMaine; Yping Yan of the China Meterological Association; Shichang Kang of UMaine and the Chinese Academy of Sciences; and Vin Morgan, Tas van Ommen and Mark Curran of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC in Tasmania.
Since at least the 1840s when sunspot cycles were discovered, scientists have proposed that solar variability could affect the climate, but direct evidence of that relationship and understanding of a mechanism have been lacking.
The ice core data show, the authors write, that when solar radiation increases, more calcium is deposited at Siple Dome and at one of the ITASE field sites. The additional calcium may reflect an increase in wind strength in mid-latitude regions around Antarctica, they add, especially over the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Calcium in West Antarctic ice cores is thought to derive mainly from dust in Australia, Africa and South America and from sea salt in the southern ocean.
That finding, they note, is consistent with other research suggesting that the sun may affect the strength of those mid-latitude winds through changes in stratospheric ozone over Antarctica.
The authors also refer to sodium data from Siple Dome ice cores that have been reported by Karl Kreutz, director of UMaine's stable isotope laboratory. Changes in sodium appear to be associated with air pressure changes over the South Pacific.
Ice core data from Law Dome focus on changes in nitrate and may reflect changing wind patterns over Antarctica. The wind currents that bring nitrate to the continent, however, are less well known than those that carry sodium and calcium.
Researchers in the UMaine Climate Change Institute (http://www.climatechange.umaine.edu/) have focused on the relationship between solar variability and climate, particularly the use of isotopes in tree rings and ice cores to provide an indication of the sun's strength. The ice core data reported in the paper demonstrates a direct atmospheric consequence associated with changing solar radiation.
Showing posts with label solar variation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label solar variation. Show all posts
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
The Evidence of Earth's Unstoppable 1,500 Year Climate Cycle---The Ice Cores
Here is one line of evidence demonstrating the Earth's historic cyclical climate changes. This is observable, quantifiable, reproducible data, not merely a computer model. Again, these observations, from multiple, highly reputable sources, are difficult to deny. The sun appears to be the overwhelming control of the Earth's continual climate changes. The amount of carbon dioxide mankind adds to the atmosphere is obviously not a factor.
Peter
from: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st279/st279b.html
The Physical Evidence of Earth's Unstoppable 1,500-Year Climate Cycle
The Ice Cores
In the 1980s scientists got the first unequivocal evidence of a continuing, moderate natural climate cycle.The 1,500-year climate cycle emerged almost full-blown from Greenland in 1983.
Denmark’s Willi Dansgaard and Switzerland’s Hans Oeschger were among the first people in the world to see two mile-long ice cores that brought up 250,000 years of the Earth’s frozen, layered climate history. Over the previous dozen years, the two researchers had pioneered ways to pry information from the ice cores. They had learned, among other things, that the ratio of oxygen-18 isotopes to oxygen-16 isotopes in ice could reveal the air temperature at the time when the snowflakes that made the ice fell to earth. The correspondence of the change in the isotope ratios to the recent Medieval Warming Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) is shown in Figure II.3
Dansgaard and Oeschger expected to see the big 90,000-year Ice Ages in the cores, and they did. But they were startled to find, superimposed on the big Ice Age swings, a smaller, moderate and more persistent temperature cycle. They estimated the average cycle length at 2,550 years. They dismissed volcanoes as a causal factor because there’s no such cycle in volcanic activity. The timing of the cycles seemed to match closely with the known history of recent glacier advances and retreats in northern Europe.
The report that Dansgaard and Oeschger wrote in 1984, “North Atlantic Climatic Oscillations Revealed by Deep Greenland Ice Cores,” was, in retrospect, almost eerie in its accuracy, its completeness and its logical linking of the climate cycles to the sun.4 The only major correction imposed by subsequent research is that the cycles were more frequent than they thought. The average length of the cycles has now been shortened by almost half — from their original estimate of 2,550 years to 1,500 years (plus or minus 500 years).
"Ice cores from Antarctica show the same climate cycle."
Dansgaard and Oeschger were correct when they told us that the climate shifts were moderate, rising and falling over a range of about 4° C in northern Greenland, with very little temperature change at the equator — and only half a degree when averaged over the northern hemisphere.
The cycles were confirmed by 1) their appearance in two different ice cores drilled more than 1,000 miles apart; 2) their correlation with known glacier advances and retreats in northern Europe; and 3) independent data in a seabed sediment core from the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland.5
They noted that the cycle shifts were abrupt, sometimes gaining half of their eventual temperature change in a decade or so. That suggested an external forcing, perhaps amplified and transmitted globally by the ocean currents and winds. (In the mid-19th century, the Upper Fremont Glacier in Wyoming went from Little Ice Age to Modern Warming in about 10 years.6 That implies a climate driver from outside our planet, almost certainly involving the sun.)
However, Dansgaard and Oeschger noted, “Since the solar radiation is the only important input of energy to the climatic system, it is most obvious to seek an explanation in solar processes. Unfortunately we know much less about the solar radiation output than about the emission of solar particulate matter in the past.”
The two scientists did know, however, that both carbon-14 and beryllium-10 isotopes vary inversely with the strength of the solar activator. The isotopes of both elements in their Greenland ice cores showed historic temperature lows during what solar scientists term the Maunder sunspot minimum (1645–1715) — the absolute coldest point of the Little Ice Age and a period when sunspots virtually disappeared.
"Climate cycles coincide with sunspots and variations in solar energy output."
Today, we can measure variations in the sun’s irradiance from satellites out beyond the obscuring atmosphere of our own planet. The solar constant isn’t — constant, that is. We also know that when the sun is less active, its solar wind weakens and provides less shielding for the Earth from the cosmic rays that bounce around space. With a weaker sun, more of the cosmic rays hit the Earth, creating more charged particles in the atmosphere, which then become low, wet clouds reflecting more heat back into space. A less active sun thus means a cooler Earth.7
The importance of the 1,500-year cycles found in the Greenland ice cores increased dramatically four years later when they were also found at the other end of the world — in an ice core from the Antarctic’s Vostok Glacier. The Vostok ice core went back 400,000 years, and showed the 1,500-year cycle through its whole length.8
The scientific world had known about the sunspot connection to Earth’s climate for some 400 years. British astronomer William Herschel claimed in 1801 that he could forecast wheat prices by sunspot numbers, because wheat crops were often poor when sunspots (and thus solar activity) were low. Not only did the Maunder minimum (1645-1715) coincide with the coldest period of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer minimum (1450–1543) aligned with the second-coldest phase of that period.
In 1991, Eigel Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen noted that the correlation between solar activity and Earth temperatures is even stronger if we use the length of the solar cycle to represent the sun’s variations instead of the number of sunspots.9 (The solar cycles average about 11 years in length, but actually vary between eight and 14 years.) Their paper in Science concluded that the solar connection explained 75 to 85 percent of recent climate variation.
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Peter
from: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st279/st279b.html
The Physical Evidence of Earth's Unstoppable 1,500-Year Climate Cycle
The Ice Cores
In the 1980s scientists got the first unequivocal evidence of a continuing, moderate natural climate cycle.The 1,500-year climate cycle emerged almost full-blown from Greenland in 1983.
Denmark’s Willi Dansgaard and Switzerland’s Hans Oeschger were among the first people in the world to see two mile-long ice cores that brought up 250,000 years of the Earth’s frozen, layered climate history. Over the previous dozen years, the two researchers had pioneered ways to pry information from the ice cores. They had learned, among other things, that the ratio of oxygen-18 isotopes to oxygen-16 isotopes in ice could reveal the air temperature at the time when the snowflakes that made the ice fell to earth. The correspondence of the change in the isotope ratios to the recent Medieval Warming Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) is shown in Figure II.3
Dansgaard and Oeschger expected to see the big 90,000-year Ice Ages in the cores, and they did. But they were startled to find, superimposed on the big Ice Age swings, a smaller, moderate and more persistent temperature cycle. They estimated the average cycle length at 2,550 years. They dismissed volcanoes as a causal factor because there’s no such cycle in volcanic activity. The timing of the cycles seemed to match closely with the known history of recent glacier advances and retreats in northern Europe.
The report that Dansgaard and Oeschger wrote in 1984, “North Atlantic Climatic Oscillations Revealed by Deep Greenland Ice Cores,” was, in retrospect, almost eerie in its accuracy, its completeness and its logical linking of the climate cycles to the sun.4 The only major correction imposed by subsequent research is that the cycles were more frequent than they thought. The average length of the cycles has now been shortened by almost half — from their original estimate of 2,550 years to 1,500 years (plus or minus 500 years).
"Ice cores from Antarctica show the same climate cycle."
Dansgaard and Oeschger were correct when they told us that the climate shifts were moderate, rising and falling over a range of about 4° C in northern Greenland, with very little temperature change at the equator — and only half a degree when averaged over the northern hemisphere.
The cycles were confirmed by 1) their appearance in two different ice cores drilled more than 1,000 miles apart; 2) their correlation with known glacier advances and retreats in northern Europe; and 3) independent data in a seabed sediment core from the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland.5
They noted that the cycle shifts were abrupt, sometimes gaining half of their eventual temperature change in a decade or so. That suggested an external forcing, perhaps amplified and transmitted globally by the ocean currents and winds. (In the mid-19th century, the Upper Fremont Glacier in Wyoming went from Little Ice Age to Modern Warming in about 10 years.6 That implies a climate driver from outside our planet, almost certainly involving the sun.)
However, Dansgaard and Oeschger noted, “Since the solar radiation is the only important input of energy to the climatic system, it is most obvious to seek an explanation in solar processes. Unfortunately we know much less about the solar radiation output than about the emission of solar particulate matter in the past.”
The two scientists did know, however, that both carbon-14 and beryllium-10 isotopes vary inversely with the strength of the solar activator. The isotopes of both elements in their Greenland ice cores showed historic temperature lows during what solar scientists term the Maunder sunspot minimum (1645–1715) — the absolute coldest point of the Little Ice Age and a period when sunspots virtually disappeared.
"Climate cycles coincide with sunspots and variations in solar energy output."
Today, we can measure variations in the sun’s irradiance from satellites out beyond the obscuring atmosphere of our own planet. The solar constant isn’t — constant, that is. We also know that when the sun is less active, its solar wind weakens and provides less shielding for the Earth from the cosmic rays that bounce around space. With a weaker sun, more of the cosmic rays hit the Earth, creating more charged particles in the atmosphere, which then become low, wet clouds reflecting more heat back into space. A less active sun thus means a cooler Earth.7
The importance of the 1,500-year cycles found in the Greenland ice cores increased dramatically four years later when they were also found at the other end of the world — in an ice core from the Antarctic’s Vostok Glacier. The Vostok ice core went back 400,000 years, and showed the 1,500-year cycle through its whole length.8
The scientific world had known about the sunspot connection to Earth’s climate for some 400 years. British astronomer William Herschel claimed in 1801 that he could forecast wheat prices by sunspot numbers, because wheat crops were often poor when sunspots (and thus solar activity) were low. Not only did the Maunder minimum (1645-1715) coincide with the coldest period of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer minimum (1450–1543) aligned with the second-coldest phase of that period.
In 1991, Eigel Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen noted that the correlation between solar activity and Earth temperatures is even stronger if we use the length of the solar cycle to represent the sun’s variations instead of the number of sunspots.9 (The solar cycles average about 11 years in length, but actually vary between eight and 14 years.) Their paper in Science concluded that the solar connection explained 75 to 85 percent of recent climate variation.
« Previous Study Home Next »
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