Hmmm. Another 'Sun is Behaving Oddly' Story

Talk about "whistling past the graveyard."

One by one, the pillars of mainstream media are being forced to admit the sun's behavior is odd and may have an effect on the forecast global warming. But, they quickly add, it is no big deal. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal became the latest:

Something is up with the sun.

Scientists say that solar activity is stranger than in a century or more, with the sun producing barely half the number of sunspots as expected and its magnetic poles oddly out of sync...

Based on historical records, astronomers say the sun this fall ought to be nearing the explosive climax of its approximate 11-year cycle of activity—the so-called solar maximum. But this peak is "a total punk," said Jonathan Cirtain, who works at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as project scientist for the Japanese satellite Hinode, which maps solar magnetic fields.

"I would say it is the weakest in 200 years," said David Hathaway, head of the solar physics group at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Researchers are puzzled. They can't tell if the lull is temporary or the onset of a decades-long decline, which might ease global warming a bit by altering the sun's brightness or the wavelengths of its light.

"There is no scientist alive who has seen a solar cycle as weak as this one," said Andrés Munoz-Jaramillo, who studies the solar-magnetic cycle at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. 

Of course, the story plays down the effects on global warming:

If so, the decline in magnetic activity could ease global warming, the scientists said. But such a subtle change in the sun—lowering its luminosity by about 0.1%—wouldn't be enough to outweigh the build-up of greenhouse gases and soot that most researchers consider the main cause of rising world temperatures over the past century or so.

"It may give us a brief respite from global warming," said Dr. Hathaway. "But it is not going to stop it."

Let's examine Dr. Hathaway's contention that the sun cannot stop global warming.

Here is a graph of world temperatures from their peak in the "Medieval Warm Period" (called "optimum" here, humanity usually does better in a warm climate) about 1100 to 1200. The Maunder and Sporer sunspot minima occurred and temperatures dropped roughly 1.5°C to create the Little Ice Age.

How does that 1.5° drop compare with modern temperatures?

Here is the Hadley Center's (the same data as used by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) plot of temperatures since 1850. On the graph, temperatures hovered around -0.35°C at the end of the Little Ice Age. As temperatures recovered in the 20th Century, they rose to about -0.10° in 1958 (a date where several climate scientists say global warming due to greenhouse gasses began).

From 1958 to 2000, temperatures peaked around +0.50, a rise of 0.6 degrees due to global warming and about 0.95 since the Little Ice Age. Since their peak in 1998-2000, temperatures dropped about a tenth of a degree to +0.40.

What if temperatures dropped 1.5 degrees from their current value of +0.40°? It would be off the chart!  Humanity would be in desperate trouble due to shorter growing seasons and advancing glaciers. 

But, there is nothing to worry about, right? Dr. Hathaway says,

"It may give us a brief respite from global warming," said Dr. Hathaway. "But it is not going to stop it."

Not so fast. It appears global warming has already "stopped," perhaps due in part or in whole due to the decreasing solar output (see temperature graph).

How accurate are Dr. Hathaway's predictions? That we can easily determine. Below is his sunspot prediction made in 2006. The dotted lines (click to enlarge) show the range between which the actual values should fall. The solid line is the most likely value.

Click to Enlarge

The actual value is the light blue line; compare to the solid white line which was the forecast. The actual sunspot values are less than half of what Dr. Hathaway forecast and the maximum, such that it was, occurred two years after he (actually a committee he chairs) forecast. This forecast of sunspot activity isn't even close! If science can't forecast the sunspots, how can we forecast their effects on the atmosphere?

The fact is, we don't know what future sunspot values will be. If we don't know that, how can Dr. Hathaway, or anyone else, be confident there will be only a minor decrease in temperatures if the low solar output continues?!

I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but we desperately need to be focusing research on this critical area of solar forecasting and its relation to climate, and greatly de-emphasize research into global warming's effect on "giant squid" (three studies already!) and other such nonsense.