Solar activity at a ten-year high

Source

This is the peak of the solar cycle, so this is not at all unexpected. Still, given how anemic cycle 24 has been to date, the last few months of regression towards the mean have been striking.

The New Normal -- Literally

We have arrived at an interesting place. ENSO and the solar cycle are the two major short-term influences on global temperatures (absent a major volcanic eruption.) They are now both as neutral as neutral can be:

Zero point zero. ENSO is balancing on the head of a pin. Now the solar cycle:

Looking at the smoothed values, the peak of the last solar cycle hit about 190, and the trough was at about 70. The average is (190 + 70)/2 = 130. And where is the blue line now? Right about 130.

Temperatures are as normal as they are gonna get. Shall we take a peek out into the world and see how the new normal is treating it?

Greenland still looks bizarre:

It's no longer melting over 96% of its surface . . . that's a comfort. But it's hard to look at these albedo numbers and think that all is well. This is some disturbing shit. A difference of 5% in the albedo compared to the average? That's a lot of joules . . . right where we don't want them.

Looking northwards, Dr. Jennifer Francis has a great presentation on how the changes in the Arctic are changing our weather. Key slide here:

And speaking of extremes, the contineintal US had its hottest July ever, and more importantly, drought and heat in the US have sent food prices skyward:

In July, food prices jumped 6%, after three months of declines, according to the United Nations' monthly Food Price Index released Thursday. The main drivers behind the increase? Grain prices. And more specifically, corn prices, which have hit record highs in recent weeks.

According to the U.N. report, global corn prices surged nearly 23% in July, exacerbated by "the severe deterioration of maize crop prospects in the United States, following drought conditions and excessive heat during critical stages of the crop development."

Since we so recently learned that big thunderstorms can chew up the ozone layer over North America, perhaps we should check on thunderstorms in our new world:

 Note that the graph ends in 2011. The crazy thunderstorms that have wracked the Midwest and Northeast over the last two months don't show up yet.

Torn to pieces by an Arctic cyclone, the thin sea ice up north is rapidly giving up the ghost.

Both the cyclone, and the thinness of the ice that got walloped, were fueled by Arctic warming and accelerate it further.

In the upper left you can see a huge chunk of the ice sheet break off and go its own way. This is not, to say the least, a common occurrence, and the ice sages at Neven's seem to be in agreement that this has never been seen before in thirty years of satellite observations.

Both solar activity and the ENSO index are still rising. Be interesting what the world looks like in an extra-warm year, won't it?

El Nino is coming

Probably:

Red means hot

Solar cycle 24, after a brief dip, is also continuing its gradual escalation:

Obviously these are short-term oscillations that have little or nothing to do with the long-term climate picture. Where they may be important, however, is in the political calculus. The US and Europe have been mired in deep recessions, and the trouble is far from over:

Old chart, but the picture has changed little recently

The American public has allowed climate change to be shunted out of their consciousness by other priorities, especially the recession. That's a shame. What we most need to pull us out of the doldrums is a stiff jolt of Keynesian stimulus, the kind of stimulus that could be achieved by, say:

* Overhauling the power grid with low-loss high-voltage direct current lines (HVDC), cutting transmission losses and creating the infrastructure for a true national market in energy.

* Modernizing our commercial rail network with dual tracks and electrified rail, decreasing our reliance on our diesel-fueled truck fleet to move goods.

* Weatherizing millions of homes and commercial buildings.

 . . . and so on. We could attack the jobs problem and the climate change problem simultaneously -- but at the moment, that is not the political conversation we are having.

My point, with this, is that there are opportunities ahead. This recession will give way to an expansion as they generally do. Sometime in the next few years, maybe as soon as the fall, we will see for the first time what we get from the combination of El Nino conditions, the upper half of the solar cycle, and CO2 concentrations flirting with 400ppm. And that is going to be a new conversation, politically speaking.

The American public has lost interest in climate change -- but this too shall pass. Unlike, say, famine in Africa, or conflict in the Middle East, climate change is going to become more and more intrusive until it is impossible for the public to ignore. For those of us already focused on the need for strong action on greenhouse gases emissions, now is the time to be sharpening a common message and a clear, simple plan.

La Nina whiplash fading fast

The mini-me La Nina has taken a dramatic swing for the warmer. This was the picture at the end of January:

You can see the brief flirtation with ENSO neutrality before the Pacific's evident determination to resume La Nina bigger and badder and colder than before. What a difference three weeks makes:

The weather-masters now think we could enter the ENSO neutral zone as soon as March. With solar activity still headed upwards, we could be in for a hot summer.

ENSO and public concern over climate change

Hypothesis: Americans are not very bright.

Hence we predict their level of concern about global warming will vary quite a bit with the short-term flucuations in warming, despite the strong, persistent long-term trend.

The most important driver of temperature variability, in the short term, in ENSO (El Ninos and La Ninas):

A similar but less powerful short-term influence is the phase of the solar cycle:

So giving people a year or two to process news stories about temperature records, extreme weather, ice cover losses and the like, we might expect to see the levels of concern rising in 1999-2000 after the big El Nino, with a rise starting in 2004-2005 related to the second large recent El Nino, with concern falling in 2009-2010, related to a La Nina event.

The phase of the solar cycle would make the peak in concern from 1998-2002 slightly higher, while the lower solar activity after that, as well as the lack of a similarly intense El Nino event, could be expected to make the peaks of concern lower, and the troughs deeper. In late 2011 we saw the next solar cycle finally start to wake up, but this will not have had a big impact yet.

So how did we do? Here's the gallup polling on concern for global warming:

Not bad. We don't see the brief 2009 El Nino in the data, but it may be too early (the polling stops in May 2011), or it may be the rapid return to La Nina conditions blunted the effect.

Of course, this is all fun and games with graphs, and if we were attaching any seriousness to it it would come dangerously close to mathdurbation. It's just as easy to come up with a different correlation, for example:

Hypothesis: Americans care about global warming only when they are not much more worried about the economy:

 When people felt relatively better, in 2008, concern about global warming was high. When economic worry spiked in 2009, concern about global warming fell. The slight increase in economic confidence recently may show up in 2012's climate polling, especially if the economy continues its still painful slow but accelerating recovery.

Should we expect these short-term reactions to subside as the long-term warming continues to push the earth's climate further out of the Holocene range? Unfortunately, we cannot assume that. Gradual changes and shifts over time are difficult to perceive. This is often described via the (apocryphal) anecdote of the frog placed in lukewarm water that is slowly boiled alive. People rapidly normalize their present experiences, unless there is a readily identifiable shift. The gradual erosion of my paycheck by inflation is not as striking as being swindled out of some portion of my savings, even if they cost me the same amount of money. That is one reason we as a society are prepared to invest huge amounts in speculative measures to reduce tiny risks (dying in a terrorist attack, for example) but not, as yet, to invest significant amounts of money, time, or even attention to the overwhelming likelihood of the less vividly imagined but far more globally destructive process of climate change.

Solar forcing headed up, La Nina hanging in

Just as we would expect at this point in the cycle:

The last month to put up numbers like November was eight years ago.

We continue to languish in what will apparently end up being a double-dip La Nina:

But the odds continue to favor at least one good El Nino coinciding with the upper half of the solar cycle, in the next four years or so. That will be a hot year.

Solar activity hits seven-year high

Solar cycle 24 continues to ramp up, as expected. When La Nina falters -- it's now expected to persist through the middle of 2012 -- temperature records will fall. Until then, enjoy another data set following the trajectory predicted by scientists based on a model.

Hello Sunshine, ctd

Highest solar activity in seven years. Which is to be expected. If you look at the smoothed monthly values, we are tracking the predicted values very well.

We have about three more years of rising solar activity this cycle. It's a modest influence, maybe 0.1C, but if we flip back into El Nino during that time, you'll see some impressive warmth. The fact that GISTEMP recorded the fourth warmest August in the record despite the sun being mid-cycle and the Pacific dipping back into La Nina, is a good indication of the underlying trend.

"My Eye is upon you -- do no wrong!"