Arguments
Do solar cycles cause global warming?
What the science says...
Climate Myth...
Solar cycles cause global warming
A new peer-reviewed study on Surface Warming and the Solar Cycle found that times of high solar activity are on average 0.2°C warmer than times of low solar activity, and that there is a polar amplification of the warming. This result is the first to document a statistically significant globally coherent temperature response to the solar cycle, the authors note (source: Mark Morano).
The study is Surface warming by the solar cycle as revealed by the composite mean difference projection by Charles D. Camp and Ka Kit Tung. They find a global warming signal of 0.18°C attributable to the 11-year solar cycle. Eg - from solar minimum to solar maximum, global temperatures increase 0.18°C due to an increase in Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). To find the solar signal, they detrended the temperature data by removing the global warming trend. They found the detrended temperature correlated well with the solar cycle.
Figure 1: Detrended temperature (solid) compared to TSI (dotted) (Camp 2007)
However, a fair degree of climate variability contaminated the signal. Volcanic eruptions in 1982 and 1991 coincided with solar maximums. Similarly, the El Nino peak of 1998 occured during low solar activity. Tung and Camp filtered out the noise using various statistical techniques and found an even higher correlation with the solar cycle.
They concluded that from solar minimum to maximum (eg - from 1996 to 2001), the forcing from the sun increases global temperatures by 0.18°C. Conversely, from solar maximum to minimum (eg - from 2001 to 2007), the reduced forcing from the sun cools global temperatures by 0.18°C. This 11 year cycle is superimposed over the long term global warming trend.
Climate Sensitivity
Camp and Tung explore the ramifications further in a follow-up paper Solar-Cycle Warming at the Earth’s Surface and an Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity. Independently of models, they calculate a climate sensitivity between 2.3 to 4.1°C. Eg - if CO2 levels are doubled, global temperatures will increase around 3.2°C. This confirms the IPCC estimate of climate sensitivity. In Tung's own words, "The finding adds to the evidence that mainstream climate models are right about the likely extent of future human-generated warming. It also effectively rules out some lower estimates in those models."
The other significant finding is that solar forcing will add another 0.18°C warming on top of greenhouse warming between 2007 (we're currently at solar minimum) to the solar maximum around 2012. In other words, solar forcing will double the amount of global warming over the next five to six years.
Last updated on 9 July 2010 by John Cook.
This article is interesting I want to know too, so solar cycle cause global warming.
The temperature around the world is now increasing and TSI(Total Solar Irradiance) I think solar cycle can cause global warming because our temperature is increasing by radiation from the sun which comes from solar cycle too. In that time global temperature increase by 0.18 but now in 2018 is much warmer than that time
Do we have another issue that caused climate change?
Well, it's now 2018, so we can evaluate the integrity of this article, which states that "The other significant finding is that solar forcing will add another 0.18°C warming on top of greenhouse warming between 2007 (we're currently at solar minimum) to the solar maximum around 2012. In other words, solar forcing will double the amount of global warming over the next five to six years.
How'd that turn out?
Ed,
Googling "Solar Cycle Activity" gives a number of hits that describe solar cycle 24 as the weakest in a century. That means that you would expect the solar forcing would be smaller than usual, probably around 0.1C (my estimate). The peak was in 2014.
We observe that 2014 was the hottest year recorded at that time and was the hottest year without an El Nino (now 2017 holds that record). The effect of the sun is often delayed for a year or two. 2015 and 2016 also set heat records.
It seems to me that it was fortunate the solar cycle was so low or we would have roasted even more than we did 2014-2016. Hopefully politicians will do something before it is too late.
NASA tracks the solar forcing and compares it to global temperatures over time, here.
Can anyone comment on J. Beer et al's assertion in 2000 that 40% of global warming which occurred between 1850 and 1990 was due to the sun ?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379199000724?via%3Dihub#preview-section-cited-by
[RH] Link activated
retiredguy... That's a very old paper and really doesn't claim much nor does it seem to present any actual research. I don't see any claim of 40%. Is there more to the paper that I'm not seeing? I ask because the the paper in that link ends with an ellipsis suggesting there's more.
retiredguy:
You have linked to the publisher's site, which only has a portion of the paper visible (along with "Access through your institution" and "Purchase PDF" buttons). Google Scholar led me to a full version here.
The first half of the paper simply reiterates a variety of reasons to expect variation in solar input to the earth system on a variety of time scales, without getting into specific solar irradiance values. They also talk about the importance of spectral variations - in addition to simple variations in total energy input.
In section 3.1, they cover "the reconstruction of the past solar irradiance". In that section, they state (emphasis added):
Their figure 7 is a graph of the reconstructed solar irradiance. It shows a solar irradiance value of about 1362 W/m2 in 1850, and a value of about 1366 W/m2 in 1990, for a difference of 4 W/m2. The wiggles in their reconstruction go as low as 1361 W/m2 in 1900, up to 1364 W/m2 from 1920-1950, and down to 1362 W/m2 around 1965.
Skeptical Science also has another page on "It's the sun". On that page, we see another solar irradiance reconstruction:
Note that the reconstruction from the paper you linked to shows much more variability and range. Their figure 7 mentions a "14-y low-pass filter", so it should probably be compared to the 11-year average in the above figure.
So, the first thing is that they have estimated a much larger change (about 4x) in solar irradiance over the 1850-1990 period than most other sources. This would explain their conclusions that solar forcing is a strong effect.
So, you have to ask, which solar reconstruction is better? Well, I think the clue is in the section I quoted and highlighted above, regarding their choice of method of reconstruction:
To put it bluntly, to claim that solar forcing is an important factor affecting temperature after choosing a solar reconstruction "because we find a better fit with the temperature data" is plain bad science. In all likelihood, they have erroneously fitted other causes of temperature change into their solar reconstruction, which leads to an overestimate of the magnitude and importance of solar forcing.
I notice their figure 10 is also for northern hemisphere temperature, not global. They do talk about the two hemispheres in the text, but I don't see an explanation as to why they did not use global temperature in their final evaluation.
In short, the main weakness is that they have a really bad solar irradiance reconstruction.
retiredguy @60,
A pointed out by responding comment, Beer et al (2000) is quite old and struggles with its solar irradience reconstruction. A more recent paper of which Beer is a co-author is Gray et al (2010) 'Solar influences on Climate'. This concludes by saying:-
As a further follow-up to the responses to retiredguy, note that the Beer et al paper mentioned in comment #60 is from 2000, when a lot of contrarians were still beating the "cosmic rays" drum pretty hard. You can read more about it here. In the past 20 years, that drum has been beaten to death.
Just over a year ago, I also did a more thorough review of another "it's the sun" paper that SkS was asked about in email. You can read that review to see where the paper went wrong. That paper argued (incorrectly) for "indirect solar effects" in an attempt to get around the weak direct effects (changes in total energy from the sun).
And finally, reading my comment #62 here in the original thread (instead of in "Recent Comments"), I see that the graph I provided is also in Comment #59.... Plus ca change...