Read the sunspots
The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output
drives climate change - and that we should prepare now for dangerous global
cooling
Financial Post, June 20, 2007
By R. TIMOTHY PATTERSON
Politicians and environmentalists these days convey the impression
that climate-change research is an exceptionally dull field with little left to
discover. We are assured by everyone from David Suzuki to Al Gore to Prime
Minister Stephen Harper that "the science is settled." At the recent
G8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel even attempted to convince world
leaders to play God by restricting carbon-dioxide emissions to a level that
would magically limit the rise in world temperatures to 2C.
The fact that science is many years away from properly
understanding global climate doesn't seem to bother our leaders at all.
Inviting testimony only from those who don't question political orthodoxy on
the issue, parliamentarians are charging ahead with the impossible and
expensive goal of "stopping global climate change." Liberal MP Ralph
Goodale's June 11 House of Commons assertion that Parliament should have
"a real good discussion about the potential for carbon capture and
sequestration in dealing with carbon dioxide, which has tremendous potential
for improving the climate, not only here in Canada but around the world,"
would be humorous were he, and even the current government, not deadly serious
about devoting vast resources to this hopeless crusade.
Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The
only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times,
quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today,
and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it
was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was
coming out of the thou-sand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode,
temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past
century's 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.
The Deniers: The National Post's series on scientists who buck the
conventional wisdom on climate science.
The National Post is a Canadian national newspaper. Here is the
series so far:
Statistics
needed -- The Deniers Part I
Warming
is real -- and has benefits -- The Deniers Part II
The
hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science -- The Deniers Part III
Polar
scientists on thin ice -- The Deniers Part IV
The
original denier: into the cold -- The Deniers Part V
The
sun moves climate change -- The Deniers Part VI
Will
the sun cool us? -- The Deniers Part VII
The
limits of predictability -- The Deniers Part VIII
Look
to Mars for the truth on global warming -- The Deniers Part IX
Limited
role for C02 -- the Deniers Part X
End
the chill -- The Deniers Part XI
Clouded
research -- The Deniers Part XII
Allegre's
second thoughts -- The Deniers XIII
The
heat's in the sun -- The Deniers XIV
Unsettled
Science -- The Deniers XV
Bitten
by the IPCC -- The Deniers XVI
Little
ice age is still within us -- The Deniers XVII
Fighting
climate 'fluff' -- The Deniers XVIII
Science,
not politics -- The Deniers XIX
Gore's
guru disagreed -- The Deniers XX
The
ice-core man -- The Deniers XXI
Some
restraint in Rome -- The Deniers XXII
Discounting
logic -- The Deniers XXIII
Dire
forecasts aren't new -- The Deniers XXIV
They
call this a consensus? - Part XXV
NASA
chief Michael Griffin silenced - Part XXVI
Forget
warming - beware the new ice age - Part XXVII
Climate-change research is now literally exploding with new
findings. Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the field has had more research than
in all previous years combined and the discoveries are completely shattering
the myths. For example, I and the first-class scientists I work with are
consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations in
the brightness of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun
and the stars are the ultimate source of all energy on the planet.
My interest in the current climate-change debate was triggered in
1998, when I was funded by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
strategic project grant to determine if there were regular cycles in West Coast
fish productivity. As a result of wide swings in the populations of anchovies,
herring and other commercially important West Coast fish stock, fisheries
managers were having a very difficult time establishing appropriate fishing
quotas. One season there would be abundant stock and broad harvesting would be
acceptable; the very next year the fisheries would collapse. No one really knew
why or how to predict the future health of this crucially important resource.
Although climate was suspected to play a significant role in
marine productivity, only since the beginning of the 20th century have accurate
fishing and temperature records been kept in this region of the northeast
Pacific. We needed indicators of fish productivity over thousands of years to
see whether there were recurring cycles in populations and what phenomena may
be driving the changes.
My research team began to collect and analyze core samples from
the bottom of deep Western Canadian fjords. The regions in which we chose to
conduct our research, Effingham Inlet on the West Coast of Vancouver Island,
and in 2001, sounds in the Belize-Seymour Inlet complex on the mainland coast
of British Columbia, were perfect for this sort of work. The topography of
these fjords is such that they contain deep basins that are subject to little
water transfer from the open ocean and so water near the bottom is relatively
stagnant and very low in oxygen content. As a consequence, the floors of these
basins are mostly lifeless and sediment layers build up year after year,
undisturbed over millennia.
Using various coring technologies, we have been able to collect
more than 5,000 years' worth of mud in these basins, with the oldest layers
coming from a depth of about 11 metres below the fjord floor. Clearly visible
in our mud cores are annual changes that record the different seasons:
corresponding to the cool, rainy winter seasons, we see dark layers composed
mostly of dirt washed into the fjord from the land; in the warm summer months
we see abundant fossilized fish scales and diatoms (the most common form of
phytoplankton, or single-celled ocean plants) that have fallen to the fjord
floor from nutrient-rich surface waters. In years when warm summers dominated
climate in the region, we clearly see far thicker layers of diatoms and fish
scales than we do in cooler years. Ours is one of the highest-quality climate
records available anywhere today and in it we see obvious confirmation that
natural climate change can be dramatic. For example, in the middle of a 62-year
slice of the record at about 4,400 years ago, there was a shift in climate in
only a couple of seasons from warm, dry and sunny conditions to one that was
mostly cold and rainy for several decades.
Using computers to conduct what is referred to as a "time
series analysis" on the colouration and thickness of the annual layers, we
have discovered repeated cycles in marine productivity in this, a region larger
than Europe. Specifically, we find a very strong and consistent 11-year cycle
throughout the whole record in the sediments and diatom remains. This
correlates closely to the well-known 11-year "Schwabe" sunspot cycle,
during which the output of the sun varies by about 0.1%. Sunspots, violent storms
on the surface of the sun, have the effect of increasing solar output, so, by
counting the spots visible on the surface of our star, we have an indirect
measure of its varying brightness. Such records have been kept for many
centuries and match very well with the changes in marine productivity we are
observing.
In the sediment, diatom and fish-scale records, we also see longer
period cycles, all correlating closely with other well-known regular solar
variations. In particular, we see marine productivity cycles that match well
with the sun's 75-90-year "Gleissberg Cycle," the 200-500-year
"Suess Cycle" and the 1,100-1,500-year "Bond Cycle." The
strength of these cycles is seen to vary over time, fading in and out over the millennia.
The variation in the sun's brightness over these longer cycles may be many
times greater in magnitude than that measured over the short Schwabe cycle and
so are seen to impact marine productivity even more significantly.
Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the
brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called
"proxies") is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies
from tree rings in Russia's Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show
exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.
However, there was a problem. Despite this clear and repeated
correlation, the measured variations in incoming solar energy were, on their
own, not sufficient to cause the climate changes we have observed in our
proxies. In addition, even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in
the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to
be sufficient to cause the past century's modest warming on its own. There had
to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate
change.
Indeed, that is precisely what has been discovered. In a series of
groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and
most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the
output of the sun varies, and with it, our star's protective solar wind,
varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our
solar system and penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance
cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the
sun's energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to
direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these
"high sun" periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our
atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.
The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays
are able to get through to Earth's atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet
cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone.
This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the
early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated
by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the
Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the
sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show
little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short
time scales.
In some fields the science is indeed "settled." For
example, plate tectonics, once highly controversial, is now so well-established
that we rarely see papers on the subject at all. But the science of global
climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published
every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis
Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from
27 countries surveyed did not believe that "the current state of
scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable
assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases." About half of those polled
stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass
the issue over to policymakers at all.
Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting
into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading
to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such
a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the
Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not
warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a
country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very
little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only
require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.
Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex
field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the
King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change."
R. Timothy Patterson is professor and director of the
Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton
University.