revolution-green.com by Simon Derricutt | Nov 22, 2018
If you have a pot on the stove, do you expect the temperature to depend more on what’s in the pot or how high you’ve turned the flame underneath it? The main problem with predicting our weather is that it’s a chaotic system and thus there is actually no mathematical way of predicting what’s going to happen over a long period. As such, for weather predictions we look at the developing trends and project them into the future. This is pretty good for tomorrow’s weather, good enough for 3 days in the future, a rough guide for a couple of weeks, and pretty-well a guess beyond that time-span. We can maybe improve that longer-term forecast by only trying to predict the average temperature we’ll achieve in future, and mostly this will depend on the energy input from the Sun.
Energy from the Sun in turn depends on how far we are away from it (our orbit is not circular, nor even constant) and how the Earth is oriented (so we need to be aware of Milankovich cycles) and the actual amount of energy (and in what wavelengths) the Sun is emitting. The plot above shows a correlation of sunspots with indicated climatic temperature (some estimated, some measured) and was taken from
https://electroverse.net/weather-and-sunspots-1976-vs-2018/ which is worth reading. There’s also some news there of the predictions of the next Solar Minimum at
https://electroverse.net/professor-valentina-zharkova-breaks-her-silence-and-confirms-super-grand-solar-minimum/ which is worth looking at too.
Of course, these are just predictions from models, much the same as all the weather and climate predictions are from models, and so we won’t know if they are actually good until we’ve experienced the actual conditions and are looking back at the past. It’s always a problem trying to project what a chaotic system will do, and it’s quite possible that the cycles that have been extracted from the historical data are simply pure chance. We don’t have impeccable data on any of the important parameters anyway – it’s mostly inferred from other indicators. We have measured temperature data for around 150 years, and sunspot data for 400 years, and some of these perceived cycles extend for much greater periods of time. However, it seems unlikely that we’ll affect the number of sunspots, and far more likely that the sunspots will affect the spectrum of the energy we get from the Sun and will therefore have at least some effect on the total energy balance of the Earth. That at least can be measured now and going forward. That received energy will affect average temperatures. There are almost certainly other effects we don’t know about yet. One seems to be the quantity of cosmic rays, and their seeding effect on clouds. For the same solar input, having more clouds will reflect more energy away before it reaches the ground, and so will cool the Earth. Clouds also stop the Earth radiating the energy it already has, too, so when the clouds are present or thickest (day or night) will affect the measured temperatures at ground level and in the atmosphere. Clouds insulate us.
To me, the correlation between sunspot number and average temperature of the Earth seems pretty dramatic. It’s also a pretty obvious cause and effect relationship – the Sun affects us, but we can’t affect the Sun’s internal processes.
There’s really no good reason to assume that the solar output will be constant over time (which of course is actually assumed in the IPCC climate predictions) and there’s evidence that it hasn’t been constant in the past but has complex cycles.
More:
https://revolution-green.com/solar-minimum-predicted/
