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New Paper: Evidence for Solar Forcing in Variability of Temperatures and Pressures in Europe
A new paper has been published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics by Jean-Louis Le Mouël, Elena Blanter, Mikhail Shnirman, and Vincent Courtillot, entitled: ‘Evidence for solar forcing in variability of temperatures and pressures in Europe.’
The Abstract states:
Daily temperature and pressure series from 55 European meteorological stations covering the 20th century are analyzed. The overall temperature mean displays a sharp minimum near 1940 and a step-like jump near 1987. We evaluate the evolution of disturbances of these series using mean squared inter-annual variations and “lifetimes”. The decadal to secular evolutions of solar activity and temperature disturbances display similar signatures over the 20th century. Because of heterogeneity of the climate system response to solar forcing, regional and seasonal approaches are key to successful identification of these signatures. Most of the solar response is governed by the winter months, as best seen near the Atlantic Ocean. Intensities of disturbances vary by factors in excess of 2, underlining a role for the Sun as a significant forcing factor of European atmospheric variations. We speculate about the possible origin of these solar signatures. The last figure of the paper exemplifies its main results.
The paper concludes:
In concluding, we find increasingly strong evidence of a clear solar signature in a number of climatic indicators in Europe, strengthening the earlier conclusions of a study that included stations from the United States (Le Mouël et al., 2008). With the recent downturn of both solar activity and global temperatures, the debated correlations we suggested in Le Mouël et al. (2005), which appeared to stop in the 1980s, actually might extend to the present. The role of the Sun in global and regional climate change should be re-assessed and reasonable physical mechanisms are in sight.
July 2nd, 2009 at 6:04 am
[...] feet of Al Gore, another inconvenient truth is to be found in a recently published paper from the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics: The Abstract [...]
July 3rd, 2009 at 3:13 am
I’ve not yet read the paper, but am very interested in the statement on a step-like jump. This is no surprise to me. I have noticed step changes in various climate time series, and have reached the tentative conclusion that much of climate change proceeds by such abrupt happenings. However, it remains a mystery to me why such changes should occur. For a prime example please examine data for southern Greenland (eg Nuuk) for the period 1880 to near the present, and look in particular at late 1922. Here a step change of nearly 2 degrees Celsius occurred in around two or three months.
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:46 pm
[...] With the recent downturn of both solar activity and global temperatures… Read more here. [...]
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:20 pm
I don’t understand why there is any ambiguity about effect of the sun on our mean temperature . The Classical Stefan-Boltzmann/Kirchhoff relationships tightly constrains the mean temperature of objects in our orbit to be about 1/21st the temperature of the sun . If the sun’s mean surface temperature changes 10c , our temperature will change about 0.5c . The implementation in a few lines modern array programming language is on my website . One should , for instance , be able to extract an approximately 1% variation in our temperature from aphelion to perihelion by averaging over a couple of decades .
The SB/K relationship is not an option . Such things as attributing Venus’s extreme temperature to “runaway” warming shows an total ignorance of the 120 to 150 year old physics . Nothing can hold heat in ; it can only slow it , reducing the variance , and the “green” gas , CO2 , upon which all life is constructed , does help with that .