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
R. TIMOTHY PATTERSON
Financial Post
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
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.
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.
� National Post 2007
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