Solar The Grand Solar Minimum (ORIGINAL)

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Melodi

Disaster Cat
Thanks. Jared Diamond's book Collapse has always puzzled me w/regard to that Viking colony. Your explanation makes much more sense.

What Jared wrote was THE Theory at the time, and he does make some good points, but I'm sure even Dr. Diamond is aware that new testing (not advanced enough when he wrote the book) shows the story is a lot more complicated.

For one thing, Greenland was much more in touch with Europe than it used to be believed, and the "collapse" seems to have taken a longer time than thought; you get people with names like "so and so the Greenlander" in German Universities in the early 1500's and the new excavations in Iceland have shown no sign of a disaster or mass die-off.

The homes look mostly like someone just closed the door and left one-day, which would fit with a number of possible stories; though I think the researcher who is looking into the hunting evidence (including the reception lists of goods imported into Europe on the European side of things) combined with the DNA evidence for graves of all periods showing people ALWAYS had a mixed lifestyle; is probably on to something.

There is also a chance that some of them went West; my husband says there are hints in the later "Sagas" (the less well-known ones) of some trading going on with the Native Americans for the entire time as well - mostly for timber, because Greenland just didn't have any and not all the wood found there is driftwood.
 

Stanb999

Inactive
You bring up moving to a warmer climate and I could see a mass exodus (abandon their homes) headed to warmer southern states. My area it could come down to heat or eat and not being able to keep up with it, that may leave only a few people here, almost like living in a small Alasken village where only the few that has what it takes to live there.

On this..

I have a book written about pennsylvania weather, AKA The Pennsylvania weather book.

The auther recounts past weather events. Anyway. The author notes during the mini iceage of the 1800s there was a mass exodus to Ohio by pennsylvania people. Northern pennsylvania population has never recovered.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000SNUQ4E/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
 

Faroe

Un-spun
What Jared wrote was THE Theory at the time, and he does make some good points, but I'm sure even Dr. Diamond is aware that new testing (not advanced enough when he wrote the book) shows the story is a lot more complicated.

For one thing, Greenland was much more in touch with Europe than it used to be believed, and the "collapse" seems to have taken a longer time than thought; you get people with names like "so and so the Greenlander" in German Universities in the early 1500's and the new excavations in Iceland have shown no sign of a disaster or mass die-off.

The homes look mostly like someone just closed the door and left one-day, which would fit with a number of possible stories; though I think the researcher who is looking into the hunting evidence (including the reception lists of goods imported into Europe on the European side of things) combined with the DNA evidence for graves of all periods showing people ALWAYS had a mixed lifestyle; is probably on to something.

There is also a chance that some of them went West; my husband says there are hints in the later "Sagas" (the less well-known ones) of some trading going on with the Native Americans for the entire time as well - mostly for timber, because Greenland just didn't have any and not all the wood found there is driftwood.

Thanks, Melodi. The long houses (if that is what they built in Greenland too) were judicious with the timber framing, but a number of large and long load bearing timbers were essential. I'm impressed by how they did so much with so little. Beautiful structures.

I've been watching Dr. Jackson Crawford videos (IIRC, that is his name). He teaches Norse studies in Boulder, and is very particular about translations and interpretation. I like his work, because he doesn't put a happy gloss on any of it. I would rather know what the prevailing psychology and cultural norms really were, as they were shaped by that cold environment. I have a book on the Greenland grave sites in my shopping cart awaiting some more discretionary funds. Here is the link, although I will buy it from another vendor. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/8...le_9?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1#customerReviews
 
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mecoastie

Veteran Member
One of the things I really liked about the book "A World Made By Hand" was that the author did his research and realized that in his small part of the Northeast (I think rural New York but it has been some time since I read the book) wheat just didn't grow very well and within a couple of years after the gradual "collapse" of things; maize corn (which will grow there) became the staple.

There is a wealthy local landowner (wealthy before the collapse too) that grows buckwheat (he brought it in after living in Japan and grew it as a hobby) greenhouse coffee and other luxury goods; he IMPORTS wheat from other areas but it isn't worth trying to grow in their location.

So even in an area where something is "supposed" to grow on a macro level, it may not grow where you happen to live.

In terms of surviving a climate downturn (or upturn) looking at what the traditional people ate and did in your area can be helpful for personal preparations; I've made some study of the 18th century downturn period; which is more relevant here in Ireland because by that point they had potatoes, pumpkins, turnips (even tomatoes) which they did not have during the 14th century downturn - also we have better records and diaries from the 16th - 19th centuries; especially for individual households and how they managed.

Before the potato; the staples here were dairy (cheese and butter especially), oats, barley and very limited wheat (mostly imported); cattle were king (but you only ate them rarely, they were too important), sheep, goats and chickens. Plus lots of "hedgerow" berries and greens.

That is a great book. THe whole series is good. My mother grew up in that area and I still have a ton of family there. It is interesting to drive around and see it now and see his vision of it in the future.
 

TxGal

Day by day
I found this link earlier this morning, it has 7 scientific articles on global cooling beginning soon. I'd post all 7 articles, but it would be a very, very long post. http://notrickszone.com/2017/12/28/...ill-begin-soon/#sthash.6QMasg90.FqUFYxSQ.dpbs

From the 2nd article, Sun et al., 2017: "… A period change rule of a 179.5-year cycle is observed. This period change rule is consistent with the change that takes place once every 2 centuries (about 160 to 210 years) for solar activity and global climate change.

The Sun is headed into a grand minimum, that is, a period of unusually low solar activity." https://www.ann-eophys.net/35/659/2017/angeo-35-659-2017.pdf
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
Browse: Home / 2017 / December / 28 / 7 New (2017) Papers Forecast Global Cooling, Another Little Ice Age Will Begin Soon
7 New (2017) Papers Forecast Global Cooling, Another Little Ice Age Will Begin Soon
By Kenneth Richard on 28. December 2017

Temperatures To Decrease 0.5°C-0.7°C
Due To Low Sunspots, Solar Minimum

Cooling-Forecast-Solar-Abdussamatov-2012.jpg


Image Source: Abdussamatov, 2012
During 2017, 120 papers linking historical and modern climate change to variations in solar activity and its modulators (clouds, cosmic rays) have been published in scientific journals.

It has been increasingly established that low solar activity (fewer sunspots) and increased cloud cover (as modulated by cosmic rays) are highly associated with a cooling climate.

In recent years, the Earth has unfortunately left a period of very high solar activity, the Modern Grand Maximum. Periods of high solar activity correspond to multi-decadal- to centennial-scale warming.

Solar scientists are now increasingly forecasting a period of very low activity that will commence in the next few years (by around 2020 to 2025). This will lead to climate cooling, even Little Ice Age conditions.
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
I found this link earlier this morning, it has 7 scientific articles on global cooling beginning soon. I'd post all 7 articles, but it would be a very, very long post. http://notrickszone.com/2017/12/28/...ill-begin-soon/#sthash.6QMasg90.FqUFYxSQ.dpbs

From the 2nd article, Sun et al., 2017: "… A period change rule of a 179.5-year cycle is observed. This period change rule is consistent with the change that takes place once every 2 centuries (about 160 to 210 years) for solar activity and global climate change.

The Sun is headed into a grand minimum, that is, a period of unusually low solar activity." https://www.ann-eophys.net/35/659/2017/angeo-35-659-2017.pdf

Thanks for the link. There is indeed a lot of valuable information there; I copied and pasted the cover story above.

von K
 

MountainBiker

Veteran Member
One of the things I really liked about the book "A World Made By Hand" was that the author did his research and realized that in his small part of the Northeast (I think rural New York but it has been some time since I read the book) wheat just didn't grow very well and within a couple of years after the gradual "collapse" of things; maize corn (which will grow there) became the staple.

There is a wealthy local landowner (wealthy before the collapse too) that grows buckwheat (he brought it in after living in Japan and grew it as a hobby) greenhouse coffee and other luxury goods; he IMPORTS wheat from other areas but it isn't worth trying to grow in their location.

So even in an area where something is "supposed" to grow on a macro level, it may not grow where you happen to live.

In terms of surviving a climate downturn (or upturn) looking at what the traditional people ate and did in your area can be helpful for personal preparations; I've made some study of the 18th century downturn period; which is more relevant here in Ireland because by that point they had potatoes, pumpkins, turnips (even tomatoes) which they did not have during the 14th century downturn - also we have better records and diaries from the 16th - 19th centuries; especially for individual households and how they managed.

Before the potato; the staples here were dairy (cheese and butter especially), oats, barley and very limited wheat (mostly imported); cattle were king (but you only ate them rarely, they were too important), sheep, goats and chickens. Plus lots of "hedgerow" berries and greens.

The story is set in Washington County, NY which abuts Southern Vermont. It's nice country there with better farmland and not as mountainous as across the border in Vermont.
 
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von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
Stozhkov et al., 2017
One of the most important problems facing humanity is finding the physical mechanism responsible for global climate change, particularly global warming on the Earth. … Summation of these periodicities for the future (after 2015) allows us to forecast the next few decades. The solid heavy line in Fig. 1 shows that cooling (a drop in ΔT values) is expected in the next few decades.

Cooling-Predicition-Cosmic-Rays-Stozhkov-2017.jpg


Figure 2 shows the dependence between the annual average changes ΔT in the global temperature in the near-surface air layer and charged particle flux N in the interval of altitudes from 0.3 to 2.2 km. We can see there is a connection between values ΔТ [temperature] and N [charged particle flux]: with an increase in cosmic ray flux N, the values of changes of global temperature decrease. This link is expressed by the relation ΔT = –0.0838N + 4.307 (see the dashed line in Fig. 2), where the ΔT values are given in °C, and the N values (in particle/min units) are related to the charged particle flux measured at an altitude of 1.3 km. The correlation coefficient of the line with the experimental data is r = –0.62 ± 0.08. … Our results could be connected with the mechanism of charged particle fluxes influencing the Earth’s climate; it includes, first of all, the effect charged particles have on the accelerated formation of centers of water vapor condensation, and thus on the increase in global cloud cover. The total cloud cover is directly connected with the global temperature of the near surface air layer.
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
The coming cooling: Usefully accurate climate forecasting for policy makers.

This paper argues that the methods used by the establishment climate science community are not fit for purpose and that a new forecasting paradigm should be adopted. Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between various quasi-cyclic processes of varying wavelengths. It is not possible to forecast the future, unless we have a good understanding of where the earth is in time in relation to the current phases of those different interacting natural quasi periodicities.

Evidence is presented specifying the timing and amplitude of the natural 60 ± year and, more importantly, 1000 year periodicities (observed emergent behaviors) that are so obvious in the temperature record. Data related to the solar climate driver are discussed and the solar cycle 22 low in the neutron count (high solar activity) in 1991 is identified as a solar activity millennial peak and correlated with the millennial peak – inversion point – in the RSS temperature trend in about 2004. The cyclic trends are projected forward and predict a probable general temperature decline in the coming decades and centuries. Estimates of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling are made.

If the real climate outcomes follow a trend which approaches the near term forecasts of this working hypothesis, the divergence between the IPCC forecasts and those projected by this paper will be so large by 2021 as to make the current, supposedly actionable, level of confidence in the IPCC forecasts untenable.

The global millennial temperature rising trend seen in Figure 11 from 1984 to the peak and trend inversion point in the Hadcrut3 data at 2003/4 is the inverse correlative of the Tropical Cloud Cover fall from 1984 to the Millennial trend change at 2002. The lags in these trends from the solar activity peak at 1991 (Figure 10) are 12 and 11 years, respectively. These correlations suggest possible teleconnections between the GCR flux, clouds, and global temperatures.

Unless the range and causes of natural variation, as seen in the natural temperature quasi-periodicities, are known within reasonably narrow limits, it is simply not possible to even begin to estimate the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on climate. Given the lack of any empirical CO2-climate connection reviewed earlier and the inverse relationship between CO2 and temperature [during the Holocene, when CO2 rose as temperatures declined] seen in Figure 2, and for the years 2003.6–2015.2 in Figure 4, during which CO2 rose 20 ppm, the simplest and most rational working hypothesis is that the solar ‘activity’ increase is the chief driver of the global temperature increase since the LIA.

Cooling-Warming-Temperature-Cloud-Page-17.jpg


Cooling-Forecast-Solar-Page-17.jpg
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
Abdussamatov, 2015

A long-term negative deviation of the Earth’s average annual energy balance from the equilibrium state is dictating corresponding variations in it’s the energy state. As a result, the Earth will have a negative average annual energy balance also in the future. This will lead to the beginning of the decreasing in the Earth’s temperature and of the epoch of the Little Ice Age after the maximum phase of the 24-th solar cycle approximately since the end of 2014.

The influence of the consecutive chain of the secondary feedback effects (the increase in the Bond albedo and the decrease in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to cooling) will lead to an additional reduction of the absorbed solar energy and reduce the greenhouse effect. The start of the TSI’s Grand Minimum is anticipated in the solar cycle 27±1 in 2043±11 and the beginning of the phase of deep cooling of the 19th Little Ice Age for the past 7,500 years around 2060±11.

Thus, the long term variations of the solar constant (allowing for their direct and secondary impacts, with the latter being due to feedback effects) are the major and essential cause of climate changes because the Earth’s climate variation is a function of longterm imbalance between the solar radiation energy incoming into the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere and Earth’s total energy outgoing back to space.

Cooling-Forecast-Solar-Abdussamatov-2015.jpg
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
http://mentalfloss.com/article/73585/15-facts-about-year-without-summer

15 Facts About 'The Year Without a Summer'
BY DENNIS MERSEREAU JANUARY 15, 2016

The history of natural disasters is peppered with storms, floods, and even asteroids, but some of the most fascinating disasters came from deep within the Earth itself thanks to volcanoes. Eruptions like the one that buried Pompeii, Italy, are prominently featured in grade school history lessons, but few volcanoes had such a dramatic and devastating impact as that of Mount Tambora. This volcano produced such a violent eruption in 1815 that it shielded the Earth from the intense summer sunlight, leading to 1816 becoming “The Year Without a Summer.”

1. MOUNT TAMBORA'S ERUPTION LASTED NEARLY TWO WEEKS ...
During the April 1815 eruption, the volcano ejected billions of tons of gas and debris into the atmosphere. Much of the heavier ash and debris fell on the islands around Tambora, but a significant amount wound up in the atmosphere, spreading around the world and partially blotting out the sun for months after the event. The eruption itself killed tens of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of people in the resulting pyroclastic flows, choking ashfalls, and tsunamis.

2. ... AND WAS WORSE THAN OTHER, BETTER-KNOWN ERUPTIONS.
Indonesia is home to some of the busiest geological activity in the world. The eruption of Indonesia’s Krakatoa on August 27, 1883, is one of the most infamous volcanic disasters in recorded history, killing tens of thousands of people and affecting weather around the world for months after the eruption. However, just a few decades before it, Mount Tambora unleashed an eruption worse than Krakatoa, Washington’s Mount Saint Helens, and even Pompeii’s Vesuvius.

Tambora registered a VEI-7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, a metric that measures the size of volcanic eruptions on a scale from VEI-0 (non-explosive) to VEI-8 (megacolossal). Krakatoa measured a VEI-6, while Mount St. Helens and Vesuvius both rated a VEI-5.

3. IT CAUSED A VOLCANIC WINTER ...
We’re familiar with the greenhouse effect, where certain gasses and particulates in the atmosphere can trap heat and cause global temperatures to tick upward, but volcanic eruptions can cause the opposite effect. There are two main mechanisms for this: the first is that the particulates ejected by volcanoes can act to reflect sunlight, allowing less solar radiation to reach the surface, keeping global temperatures lower than they would be under normal conditions. The result is a volcanic winter, similar to the much-feared “nuclear winter” that served as a major theme in 20th century science fiction. But particulates only last in the atmosphere for a couple of days. Far more important is the sulfur dioxide that also comes with eruptions. Sulfur dioxide gets converted into sulfuric acid, which then forms aerosols high up in the atmosphere that also serve to block incoming solar radiation for several years after the eruption.

4. ... AND A SNOW DAY IN JUNE.
The volcanic winter that followed Mount Tambora’s historic eruption devastated communities around the world. Ironically, the volcanic winter effect was most heavily felt during the summer months, especially in eastern North America. Residents reported heavy snow falling as late as the middle of June in the northeastern United States, with one report indicating as much as half a foot of snow on June 6, 1816.

5. AGRICULTURE SUFFERED.
The sudden drop in temperatures wreaked havoc on agriculture around the world. In addition to heavy frosts and freezes all but destroying crops in the United States, cold and wet conditions also killed the harvest in Europe and Asia. The widespread crop failures around the world led to famine in many regions of the world, costing countless lives.

6. DISEASE FLOURISHED.
Not only did the eruption leave weather disasters and famine in its wake, but the combination of the two effects also produced an undesirable result: disease. The cholera epidemic that became the scourge of the 19th century likely began in the wake of Mount Tambora’s eruption, killing millions of people, but it also helped bring us much closer to modern medicine.

7. THE VOLCANO BROUGHT US FRANKENSTEIN.
The gloomy weather in Europe during the Year Without a Summer prevented tourists from enjoying a quiet vacation during the usually-warm months. One group of literary legends—including Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley), Lord Byron, and John Polidori—took a trip to Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 and wound up indoors most of the time due to the chilly, rainy conditions. It was during this outing-turned-staycation that Mary Shelley started what became her classic novel Frankenstein; or: The Modern Prometheus, and John Polidori was inspired to write The Vampyre, which later influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula.

8. THE ERUPTION CAUSED EPIC SUNSETS.

chichester_canal_jmw_turner.jpeg


Chichester Canal circa 1828 by J.M.W. Turner via Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain

Brilliant sunsets are often the result of sunlight refracting through moisture in the atmosphere, leading to vivid displays of warm colors that often balance against a darkening sky. Particulates in the atmosphere such as dust and volcanic ash can create even more vivid sunrises and sunsets, the latter causing these phenomena to linger for many months after such an eruption. These dazzling sights often inspire wondrous paintings in the time after events like the eruption of Tambora, including the 1828 Turner painting Chichester Canal.

9. THE ERUPTION MAY HAVE LED TO MORMONISM.
One of the more unusual effects of the temporary climate change brought about by Mount Tambora’s eruption is that it may have indirectly led to the creation of the Mormon religion. Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s family was one of thousands that left Vermont during the freakishly cold summer of 1816. The Smith family subsequently settled in New York, where a teenage Joseph would go on to experience the events that led to his publication of the Book of Mormon.

10. THE YEAR WITHOUT SUMMER HELPED GIVE US THE BICYCLE.
When crops failed as a result of the extreme weather in 1816, it wasn’t only humans that suffered without food. The failed harvests sent the price of oats soaring, making it harder and more expensive for individuals to afford to keep horses for transportation. Looking for a new way to get around, Karl Drais invented a device called a “Laufmaschine,” or a “running machine.” The contraption is very similar to the bicycle we know and love today—instead of using pedals, however, you operated it with your feet Fred Flintstone-style.

11. CROP FAILURES FURTHER HARMED A FOUNDING FATHER.
We don’t normally think of leaders of the United States as individuals without money—especially in current times, it’s common for candidates to require vast personal wealth in order to seek the highest office in the land. In the early days of the United States, however, this wasn’t always the case. Thomas Jefferson lived most of his life deeply in debt, and the summer of 1816 didn’t help. That year’s extreme weather caused Jefferson’s crops to fail for several years afterward, heavily contributing to the Founding Father’s already-considerable debt. Jefferson never recovered financially, and he lived the waning years of his life in debt that would equal millions of dollars in 2016.

12. THE COOL DOWN LED TO ARCTIC EXPLORATION.
Weather exists as nature’s way of trying to balance out the atmosphere. When one part of the world experiences extreme weather, somewhere nearby is often experiencing the opposite weather to balance it out. When much of the world experienced a cool-down in the wake of Mount Tambora’s eruption, the Arctic warmed up, and it warmed up enough that it cleared the sea ice and allowed British explorers to map out the area and hunt for the Northwest Passage.

13. CROP FAILURES LED TO AN OPIUM BOOM.
One of the major causes for the drug trade around the world is poverty—when there’s no other way to make money, selling drugs is a profitable draw for many people. After the crops failed in 1816, farmers in places like China were forced to begin growing opium in order to make money. This opium production led to a boom in the opium trade that still exists today.

14. THE ATMOSPHERE QUICKLY RECOVERED.
Thankfully, such a dramatic change in global climate didn’t last very long. The effect of the global cool-down only stuck around for a couple of years after the eruption. Once the particles in the atmosphere began to mix out and settle back to the surface, the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface began to return to normal, allowing weather to mostly return to normal around the world.

15. IT COULD HAPPEN AGAIN (BUT PROBABLY WON'T IN YOUR LIFETIME).
The proliferation of television shows depicting doomsday scenarios of “supervolcanoes” erupting has led to concern that we’re at risk for another eruption on the scale of Tambora (or even larger). The USGS says that the risk of an eruption at the much-discussed Yellowstone Caldera, for instance, is exceedingly small, many fractions of one percent per year. If we were to experience an eruption like Tambora in modern times, the results would be catastrophic. The global population has dramatically risen by billions of people over the past 200 years, and the consequences of such an eruption occurring in modern times would lead to unimaginable death and devastation. In addition to the eruption itself, simple activities like air travel would grind to a halt as volcanic ash can seize jet engines and cause planes to crash. The global climate change would result in outbreaks of famine and disease practically unseen in modern times.
 
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tanstaafl

Has No Life - Lives on TB
As I've mentioned in another thread, it's not just any old volcanic eruption (even a really big eruption) that can change the global weather. Location of the volcano is also an important factor. Novarupta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novarupta) in Alaska was a massive eruption fully in the same category as Mt. Pinatubo and Krakatoa, but being so far north it had noticeably less of an impact on global weather than the other two located much closer to the equator. Also, it's important to remember that not all volcanoes eject vast amounts of ash into the atmosphere ... it still qualifies as a volcanic eruption if all it ever does is pump out lava in relatively tame flows (like Mauna Loa, considered by many to be the largest volcano on Earth). But even massive lava flows without a related massive release of certain gases (like sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide) are also not as big a threat, no matter how much lava is ejected. In other words, size alone isn't everything.

Something to also think about is that assuming there is in fact a temporary period of global cooling coming but no other changes in all the other factors affecting climate and shorter-term weather, then once the cooling effect is removed all the other factors may come back to the fore with a vengeance. That is, any obscured tendency towards global warming (by humans or nature) may well result in a whipsaw to the other extreme. If there is a Gaia regulating the planet's ecosystems, all it really cares about are the averages that allow life in general to continue to flourish. But those temporary whipsaws into extremes will still suck for individual species (and individual humans).
 

Publius

TB Fanatic
GLOBAL COOLING: Ice Age Now...

Some days back I posted a YouTube link on another thread and reposting here
This is about Global Cooling-Ice Age Now this video its a few very well educated people who have studied weather and atmospherics and much more.
The one old feller Professor Sigmond Fred, Singer is 93 years old and has an impressive history and education back ground.
Singer makes a good point that food will be the major issue and we need prepair for this now.
Posted on YouTube Jan 10, 2018. Run Time 8:57 LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nsl4RQUeag
 
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TxGal

Day by day
Some days back I posted a YouTube link on another thread and reposting here
This is about Global Cooling-Ice Age Now and its a few very well educated people who have studied weather and atmospherics and much more.
The one old feller Professor Sigmond Fred, Singer is 93 years old and has an impressive history and education back ground.
Singer makes a good point that food will be the major issue and we need prepair for this now.
Posted on YouTube Jan 10, 2018. Run Time 8:57 LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nsl4RQUeag

Very good video, thank you! I agree about the food issue, and that is something we are seriously planning for.
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
Very good video, thank you! I agree about the food issue, and that is something we are seriously planning for.

I think you are correct about the importance of the food issue: most plants can't survive in ice, snow, or even a heavy frost.

North Dakota isn't going to be prime farmland!

von K
 

Stanb999

Inactive
The story is set in Washington County, NY which abuts Southern Vermont. It's nice country there with better farmland and not as mountainous as across the border in Vermont.

It's also mostly at sea level. Very hot in the summer too. I spent a few summers in Saratoga.
 

Publius

TB Fanatic
Very good video, thank you! I agree about the food issue, and that is something we are seriously planning for.




From whats known about the last glacial period the ice only came down into north america so far and areas like Texas, New Mexico, alabama did not freeze year around but I think would have four months warm enough to grow a good many crops. They could start planing on this and start building soil up in preparation and the farmer is trained on soild building and forbidden to grow corn on it.
 

Flippper

Time Traveler
Geoengineering is designed to drop the temperature of earth's surface, somewhere I heard it is very effective, imagine that combined with the solar minimum and now deadly it could be. Remember, the globalist goal is near total eradication of humanity on the planet.

When I think on Revelation, it says that a third of the earth's population dies from famine, pestilence and beasts of the earth. If the ability to grow food crops is severely hindered, I can see that the beasts of the earth will also be starving, likely why people are killed by them. Pestilence could be an offshoot of that, or genetically engineered superbugs that we seem to be seeing now in the form of hundreds of variations of the influenza virus and other deadly viruses now cropping up in odd places.
 

Stanb999

Inactive
From whats known about the last glacial period the ice only came down into north america so far and areas like Texas, New Mexico, alabama did not freeze year around but I think would have four months warm enough to grow a good many crops. They could start planing on this and start building soil up in preparation and the farmer is trained on soild building and forbidden to grow corn on it.

Your conflating Iceage and "Little" Iceage.

The massive continental ice sheets of an Iceage take many centuries to form. They were miles high and cover vast areas in the north. The ice stopped moving south mostly around Pennsylvania in the east and Washington in the west. With a large northern push in the center of the country to north of the Canadian border. It takes lots of precipitation to form the ice sheets and there isn't much in the central high plains. So no ice sheet there. The big thing to note with an iceage period is the temps aren't all that different than today for most of the time and most of the country. Yes it's cold in it's initial phase that creates the ice sheets. But then the presence of the ice sheets perpetuates them due to the high elevations on top of the ice sheets forcing snow instead of rain.

A little iceage is a period of actual cold where the average temperature drops several degrees in a short period of time for a short period of time. It's actually colder and less predictable than iceage conditions. It could be what triggers an iceage but we have no way of knowing one way or another.
 
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von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/jamestown-icy-conquest/

An Icy Conquest
Susan Dunn NOVEMBER 9, 2017 ISSUE
A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America
by Sam White
Harvard University Press, 361 pp., $29.95



dunn_1-110917.jpg


Captain John Smith taken captive by the Powhatan Native Americans; color engraving from Captain Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, 1624

“We are starved! We are starved!” the sixty skeletal members of the English colony of Jamestown cried out in desperation as two ships arrived with provisions in June 1610. Of the roughly 240 people who were in Jamestown at the start of the winter of 1609–1610, they were the only ones left alive. They suffered from exhaustion, starvation, and malnutrition as well as from a strange sickness that “caused all our skinns to peele off, from head to foote, as if we had beene flayed.”

Zooarchaeological evidence shows that during those pitiless months of “starving time” they turned to eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, venomous snakes, and other famine foods: mushrooms, toadstools, “or what els we founde growing upon the grounde that would fill either mouth or belly.” Some of the settlers reportedly ingested excrement and chewed the leather of their boots. Recent discoveries of human skeletons confirm the revelation of the colony’s president, George Percy, that they also resorted to cannibalism: “Some adventuringe to seeke releife in the woods, dyed as they sought it, and weare eaten by others who found them dead.” When one man confessed under torture to having murdered and eaten his wife, Percy ordered his execution.

That happened a mere three years after the first adventurous group of Englishmen arrived in Jamestown. From the beginning, it was a struggle for subsistence. Most of the settlers fell ill only a few weeks after landfall in May 1607. One colonist recalled that “scarse ten amongst us coulde either goe, or well stand, such extreame weaknes and sicknes oppressed us.” The corn withered in the summer drought, and as the flow of the James River waned in the unrelenting heat, salt water encroached from the sea, depriving the settlers of their main source of fresh water. Nor was divine assistance forthcoming. The Quiyoughcohannock Indians, scarcely better off, beseeched the Englishmen to intercede and ask their powerful God for supernatural intervention. But when the colonists’ prayers seemed to bring only more suffering instead of rain to Jamestown, the natives concluded that the Christian god must be a vindictive one, and their relations with the colonists deteriorated.

By September 1607, half the colony’s members were dead. “Our men were destroyed with cruell diseases as Swellings, Flixes, Burning Fevers, and by warres, and some departed suddenly,” Percy later recalled, “but for the most part they died of meere famine.” The next winter months would prove equally deadly. “It got so very cold and the frost so sharp that I and many others suffered frozen feet,” another witness wrote, adding that the cold was so severe that “the river at our fort froze almost all the way across.”

Fresh groups of colonists arrived in 1608 and 1609, but steady attrition and the “starving time” of 1609–1610 pushed the settlement to the brink. In June 1610, when the two ships arrived with provisions for the emaciated survivors, it seemed too late. Jamestown’s leaders announced to the settlers that they would all return to England by way of Newfoundland. “There was a general acclamation, and shoute of joy,” one person remembered. They set sail on June 17, but the next day, when they reached the small settlement on Mulberry Island along the James River just a few miles away, they sighted another boat, working its way up the river with news that an English relief fleet was on its way with more settlers and enough provisions to last a year. That chance encounter saved the colony of Jamestown. “God would not have it so abandoned,” one settler wrote. The following winter proved less harsh, and by 1614 colonists had begun lucrative exports of tobacco. In 1619 the Virginia House of Burgesses would hold its first assembly in Jamestown.

The brutal story of Jamestown scarcely fits the pageant of success that students are often taught in the condensed version of early American history that starts in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and then jumps to the Pilgrims’ safe landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and their peaceful celebration of the first Thanksgiving the following year. But in his deeply researched and exciting new book, A Cold Welcome, the historian Sam White focuses on the true stories of the English, Spanish, and French colonial expeditions in North America. He tells strange and surprising tales of drought, famine, bitterly cold winters, desperation, and death, while anchoring his research in the methods and results of the science of climate change and historical climatology. In doing so, he erases what C.P. Snow, the British physicist and author of The Two Cultures, considered the damaging cultural barrier and “mutual incomprehension” estranging humanists and scientists from one another.1 “Historians can, and must, embrace this science,” White counsels.

He weaves an intricate, complex tapestry as he examines the effects both of climate—meteorological conditions over relatively long periods of time—and of weather—the conditions of the atmosphere over a short term—on vulnerable colonists in North America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The half-century that led up to the founding of permanent settlements saw, as White notes, “one of the steepest declines in Northern Hemisphere temperatures in perhaps thousands of years.”

His fresh account of the climatic forces shaping the colonization of North America differs significantly from long-standing interpretations of those early calamities. Edmund S. Morgan’s classic American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975) contains a lengthy assessment of the reasons why the Jamestown colonists experienced their “Lord of the Flies” fate. Morgan faults the poor organization and direction of the colony but most of all points to sociological and psychological factors, especially the indolence of the colonists and the large number of “gentlemen” among them who were averse to descending to ordinary labor. “He that will not worke, shall not eate,” John Smith warned them to little avail.2 A Cold Welcome does not replace these well-grounded interpretations but rather supplements them by shining a spotlight on a wholly different dimension: the timing of these colonial enterprises, which ensnared them in what came to be known as the Little Ice Age.

As climatologists define it, the Little Ice Age was a long-term cooling of the Northern Hemisphere between 1300 and 1850. They locate maximum cooling in the early seventeenth century, just when European settlers were attempting to establish colonies in North America.
To reconstruct past climate, scientists use indicators called climate “proxies,” such as ice cores, tree rings, and lake-bottom sediments that they analyze for indications of past temperatures and precipitation. In addition, zooarchaeologists examine animal bones to see what settlers ate, while bioarchaeologists study human skeletons to probe health and nutrition.

Climate proxies also provide important evidence of volcanic activity. Between the 1580s and 1600 large tropical volcanic eruptions spewed dust and sulfates high into the atmosphere, dimming sunlight, cooling Earth’s surface, and causing oscillations in atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Eruptions in Colima, Mexico, in 1586, in Nevado del Ruiz in present-day Colombia in 1595, and especially the huge Huaynaputina eruption in the Peruvian Andes in 1600 helped produce shockingly cold decades.

Even before colonists departed from Europe, their lack of reliable information about the extremes of weather in the Little Ice Age was compounded by fatal misconceptions linking geographical latitudes with climate. Educated in the work of the classical Greek geographer Ptolemy, for whom climate and latitude were synonymous, Europeans assumed that they would find a relatively mild climate in North America, since Britain lies latitudinally north of the continental United States and Paris north of Quebec, while Spain lines up with New Mexico. The confusion sowed by those misleading notions would doom many of their enterprises.

During those harrowing decades, European countries—England and Spain in particular—also suffered from freezing winters, cold, wet summers, intense rain, flooding, ruined crops, famine, outbreaks of disease, plague, and spikes in mortality. In the mid-1590s, William Shakespeare found poetry in the capricious climate of the age:

And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
…The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world
…now knows not which is which.

dunn_2-110917.jpg


Bettmann/Getty Images

Economic and demographic factors, worsened by climate-related disasters, White argues, influenced the colonial ambitions of European nations: “The Little Ice Age came at a particular moment and in a particular way that helped to undermine Spain’s commitment to North American colonization but to reinforce England’s.” He suggests that a pervasive sense of overcrowding in England, worsened by an influx of poverty-stricken famine refugees into London, helped the planners and promoters of American colonies secure private investment and gather public support by depicting North America as an opportune overseas outlet for the surplus population. In Spain, meanwhile, a decline in imperial revenue, heavy military expenses, and disillusionment with the nation’s fragile settlements in North America, along with weather-related hardships and a general sense of crisis in the empire, led King Philip III to pull back on Spain’s North American claims, opening the way for the English and the French to establish their own colonies there and ultimately allowing for a decisive shift of power in the North Atlantic world.

Spain’s expeditions in the early sixteenth century to La Florida—today’s southeastern United States—resulted in lost lives and lost investments. Explorers and colonists expected to find a familiar Mediterranean climate in La Florida: hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters. Instead they encountered wet summers, storms, hurricanes, and freezing winters. “We were farming people in Spain,” wrote one bitterly disillusioned settler in Santa Elena, now Paris Island in South Carolina. “Here we are lost, old, weary, and full of sickness.” In 1587, the few remaining colonists in Santa Elena left for St. Augustine. Frustrated, Philip III was anxious to abandon La Florida and focus instead on New Spain—the territory encompassing the Caribbean and what is now Mexico. In 1608, however, he yielded to Franciscan missionaries who urged him to maintain the settlement in St. Augustine and not abandon the Indians who had been converted to Christianity.

The Spanish colony of New Mexico received a reprieve at the same time and for the same reason: the Franciscans convinced the viceroy of the need to minister to the more than seven thousand Indians who had been baptized. Ever since the colonists’ first arrival in 1540, the barren desert landscape had tested their endurance. In 1598 they set up a base about thirty miles north of present-day Santa Fe, built houses and a church, and dug irrigation channels for crops. But neither they nor the Pueblo Indians, born to that climate, were immune to the hazards of New Mexico’s Little Ice Age.

The nadir came in 1601 following the Huaynaputina eruption, when both colonists and natives found themselves unprepared, physically and psychologically, for one of the coldest and driest periods of the past millennium. During the long freezing winter months, fields of cotton and corn were destroyed, livestock perished in the snow, and even the Rio Grande froze over. Summer was no less discouraging. One witness reported that the four months of summer heat were “almost worse than the cold in winter; and so the saying there is, winter for eight months and hell for four.”

The New Mexico colony all but collapsed at the end of 1601. Gradually, though, the drought came to an end, the winters became less unforgiving, and in 1608 the colonists and missionaries were granted land to set up a new town called Santa Fe, making it, White comments, “an almost exact contemporary of Jamestown.”

In 1609, just when Spanish colonists were securing their settlement in Santa Fe and English colonists starved in Jamestown, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain established a settlement on low ground near the edge of the St. Lawrence River; it had good soil, streams, fresh water, and the protective shelter of high cliffs. He called the colony Quebec, a name derived from the Algonquin word kébec, meaning “where the river narrows.”

Champlain was by then painfully familiar with the climate and geography of the region. He and the explorers Pierre Dugua and François Gravé had already experienced the challenges of establishing settlements in Canada. Their first attempt to set up a colony on the island of St. Croix in the Bay of Fundy failed during the devastating winter of 1604–1605. “The cold is harsher and more excessive than in France and much longer,” Champlain discovered. In the summer of 1605, he and Dugua led the St. Croix colonists who hadn’t died of malnutrition and scurvy to a new site, Port Royal on Nova Scotia. Though the first winter in Port Royal was also deadly, the second one, Champlain noted, “was not so long as in preceding years.” The settlers on Port Royal chanced upon more fresh food, including berries, and suffered fewer instances of scurvy; Champlain’s beneficial creation of a social club, the Order of Good Cheer, also boosted morale. But just when the settlement began to thrive, King Henry IV abruptly canceled the fur trade monopoly that made Port Royal economically viable.

In the end, St. Croix and Port Royal contributed to the eventual success of the French in Canada, for Champlain was able to apply to Quebec what he had learned from the mistakes on St. Croix and the accomplishments in Port Royal. He grasped the importance of constructing storehouses with cellars to insulate food and drink from the winter cold and of locating dwellings around a compact central courtyard for defense against storms as well as Indian attacks. White also praises Champlain for having sought out Native Americans for their local knowledge, though the Frenchman could neither abide nor understand their consumption of raw organ meat—pancreas, kidney, tongue—one of the few sources of ascorbic acid that protected them from scurvy during the frigid winter months.

After decades of failed European expeditions and aborted settlements in North America, England, Spain, and France finally had their first enduring colonies in Jamestown, St. Augustine, Santa Fe, and Quebec in the early seventeenth century. At great cost in lives, money, and hopes and expectations, these colonies not only overcame the rigors and ravages of the Little Ice Age but would come to define much of the cultural heritage of the continent.

White remarks that, in undertaking this intriguing study, he was “conscious of the challenges posed by climate change” today. Indeed, he acknowledges that he wrote A Cold Welcome “from the vantage point of global warming” and that he saw in the colonial period “an era that addresses concerns of the present.” It was “another age when America spoke many languages and when its future, its environment, and its place in the world were all uncertain. It was another age when climatic change and extremes threatened lives and settlements.” But while the Europeans who traveled to North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not responsible for the Little Ice Age, today the responsibility for the global climate lies largely with humanity.

The earliest North American colonies survived the Little Ice Age by the skin of their teeth, but as White points out, other longer-established colonies in the North Atlantic did not. Vikings first settled Greenland in the tenth century. They raised sheep, goats, and cattle, hunted seal and walrus, and had sporadic commerce with the Scandinavian mainland, yet by the mid-1400s nothing more was heard from them. Between 1605 and 1607, Denmark’s King Christian IV sent out three expeditions to find the colonies. His ships struggled through storms, frigid waters, “ilandes of ice,” and “ice piled upon ice so high,” as one contemporary chronicler wrote, “that it resembled great cliffs.” What the sailors finally discovered was a frozen, treeless land sparsely populated by Inuit natives. The Viking families, communities, and churches had vanished long before, victims of climatic change they could neither adapt to nor control.

1
C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959; Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 4. ↩

2
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (Norton, 1975), pp. 75, 78. ↩
 
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jed turtle

a brother in the Lord
Thanks van Koehler. A very sobering insight into the deprivations suffered by all involved some 400 years ago.
 

Faroe

Un-spun
As pointed out above there are a great many variables with each solar minimum, short and long term drought can happen in any given area, winter weather can drift down into the deep south.
Growing crops may only be posable during a shorter window (late spring, summer, early fall) and have to make the best of that time to grow all you can and hopefully have enough not just for your self to make threw to the nest growing season, but to sell or barter with. Large scale farming should be posable in the warmer south. In the more northern areas where they get a three+ month warm weather window cole crops and some root crops and faster growing squash may be the only thing you can grow and survive on.

Post N0# 100 above, in the video Mr. Singer notes the conundrum that we have far more people today then during any of the past solar minimum's I.E. there is just to many of us.

I would suggest thinking more along the lines of grass based agriculture, and nut trees. Sheep, goats, rabbits, and some cattle where feasible. Pigs eat mast from the nuts. Ducks are cold hardy, as well as many chicken breeds. Many nut trees are cold hardy, wild crab apples grow at least into Zone 4.

A bit easier than worrying about the damn broccoli, but then I do much better with orchards, grass, and animals than gardens. YMMV.
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
One of the things that amazed me when reading accounts of life during the Little Ice Age was the great variability in the weather.

The growing season could start off by being typical, but then suffer wide swings in temperatures, even in the middle of summer.

90 degrees one day then a frost the next day.

von Koehler
 

Publius

TB Fanatic
One of the things that amazed me when reading accounts of life during the Little Ice Age was the great variability in the weather.

The growing season could start off by being typical, but then suffer wide swings in temperatures, even in the middle of summer.

90 degrees one day then a frost the next day.

von Koehler




One of the biggest problems was to much rain, if your soil had really good drainage (sandy) you may have a crop by the end of the season.
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
Oliva et al., 2018
Cold period during 1645–1706 (Maunder solar minimum). Cold period during 1810–1838 (Dalton solar minimum). Warm period during the mid-20th and 21st centuries (modern solar maximum).



LIA [Little Ice Age] was characterized by a cold phase having lower annual and summer temperatures relative to the long-term mean, consistent with the solar minima. … The record shows rapid cooling since the start of the Spörer Minimum, which intensified during the Maunder Minimum (with the lowest estimated temperature being 2 °C lower than the recent average). A later increase in the temperature and another slight cooling probably coincided with the Dalton Minimum. Particularly cold winters occurred during the MCA (from 1090 to 1179), during the LIA onset (1350) and from the late 15th to early 16th centuries. Winter temperatures would have been approximately 0.5 °C lower during the LIA (1500–1900) than during the 20th century. … [T]he Maunder Minimum coincided with a cold period from 1645 to 1706, and the Dalton Minimum (1796–1830) is correlated with a cold stage spanning the years from 1810 to 1838.

Four warm periods (1626–1637, 1800–1809, 1845–1859, and 1986–2012) coincided with periods of increased solar activity.

The gradual increase in temperature during the second half of the 19th century resulted in significant glacier retreat, with rates of receding [in the second half of the 19th century] similar to those recorded during the last decades of the 20th century and in the early 21st century (Chueca et al., 2008). … The colder climate of the LIA was accompanied by severe droughts, floods, and cold/heat waves that showed significant spatio-temporal variation across the Iberian mountains.

The 20th century did not show unprecedented warmth over the last 800 years.
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
What is especially frustrating while there has been extensive research into life in the Little Ice Age in Europe, there's not much available about conditions in America. During the LIA, America was sparsely settled and considered just a back water colony and later country.

von Koehler
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
https://royalhistsoc.org/calendar/g...s-volcano-indonesia-1258-english-food-crisis/


timthumb.php


Global climates, the 1257 mega-eruption of Samalas Volcano, Indonesia, and the 1258 English food crisis

Historians justly celebrate 1258 as the year when baronial opposition to Henry III culminated in parliament’s imposition upon the King of the Provisions of Oxford. Less well remembered is the fact that this constitutional conflict unfolded against a background of bad weather, failed harvests, scarce and increasingly dear [British for 'expensive'] food, and mounting hunger. Recent discovery of mass burials in the excavated cemetery of the London hospital of St Mary Spital has refocused attention on the plight of the poor at this time of political turmoil, when the superior institutional and economic resources of the capital rendered it a magnet to those in need. Scientific identification in 2013 of the Samalas Volcano, Indonesia, as the source of perhaps the most explosive eruption of the last 10,000 years, re-dated from 1258 to spring/summer 1257, has endowed the food crisis with further interest, for, analogously, it was global fallout from the mega-eruption of the neighbouring volcano of Tambora in April 1815 that was responsible for the northern hemisphere’s notorious ‘year without a summer’ in 1816. Evaluating the seriousness of the English food crisis of 1258 thus assumes considerable comparative significance, always provided that volcanic forcing of global climates and not some other less conspicuous but equally powerful perturbation was responsible for the run of bad weather that led harvests repeatedly to fail. One thing alone is clear, the 1258 food crisis is the earliest of the long sequence of English subsistence crises upon which documentary evidence of harvests, prices and the comments of contemporaries can shed systematic light, alongside that provided by tree rings and other palaeo-climatic proxies. Although less momentous in its consequences than the concurrent political drama, it demonstrates that the weather, food supplies, charitable relief and the poor all have histories as worthy and rewarding of investigation as affairs of state.

Bruce Campbell is Professor Emeritus of Medieval Economic History at The Queen’s University of Belfast, Fellow of the British Academy, co-author (with Steve Broadberry, Alex Klein, Mark Overton and Bas van Leeuwen) of British Economic Growth 1270-1870, CUP, 2015, and author of The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World, CUP, May 2016.
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
New paper: The missing link between cosmic rays, clouds, and climate change on Earth

Anthony Watts / December 19, 2017

Last week I hinted at this upcoming paper, which was embargoed until this morning. I noted then something Dr. Roy Spencer said in his book about clouds: The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists and how this new paper could be the “holy grail” of climate science, if it is true.

“The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.”

Today, we have news of something that modulates cloud cover in a new paper by Henrik Svensmark in Nature Communications.

PRESS RELEASE: DTU Space at the Technical University of Denmark

A breakthrough in the understanding of how cosmic rays from supernovae can influence Earth´s cloud cover and thereby climate is published today in the journal Nature Communications. The study reveals how atmospheric ions, produced by the energetic cosmic rays raining down through the atmosphere, helps the growth and formation of cloud condensation nuclei – the seeds necessary for forming clouds in the atmosphere. When the ionization in the atmosphere changes, the number of cloud condensation nuclei changes affecting the properties of clouds. More cloud condensation nuclei mean more clouds and a colder climate, and vice versa. Since clouds are essential for the amount of Solar energy reaching the surface of Earth the implications can be significant for our understanding of why climate has varied in the past and also for a future climate changes.

cosmic-ray-particle-shower-atmosphere.jpg


Illustration of cosmic rays interacting with the atmosphere. A proton with energy of 100 GeV interact at the top of the
atmosphere and produces a cascade of secondary particles who ionize molecules when traveling through the air. One 100 GeV proton hits every square meter at the top of the atmosphere every second.

Cloud condensation nuclei can be formed by the growth of small molecular clusters called aerosols. It has until now been assumed that additional small aerosols would not grow and become cloud condensation nuclei, since no mechanism was known to achieve this. The new results reveal, both theoretically and experimentally, how interactions between ions and aerosols can accelerate the growth by adding material to the small aerosols and thereby help them survive to become cloud condensation nuclei. It gives a physical foundation to the large body of empirical evidence showing that Solar activity plays a role in variations in Earth’s climate. For example, the Medieval Warm Period around year 1000 AD and the cold period in the Little Ice Age 1300-1900 AD both fits with changes in Solar activity.

“Finally we have the last piece of the puzzle explaining how particles from space affect climate on Earth. It gives an understanding of how changes caused by Solar activity or by super nova activity can change climate.”

says Henrik Svensmark, from DTU Space at the Technical University of Denmark, lead author of the study. Co- authors are senior researcher Martin Bødker Enghoff (DTU Space), Professor Nir Shaviv (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Jacob Svensmark, (University of Copenhagen).

The new study

The fundamental new idea in the study is to include a contribution to growth of aerosols by the mass of the ions. Although the ions are not the most numerous constituents in the atmosphere the electro-magnetic interactions between ions and aerosols compensate for the scarcity and make fusion between ions and aerosols much more likely. Even at low ionization levels about 5% of the growth rate of aerosols is due to ions. In the case of a nearby super nova the effect can be more than 50% of the growth rate, which will have an impact on the clouds and the Earth’s temperature.

To achieve the results a theoretical description of the interactions between ions and aerosols was formulated along with an expression for the growth rate of the aerosols. The ideas were then tested experimentally in a large cloud chamber. Due to experimental constraints caused by the presence of chamber walls, the change in growth rate that had to be measured was of the order 1%, which poses a high demand on stability during the experiments, and experiments were repeated up to 100 times in order to obtain a good signal relative to unwanted fluctuations. Data was taken over a period of 2 years with total 3100 hours of data sampling. The results of the experiments agreed with the theoretical predictions.

The hypothesis in a nutshell

Cosmic rays, high-energy particles raining down from exploded stars, knock electrons out of air molecules. This produces ions, that is, positive and negative molecules in the atmosphere.

The ions help aerosols – clusters of mainly sulphuric acid and water molecules – to form and become stable against evaporation. This process is called nucleation. The small aerosols need to grow nearly a million times in mass in order to have an effect on clouds.

The second role of ions is that they accelerate the growth of the small aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei – seeds on which liquid water droplets form to make clouds. The more ions the more aerosols become cloud condensation nuclei. It is this second property of ions which is the new result published in Nature Communications.

Low clouds made with liquid water droplets cool the Earth’s surface.

Variations in the Sun’s magnetic activity alter the influx of cosmic rays to the Earth.

When the Sun is lazy, magnetically speaking, there are more cosmic rays and more low clouds, and the world is cooler.

When the Sun is active fewer cosmic rays reach the Earth and, with fewer low clouds, the world warms up.

The implications of the study suggests that the mechanism can have affected:

The climate changes observed during the 20th century

The coolings and warmings of around 2°C that have occurred repeatedly over the past 10,000 years, as the Sun’s activity and the cosmic ray influx have varied.

The much larger variations of up to 10°C occurring as the Sun and Earth travel through the Galaxy visiting regions with varying numbers of exploding stars.

The authors

Dr. Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Institute, in the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

Senior Resercher Martin Andres Bødker Enghoff, Danish National Space Institute, in the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

Professor Nir Shaviv, Physics Institute, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Ph.D. student Jacob Svensmark, Dark Cosmology Center, University of Copenhagen.
 
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von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
Full journal reference

H. Svensmark, M.B. Enghoff, N. Shaviv and J. Svensmark, Increased ionization supports growth of aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei, Nature Communications DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02082-2

The paper is here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02082-2

Abstract:
Increased ionization supports growth of aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei
H. Svensmark 1, M.B. Enghoff 1, N.J. Shaviv2 & J. Svensmark1,3

Ions produced by cosmic rays have been thought to influence aerosols and clouds. In this study, the effect of ionization on the growth of aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei is investigated theoretically and experimentally. We show that the mass-flux of small ions can constitute an important addition to the growth caused by condensation of neutral molecules. Under present atmospheric conditions the growth rate from ions can constitute several percent of the neutral growth rate. We performed experimental studies which quantify the effect of ions on the growth of aerosols between nucleation and sizes >20 nm and find good agreement with theory. Ion-induced condensation should be of importance not just in Earth’s present day atmosphere for the growth of aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei under pristine marine conditions, but also under elevated atmospheric ionization caused by increased supernova activity.

From the discussion section of the paper:

This suggests that there are vast regions where conditions are such that the proposed mechanism could be important, i.e., where aerosols are nucleated in Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone and moved to regions where relative large variations ionization can be found. Here the aerosols could grow faster under the influence of ion condensation, and the perturbed growth rate will influence the survivability of the aerosols and thereby the resulting CCN density. Finally the aerosols are brought down and entrained into the marine boundary layer, where clouds properties are sensitive to the CCN density2.

Although the above is on its own speculative, there are observations to further support the idea. On rare occasions the Sun ejects solar plasma (coronal mass ejections) that may pass Earth, with the effect that the cosmic ray flux decreases suddenly and stays low for a week or two. Such events, with a significant reduction in the cosmic rays flux, are called Forbush decreases, and can be used to test the link between cosmic ray ionization and clouds. A recent comprehensive study identified the strongest Forbush decreases, ranked them according to strength, and discussed some of the controversies that have surrounded this subject.

Atmospheric data consisted of three independent cloud satellite data sets and one data set for aerosols. A clear response to the five strongest Forbush decreases was seen in both aerosols and all low cloud data. The global average response time from the change in ionization to the change in clouds was ~7 days, consistent with the above growth rate of ~0.4 nm h−1. The five strongest Forbush decreases (with ionization changes comparable to those observed over a solar cycle) exhibited inferred aerosol changes and cloud micro-physics changes of the order ~2%7. The range of ion production in the atmosphere varies between 2 and 35 ions pairs s−1 cm−337 and from Fig. 1b it can be inferred from that a 20% variation in the ion production can impact the growth rate in the range 1–4% (under the pristine conditions). It is suggested that such changes in the growth rate can explain the ~2% changes in clouds and aerosol change observed during Forbush decreases.

It should be stressed that there is not just one effect of CCN on clouds, but that the impact will depend on regional differences and cloud types. In regions with a relative high number of CCN the presented effect will be small, in addition the effect on convective clouds and on ice clouds is expected to be negligible. Additional CCNs can even result in fewer clouds. Since the ion condensation effect is largest for low SA concentrations and aerosol densities, the impact is believed to be largest in marine stratus clouds.

Further reading:
COSMIC RAYS, CLOUDS AND CLIMATE
Henrik Svensmark – DOI: 10.1051/epn/2015204
National Space Institute – Technical University of Denmark – Elektrovej, Bygning 328, 2800 Kgs – Lyngby, Denmark
The most profound questions with the most surprising answers are often the simplest to ask. One is: Why is the climate always changing? Historical and archaeological evidence of global warming and cooling that occurred long before the Industrial Revolution, require natural explanations.

Link to the PDF: SvensmarkEPN_46-2-2_2015

From that article:

svensmark-c13-vs-solar.jpg


Red curve is the variation in the local supernova rate, and therefore also the variation in cosmic ray flux during the last 500 Myr. The colored band indicates climatic periods: warm periods (red), cold periods (blue), glacial periods (white and blue hatched bars) and finally peak glaciations (black and white hatched bars). The proportions of carbon-13 in sediments (d13C in parts per mill) over the past 500 Myr, shown in the scattered points, reflect changes in the carbon cycle. d13C carries information on the burial of organic material in sediments, and is therefore a record of bio-productivity. Blue dashed curve is smoothed d13C. Circles are d13C from marine carbonates, open circles with a star symbol, Jurassic to Neogene, are a carbon isotopic record of organic matter. Note that there are three brief gaps in the d13C data (end-Silurian, mid-Carboniferous and mid Jurassic). Abbreviations for geological periods are Cm –Cambrian, O – Ordovician, S – Silurian, D – Devonian, C – Carboniferous, P – Permian, Tr – Triassic, J – Jurassic, K – Cretaceous, Pg –Palaeogene, Ng – Neogene.
 
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