A Sun-Climate Connection on Long Time Scales: Pros and Cons

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7537 Solar And Stellar Variability, 3339 Ocean/Atmosphere Interactions (0312, 4504), 4267 Paleoceanography, 2162 Solar Cycle Variations (7536), 1620 Climate Dynamics (3309)

Scientific paper

A significent obstacle to advancing our knowledge of sun-climate connections is that solar physicists best understand changes in total solar irradiance (TSI) for the 11 year sunspot cycle, while paleoclimatologists tend to find the most convincing sun-climate correlations among cycles in the centennial to millennial band for which TSI changes are unknown. Indeed, some solar physicists argue that there are no trends longer than 11 years in TSI. Lack of a quantitative value for TSI on the longer time scales appears to be underappreciated by modelers and seriously compromises their efforts to understand how the climate system responds to solar variability. Paleoclimatologists and modelers urgently need an agreed upon number for TSI on timescales greater than 11 years. Further complications arise from uncertainty in the relation between TSI and proxies of solar activity, atmospheric radiocarbon and beryllium 10, which extend the observational record of solar activity back to about 12,000 years ago. This is unfortunate because there is increasing evidence for good matches between paleoclimate and nuclide variations of centennial to millennial duration. Cloud-climate connections proposed to resolve this problem, however, are inconsistent with climate during the Laschamp geomagnetic event about 40,000 years ago. The nuclide-TSI connection is another urgent issue that needs to be addressed by solar physicists and cosmogenic nuclide geochemists. It is unlikely that the weak variations in direct solar forcing could have produced climate changes large enough to be resolved in proxy climate records. Strong amplifiers and feedbacks, such as changes in stratospheric ozone, shifts in planetary wave patterns, changes in thermohaline circulation, and excitation of annular modes, must have operated within the climate system. Such amplifying mechanims are suggested by modeling but need confirmation, where possible, from paleoclimate records. Finally, climate models suggest that during the last one to two millennia ENSO, and/or volcanism may have had a larger influence on climate than solar forcing. Yet recent paleoclimate records spanning most of all of the last 12,000 years suggest that at least on time scales of multi-centuries to millennia, solar forcing may be the dominant agent of climate change. Sorting out attribution on different time scales is an especially important problem that the paleoclimate and solar physics communities need to address.

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