Sunspots - The Real Cause of Higher Grain Prices | Tom McClellan

Tom McClellan (Jul 27, 2012) - Sunspots are a big driver for wheat prices. Various pundits are putting out stories blaming the drought in the plains states on global warming [...] A better explanation for the drought, and the ensuing spike in grain prices, is that this is all part of the normal 11-year sunspot cycle. But to find that relationship in the data is what the story is about. The first point to understand is that sunspot activity has now been scientifically linked to changes in cloud formation. When the sun is more active, the charge particles streaming out from sunspot activity help to sweep away cosmic rays that might otherwise hit earth's atmosphere, where they play a role in cloud formation [... | HERE + HERE] Once you get past that more difficult scientific hurdle of understanding that cosmic rays and clouds are related, it is pretty easy to understand that less cloud formation is related to less precipitation, and thus poorer growing conditions for rain-irrigated crops. That is what we are seeing with this year's drought, and it has been pushing up grain prices accordingly. Looking across the last hundred years of price data on wheat, it can be difficult to see the relationship between the sunspot number and wheat prices. Part of this comes from the fact that there are other factors which sometimes act upon crop yields and thus grain pricing. But a big factor is that the units we use to measure wheat prices, i.e. US dollars, can vary themselves, causing the relationship with sunspots to sometimes be disguised by what the dollar itself is doing. 



If we look at the history of these two sets of data before the modern era of floating currency exchange rates, we can better see how they were correlated. This chart shows raw wheat prices, un-adjusted for the value of the dollar. The sunspot number data is shifted forward by 2 years to reveal that bottoms and tops in the sunspot number tend to be followed a couple of years later by bottoms and tops in wheat prices. This relationship got into some trouble in the middle part of the chart, when President Roosevelt's New Deal price fixing artificially inflated wheat prices. The intention in the 1930s was to benefit farmers by keeping wheat prices up. That effort switched during WWII to the government putting a cap on all prices, including wheat, to support the war effort. Rationing of food, fuel, and other items took over for market forces. Additional trouble came in the 1970s, when the Arab Oil Embargo pushed up oil prices in 1973-74, reducing acreage under cultivation. Then later in that decade, the rising value in the dollar pushed down the dollar price of most commodities compared to prices in other currencies. So using dollars to see the normal cyclical relationship in price data became problematic.

All of this explanation brings us (finally!) back to the lead chart above. In [the above] chart, I have adjusted the dollar price of wheat, multiplying it by the US Dollar Index, which was created back in 1971. This mathematical step produces a unit-less measure of the value of wheat by factoring out the dollar's movements. Doing this allows us to better see how the peaks and troughs in wheat prices have been related to the sunspot cycle. I want to emphasize again that the sunspot number is shifted forward in that chart by 2 years, to reveal its leading indication for how wheat prices will behave. The conclusion from this is that the upward move in the value of wheat right now is just following the swoop upward in the sunspot number that began in 2009. We should expect to see generally rising prices for wheat and other grains until about 2 years after the sunspot cycle has peaked, a peak which has not even happened yet.

The Cloud Mystery | Henrik Svensmark

Nir Shaviv and Henrik Svensmark (HERE)

Looking at the Milky Way from above, we see four giant spiral arms. Our solar system is currently located within a small armlet called Orion between the two big spiral arms Sagittarius-Carina and Perseus. But it doesn’t stay there. It rotates at a speed of some 830,000 kilometers per hour around the galactic center and does a whole round about every 250 millions years. This rotation period is called one galactic year. That means on average every about 65 million years our solar system moves through one of the major spiral arms of the milky-way. 

The Solar System's passage
through the Milky Way (HERE)

During such a passage the average temperature on Earth is about 5-10°C colder than outside the spiral arms where more clouds can be created and are causing cooler climatic conditions. Within a spiral arm more cosmic rays reach the Earth because there are more super novae in the immediate neighborhood of our solar system. These dying stars are sending out cosmic rays, subatomic particles with enormous energy rushing through the galaxy at almost the speed of light. And some of them shower and bombard the Earth. In our atmosphere the cosmic rays are nuclei for condensation of water vapor and cloud formation. And the clouds reflect the sunlight and cool the Earth.

The Sun of course also plays an important role in the formation of clouds: When there are a lot of sunspots, the magnetic fields of the Sun are emitting more charged particles, called the solar wind. The solar wind fights and neutralizes the cosmic rays and controls how many of them reach the Earth. During the 20th century the magnetic activity of the Sun has almost doubled. As a result fewer cosmic rays reach the Earth, the cloud cover became thinner and the Earth’s climate warmer. 

Nir Shaviv (HERE)

A ‘lazy’ Sun would produce less magnetic activity, less solar wind and more cosmic rays would reach the Earth’s atmosphere able to build up clouds there and to cool the planet’s climate down: The Sun controls the Earth’s cloudiness. The climate is controlled by the clouds. The clouds are controlled by cosmic rays. And the cosmic rays are controlled by the Sun.

Sources: Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, astrophysicists, Danish National Space Institute (DTU Space), Copenhagen | Nir Shaviv, astronomer,  Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem | Jan Veizer, geologist, Department of  Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa and Institute for Geology, Mineralogy and Geophysics, Bochum Ruhr University | Jasper Kirkby (2011): The CLOUD experiment at CERN [65 m] | Lars Oxfeld Mortensen (2007): The Cloud Mystery - Henrik Svensmark on Climate Change [53 m] | Martin Durkin (2007): The Great Global Warming Swindle [76 m]