http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/239625

Sunspot cycle more dud than radiation flood
By Dan Sorenson
arizona daily star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 05.19.2008

Many solar scientists expected the new sunspot cycle to be a whopper, a prolonged solar tantrum that could fry satellites and raise hell with earthly communications, the power grid and modern electronics.

But there’s scant proof Sunspot Cycle 24 is even here, let alone the debut of big trouble.

So far there have been just a couple minor zits on the face of the sun to suggest the old cycle is over and the new one is coming.

The roughly 11-year cycle of sunspot activity should have bottomed out last year, the end of Cycle 23 and the beginning of Cycle 24. That would have put the peak in new sunspot activity around 2012.

But a dud sunspot cycle would not necessarily make it a boring period, especially for two solar scientists with the Tucson-based National Solar Observatory.

Two years ago, William Livingston and Matt Penn wrote a paper for the journal Science predicting that this could not only be a dud sunspot cycle, but the start of another extended down period in solar activity. It was based on their analysis of weakening sunspot intensity and said sunspots might vanish by 2015.

The paper, rejected in peer review, was never published by Science. Livingston said he’s OK with the rejection.

“I accept what the reviewers said,” Livingston said. “‘If you are going to make such statement, you had better have strong evidence.’ ”

Livingston said their projections were based on observations of a trend in decreasingly powerful sunspots but reviewers felt it was merely a statistical argument.

…

The twisting and kinking up of the magnetic ropes that cause these sun spots to appear occur away from the equator first. That’s why the beginning of each cycle shows spots away from the equator. At its peak, the sun is all twisted up like a ball of yarn that has been attacked by a litter of kittens. Then as the twisting energy dies down (somehow the ropes untangle) in that area of the sun, the middle becomes the main territory for spots. This area eventually loses its tangles as well as everything stops twisting up. Meantime, the areas of the sun away from the equator start twisting up again but the polarity will be switched for the sun spots that occur.

Anybody else have a better way to explain polarity of sun spots?

Back to reality, it looks like we have two cycle 24 spots forming along with two cycle 23 spots http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_mag/512/. Is this the beginning of the end for Cycle 23?

REPLY: Thanks for the heads up, but these are small, Cycle 23 spots and numbered 994, 995, and 996. No evidence in the magnetogram of cycle 24 polarity and the latitudes are too close to the equator.

Oops! So much for your reality Mikey! Might want to try the real thing next time.

http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/Solar_Arch_NY_Mar2_08.pdf

I took some time to read this paper over, and I think it’s very well done. On the other hand, he also draws some pretty large conclusions based on one curretn data point. Part of me fears he’s right and most of me hopes he’s wrong. But his conclusions do correspond with Landscheidt’s prediction of a Grand Minimum around 2030. Yay…

Anyway, I have technical question on the chart where he shows the cycle 22 and cycle 23 sunspot overlap as we transitioned into cycle 23 at minimum. He clearly labels 5/1996 as the minimum, but I have heard hear that minimum occurs at the point where the new cycle sunspots > old cycle sunspots. According to his chart, this occurred in November 1996. It appears he is defining minimum as the point in which the total sunspost number, cycle 22 + cycle 23 combined reached its lowest point.

I’m not sure if this would change his analysis or not, since he may consistently define it this way for the purposes of his study. But it may impact it, and it seems to muddly the waters as to how long this cycle really is by half a year.

Can someone clarify this for me? It’s questions like this that keep me up at night…

Traciatim: Nice graph! It is indeed pretty clear there is a 11 year cycle in temperature which follows the sunspot number (and more directly, TSI) pretty closely, but as you say, it’s not large. Beware, however of thinking this is simple – the phase relationship changes over time:

http://www.woodfortrees.org//plot/sidc-ssn/scale:0.0001/offset:-0.01/from:1850/fourier/low-pass:25/inverse-fourier/from:1900/to:2000/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:12/fourier/low-pass:25/inverse-fourier/derivative/from:1900/to:2000

I don’t know why that would be…

The relationship with CO2 is also complex. It’s pretty clear that CO2 has been increasing steadily (if you filter out the annual signal, anyway), and I have no reason to think it’s not mostly man-made. However, if you look at the fine grain, some of the off-trend CO2 variation seems to be causedby short-term temperature changes:

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958

This is of course a positive feedback, albeit a fairly minor one.

The big question is whether the 1960-1998 upward temperature trend is caused by the gross CO2 trend, or just happened to be going up at the same time, and (to a small degree) fed back to it. The spike in 1998 was clearly a once-off, but even if you look at the last 8 years or so, there’s no longer any obvious connection:

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2000/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/from:2000/normalise

Again, from what I can see at this rather simplistic numerical level there’s no reason to doubt there is some impact of CO2 on temperature; what interests me is what other cycles there are (e.g. PDO) that might explain a proportion of the 1960-1998 warming, and hence reduce the future projections, and, more importantly, whether there is really the water vapour feedback that triggers the more extreme forecasts – I just can’t see it from the data…

Enjoy playing!

Paul

REPLY: Thanks for the heads up, but these are small, Cycle 23 spots and numbered 994, 995, and 996. No evidence in the magnetogram of cycle 24 polarity and the latitudes are too close to the equator.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:24/from:1965/plot/esrl-co2/normalise/mean:4/from:1965/plot/sidc-ssn/normalise/from:1965/mean:12

Am I just not using it correctly?

REPLY: It appears you setup the graphing correctly. Finding correlations between the SSN and surface temperature record has been the whole reason for the creation and existence of that website. Serious kudos to Paul Clark for setting it up.

I think they are unwittingly setting themselves up for government fraud. They’ve gone from being a supplier of data for governments to use constructively, to being a manipulator of data to pressure governments to act as they see politically correct. This is fraud. If we lie to the government, then we get nailed big time. The same has to apply to everyone.

I can see them getting away with their scam if the temperature hovers at the current cooler levels. But if it gets another half degree C cooler, I think it’s going to be awfully tough for them to convince the public it’s warming as usual. Enough ramble.

Another topic:
Looking at the last SST chart, the PDO seems to be truly going cool. La Nina seems to be fading.
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/climo&hot.html
What can we expect with a combination El Nino and cool PDO and cool AMO?
Has this combination ever occurred in recent history? 1960s maybe?
Perhaps some experts could shine some light on this?

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/alerts/solar_indices.html