From the “I hope to God they are flat wrong department”, here is the abstract of a short paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson. It was sent to me by reader Mike Ward.
I previously highlighted a news story on this paper on May 21st, but didn’t have the actual paper until now. If anyone has an update to this paper, which uses data up to 2005, please use the comment form to advise.
Here is the complete paper, and below are some excerpts:
Abstract: We have observed spectroscopic changes in temperature sensitive molecular lines, in the magnetic splitting of an Fe I line, and in the continuum brightness of over 1000 sunspot umbrae from 1990-2005. All three measurements show consistent trends in which the darkest parts of the sunspot umbra have become warmer (45K per year) and their magnetic field strengths have decreased (77 Gauss per year), independently of the normal 11-year sunspot cycle. A linear extrapolation of these trends suggests that few sunspots will be visible after 2015.
Figure – 1. Sample sunspot spectra from the data set. The dashed line is from a sunspot observed in June 1991, and the solid line was observed in January 2002. These provide examples of the trends seen in the data, where the OH molecular lines decrease in strength over time, and the magnetic splitting of the Fe line decreases over time. A magnetic splitting pattern for the January 2002 Fe line of 2466 Gauss is shown, while the June 1991 spectrum shows splitting from a 3183 Gauss field
Figure 2. – The line depth of OH 1565.3 nm for individual spots. The upper trace is the smoothed sunspot number showing the past and current sunspot cycles; the OH line depth change seems to smoothly decrease independently of the sunspot cycle.
Figure 3. – A linear fit to observed magnetic fields extrapolated to the minimum value observed for umbral magnetic fields; below a field strength of 1500G as measured with the Fe I 1564.8nm line no photospheric darkening is observed.
Figure 4 – A linear fit to the observed umbral contrast values, extrapolated to show that by 2014 the average umbrae would have the same brightness as the quiet Sun.
They write: Sunspot umbral magnetic fields also show systematic temporal changes during the observing period as demonstrated by the sample spectra in Figure 1. The infrared Fe 1564.8 nm is a favorable field diagnostic since the line strength changes less than a factor of two between the photosphere and spot umbra and the magnetic Zeeman splitting is fully resolved for all sunspot umbrae. In a histogram plot of the distribution of the umbral magnetic fields that we observe, 1500 Gauss is the smallest value measured. Below this value photospheric magnetic fields do not produce perceptible darkening. Figure 3 presents the magnetic fields smoothed by a 12 point running mean from 1998 to 2005. The ordinate is chosen so that 1500 G is the minimum. A linear fit to the changing magnetic field produces a slope of 77 Gauss per year, and intercepts the abscissa at 2015. If the present trend continues, this date is when sunspots will disappear from the solar surface.
Let us all hope that they are wrong, for a solar epoch period like the Maunder Minimum inducing a Little Ice Age will be a worldwide catastrophe economically, socially, environmentally, and morally.
I’m still very much concerned about the apparent step change in 2005 to a lower plateau of the Geomagnetic Average Planetary (Ap) index, that I’ve plotted below. This is something that does not appear in the previous cycle:
click for a larger image
What is most interesting about the Geomagnetic Average Planetary Index graph above is what happened around October 2005. Notice the sharp drop in the magnetic index and the continuance at low levels, almost as if something “switched off”.
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Has there been any interesting change in solar diameter over the past 20 years or so? Last I read the Sun was showing fairly consistent shrinkage of something like 2 seconds per century or something. I am wondering if that has changed significantly over the past decade or so.
My thought being that we know the Sun is a variable star. And we haven’t been observing it for very long in geological time scales. What if it is in a sort of period of oscillation with some hysteresis? What if the current periods of glaciation and interglacials are due to oscillations inside the Sun? What if the shrinks and gets hotter in the interior and after some thousands of years that heat and light makes its way out and the Sun expands slightly until some point is reached where something “turns off” … say some small amount of helium is being fused but the pressure drops to a point where that stops happening and we have only hydrogen fusion again. And at some point the Sun cools and it begins to shrink again and temperatures and pressures rise but it takes longer to re-ignite or re-start whatever was going on. So you could end up with a 10 percent duty cycle of 100,000 years off and 10,000 years on. At some point the temperature and pressure would rise again due to contraction where whatever it is would turn on, and solar output would jump up, bring us out of the ice age until the Sun expanded enough to shut that down again and we go into another ice age.
So I suppose what I am really wondering is that since we know that part of the life cycle of the Sun will be an eventual switchover to fusing mostly helium from mostly hydrogen, maybe that switchover isn’t “clean”. Maybe it starts and “blows itself out” and then starts again but maybe burns just a little longer before “blowing itself out” again and so forth with the helium cycle lasting a little longer each time and so we end up with a situation where the interglacials get a little hotter and/or a little longer each time until there just aren’t any anymore and we really begin to heat up.
Just musing from a bored engineer with nothing better to occupy his time at the moment 🙂
Hang on – “morally”?? How do you attach morality to a lack of sunspots?
REPLY: From the changes that will occur in governments and populations as they jockey for survival in a colder, disrupted world.
Ultimately these types of things further drive home the point that our existence here is so delicate and at the mercy of forces completely beyond our control. Basically it means we don’t amount to a hill of beans in this universe.
Hi Anthony,
A little OT but “NASA’s press office “marginalized or mischaracterized” studies on global warming between 2004 and 2006, the agency’s own internal watchdog concluded.”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,362023,00.html
Has anyone looked into Chinese sun spots records during the period surrounding the end of the MWP? Or at the end of the RWP?
On an unrelated note . . . I hear Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras are really great places to shop for land/housing.
Hi Anthony, I’ll try again repost if necessary
I started a topic over at the climate audit bb.
http://www.climateaudit.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=325
We are discussing barycentric, planetary, magnetic and gravitational influences on the sun and our climate. I am going to put some links here but be warned that they may take some reading and some are pretty easy reading. Leif will love these..LOL sarc off. The Hung paper is very interesting but for some reason Saturn is not on there
Theodor Landscheidt’s papers.
http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/papers-by-dr-theodor-landscheidt
Mississippi River Flow
http://ks.water.usgs.gov/Kansas/pubs/reports/paclim99.html
Nile River Flow
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/Conf2007/Alexander-etal-2007.pdf
Jupiter Saturn cycles
http://www.bnhclub.org/JimP/jp/comp1.JPG
Ching-Cheh Hung
Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio
http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/reports/2007/TM-2007-214817.pdf
The sun’s magnetic ropes twist up and twist down. Each rotation section twisting on a different rotational speed. When things are really tightly wound, lots of entwined magnetic ropes sprout to the surface and become sunspots. It would seem to me that occasionally, all the twisting rotating speeds rotate into synchrony. When this happens, no sun spots would occur. As the speeds slowly differential once again, sunspots would begin to occur. How long this takes may be what happens during minimums, especially really long cold ones. Just thinking out loud.
“Ultimately these types of things further drive home the point that our existence here is so delicate and at the mercy of forces completely beyond our control. Basically it means we don’t amount to a hill of beans in this universe.” Jeff Alberts
Jeff, You have it exactly backwards. Yes, our existence is delicately balanced and has been for a long time. I am confident that SOMEONE is keep it balanced for our sake and it ain’t Al Gore.
I would apprecieate Lief’s comments/thoughts on the last graph.
Jim Arndt (17:48:08):
Very interesting -especially liked the Chavratova article on the 178 year solar-jupiter dance and the correlation of disordered solar orbits with solar minima/cooling.
I close my eyes:
I think they’ve seen enough,
Light hurts:
Can anyone switch off the sun?
Switch off the sun the stars and the moon
I have all I need inside of this room
Turn off the sun
Take down the moon
Eliminate the words “I love you”
She lost her soul
And there are no ears to hear her cries
The sun is gone
Even the rocket scientists have trouble predicting sunspot cycles. I keep a few bookmarks in a folder I call “10 inches of partly cloudy” (As a meteorologist, Anthony probably cringes at that title) with really bust forecasts of whatever. The article at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10mar_stormwarning.htm has earned its rightful place in that folder. This version appears to have been issued for the dumbed down press…
=======================================
March 10, 2006: It’s official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.
Like the quiet before a storm.
This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.
=======================================
A similar news release at http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/sunspot.shtml is more detailed and has more graphs, but the drift is the same.
REPLY: Sounds like “10 years of partly spotty”. – Anthony
reflections on the blank, pitiless gaze of the sun (thanks to Y.B. Yeats)
The sun ain’t got no spots.
That means it won’t get hot.
If they stay away,
they’ll be cold to pay.
hey! The sun ain’t got no spots.
Bill Livingston sent me the same file yesterday, I was a awaiting his permission before passing it on to you. I think there are snippets of a slightly more recent version that stretches the data back in time a bit. I don’t think there’s anything with newer data plotted, but the data may be logged. I did ask how they are doing with measuring sunspecks, but haven’t heard back.
The thing I find fascinating are the linear trends and the non-coupling to the 11 year cycle. It’s unfortunate that there is so little to compare it to and less idea of what’s behind it. The trend could suddenly change and sunspots could reassert their glory or cycle 24 could finally get rolling only to fade into a Maunder-style minimum a few years later.
The only problem with these extrapolations is they look an awful lot like the sort of global warming extrapolations that we’ve been treated to. We all know just how error-prone extrapolation can be.
Look at fig. 3. The authors are extrapolating a 6 year trend (2000 to 2006) out an extra 9 years to 2015. If they extrapolated 9 years the other way (back to 1991) they’d be dead wrong.
“a Little Ice Age will be a worldwide catastrophe economically, socially, environmentally, and morally…”
Most of these I can understand. But ‘morally’?
Perhaps you are concerned that when people wrap up warm under the sheets they might get up to naughty things…?
REPLY: If such a minimum materializes, and we see crop failures and food shortages, watch for the moral change in the way certain governments deal with the proble,
I hope we don’t get a serious sunspot minimum.
In any event, I like the proposal I heard somewhere, might have been here, to label the next sunspot minimum the Al Gore minimum.
Another note:
My comments regarding the role of the sun in climate were not posted on Dot Earth. This was also my response to the charge I was one of the “scurrilous, industry-paid denialists, come here to spread confusion among the uninitiate.”
It would appear if you believe the sun might have something to do with the climate, you’re not allowed to talk to others about it.
Honestly, I was hoping a Dalton Minimum to be in the works in order to shut up the sophomoric AGW scientists. Indeed the mitigation programs these alarmist climate brats have been advocating would be far worse for humanity than what a Dalton Minimum cold possibly muster.
However, even I would prefer not to see future generations have to go through Maunder-type Minimum, as the aftermath would be worse than what even Al Gore could bring us.
Still, I’m not going to lose any sleep over this, as this is just another worst case scenario. I seriously doubt this will materialise.
William,
You are right, of course, about extrapolations being risky business. In fact, the same thought occurred to me regarding the “global warming” theory being so dependent on extrapolations.
However, a few differences are worth noting:
1. Livingston and Penn are careful to couch their summary not as a prediction but as an “if” … as with “… if the present trend continues, this date is when sunspots will disappear from the solar surface.” As I see it, they are merely presenting what they know and examining one possible outcome if the current trends continue. That seems reasonable to me. It’s interesting data and shows one possible significant outcome.
2. Livingston and Penn base their extrapolations on actual data. The IPCC extrapolates from model results built on assumptions (not proven) using models that cannot accurately predict current climate from past data. Consequently, IPCC projections/extrapolations are worthless as they have been historically misused in the summary reports. IPCC takes things further by attempting to put a label on naked guessing that sounds like valid statistical estimations of likelihood. This is effective technique for dealing with journalists and politicians. It is also nothing but old-fashioned propaganda; it certainly isn’t science. But wrapped in mounds of data and charts, it’s evidently enough to fool those same journalists and politicians.
But your basic point is well worth keeping in mind with any extrapolation. I appreciate the caution that Livingston and Penn have evidently placed on theirs.
For amusement, imagine if there were a UN-sponsored organization, the IPSC (change “Climate” in IPCC to “Solar”), tasked with finding a solar cause for global cooling. This paper would be sufficient to be featured in IPSC reports as well as Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc., etc., and it would have been full of dire warnings of future glacial advances. Media would pounce on the extrapolations as valid predictions. Politicians and journalists might be advocating burning more fossil fuel in order to counteract the solar influence on global climate cooling.
Regards,
Bob
Yesterday upon the Sun
I spied a spot that wasn’t fun.
It wasn’t there again today.
I wish that spot would stop its play.
Oh no – I’ve been infected too!
IMHO, this falls into the same category as AGW-prognosticators’ theories.
It is an attempt to predict the future, based on woefully inadequate data, extrapolating from past cycles which proved to be relatively unpredictable, using recent data to extrapolate in a largely linear fashion.
In short: it falls into the same logical and scientific traps which besets AGW.
There are some things we can say about this subject, with relative assurance: – the absolute number of sunspots are presently very low;
– our limited observations suggest that, with a slight lag, periods of lower sunspot activity might coincide with less recorded high temperature extremes.
– in the past, the present rate of sunspot activity has tended to indicate that we are towards the bottom of the present “cycle”;
– within our very small number of observations, this current bottoming is not particularly short;
– we have data on far too few cycles to know whether or not this is a typical cycle, nor whether the average 11 year cycle is valid;
– there are over 90,000 eleven year periods per million years.
I dislike “future machines” almost as much as many people dislike the uncertainty and unpredictablility of tomorrow.
IMO, those who simply use past graphs/frequencies/data/etc. in an attempt to predict the future are not employing the scientific method (there is no hypothesis, which might be disproven or supported), but merely extrapolating.
Extrapolation is an interesting (some would say existential) pastime, but it is not science – even when enhanced via supercomputer.