Astronomical Society of Australia publishes new paper warning of solar quieting and global cooling

28 06 2008

http://www.astronomy.org.au/ngn/media/client/asa-large.gif A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia titled:

Does a Spin–Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle?

contains a warning about earthly climate change not immediately obvious from the abstract:

Based on our claim that changes in the Sun’s equatorial rotation rate are synchronized with changes in the Sun’s orbital motion about the barycentre, we propose that the mean period for the Sun’s meridional flow is set by a Synodic resonance between the flow period (~22.3 yr), the overall 178.7-yr repetition period for the solar orbital motion, and the 19.86-yr synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn.

According to an interview with Andrew Bolt, of the Australian Newspaper, Herald Sun, Ian Wilson, one of the authors explained:

It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 – 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 – 2 C.

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Hmmm, I’m not sold on this idea. This is a lot like what Dr. Theodor Landscheidt proposes. I have a little bit of trouble understanding how the “mass at a distance” gravitational effects of Jupiter and Saturn could have much effect on the solar dynamo.

I’m sure both my readers, and Dr. Leif Svalgaard, who regularly monitors this blog, will have something to add to provide additional insight. – Anthony


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Categories : Uncategorized

Sun: Still quiet, over two months since a cycle 24 spot seen

28 06 2008

Its all quiet on the solar front. Too quiet. It has now been almost 2 and a half months since the last counted cycle 24 sunspot has been seen on April 13th, 2008. There was a tiny cycle 24 ”sunspeck” that appeared briefly on May 13th, but according to solar physicist Leif Svalgaard, that one never was assigned a number and did not “count”. It is just barely discernable on this large image from that day.


The sun today: spotless

NASA’s David Hathaway updated his solar cycle prediction page on June 4th. The start of cycle 24 keeps getting pushed forward while the ramp up line starts to look steeper into 2009.


Click for full sized image

The most recent forecast ( June 27th, 2008 ) from the Space Weather Prediction Center says little that would suggest our spotless streak would end any time soon:

Solar Activity Forecast: Solar activity is expected to be very
low.

Analysis of Solar Active Regions and Activity from 26/2100Z
to 27/2100Z: Solar activity was very low. No flares occurred during
the past 24 hours and the solar disk remains spotless.

 So when will solar cycle 24 really get going? It seems even the best minds of science don’t know for certain. A NOAA press release issued last year in April 2007 calls for Cycle 24 to be up to a year late, but they can’t decide on the intensity of SC24. That argument is ongoing.

Meanwhile the NOAA SEC Solar Cycle Progression Page looks pretty flat in all metrics charted.

 


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Categories : Science, solar

Coloring the Models: Climate Change through Color Change

28 06 2008

NOTE: Mike alerted me in comments about this article he wrote along the lines of my story on Color and Temperature: Perception is everything. I thought this would be good to examine again.  This article below is re-posted from John Daly’s website, and was originally published July 7th, 2002. – Anthony

By: Michael Ronayne

In a story titled “Coloring Climate Change” by Nick Schulz, Tech Central Station reported that key documents, in a US government report titled “The National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change“, were “doctored” to distort public perceptions of climate change. The report was published by the United States Global Change Research Program. According to their own web page, the USGCRP coordinates the research of ten Federal departments and agencies with active global change programs and provides liaison with the Executive Office of the President. The budget of the USGCRP in fiscal year 2002 was approximately $1.7 billion US dollars.

The National Assessment report has served as the basis for parts of the 2001 National Academy of Sciences’ report “Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions” prepared for President Bush on the state of climate science and, most recently, for the highly controversial “U.S. Climate Action Report – 2002“, covertly issued by climate alarmists within the Environmental Protection Agency, with the objective of embarrassing the Bush Presidency.

The TCS story displays two graphics, shown below. The graph on the left is the one which was circulated during the public comment period after the original draft was developed. It compares the Canadian Model with the Hadley Model for the lower 48 States for the summer months of June through August, over the next 100 years. The TCS story provides additional background on the two graphs and is highly commended to your attention. Then the disparity between the two models’ future forecasts, cast doubt on the predictive capacity of the Canadian and Hadley models, the USGCRP issued the final report on the right, with the color scale altered to obscure the differences between the two models.

Unfortunately for the USGCRP, the two models show the areas of warming and cooling to be occurring in widely different sections of the United States. The USGCRP’s solution to this conundrum was to alter the temperature color scale by eliminating yellow and green, and extending the color orange into negative temperature ranges as low as -1.0°F, thereby implying warming,  when in fact the models were showing no temperature change or cooling for some localities.

Above: When the “Draft” and “Final” copies of the USGCRP graphs are animated, employing a technique used elsewhere on this web site, the amateurish nature of the deception becomes painfully obvious. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Science, climate_change