Guest post by David Archibald
With respect to the month of minimum, it is very likely that Solar Cycle 24 has started simply because Solar Cycle 23 has run out. Most solar cycles stop producing spots at about nineteen years after solar maximum of the previous cycle. Solar Cycle 23 had its genesis with the magnetic reversal at the Solar Cycle 22 maximum. As the graph above shows, Solar Cycle 23 is now 19 years old. Only 9% of the named solar cycles produced spots after this.
The graph also shows the position of Solar Cycle 24 relative to its month of genesis. Solar Cycle 24 is now the second latest of the 24 named solar cycles. January is 105 months after the Solar Cycle 23 maximum. Only Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum, is later. This lateness points to Solar Cycle 24 being very weak.
This graph shows the initial ramp ups of six solar cycles that were preceded by a vey low minimum. The ultimate trajectory of Solar Cycle 24 should be apparent by late 2009. If Solar Cycle 24 is going to be as weak as expected, the monthly sunspot number should remain under 10 by the end of 2009.
Already updated, but this was the text was when I first noticed it:
” A new sunspot is emerging inside the circle region–and it is a strange one. The low latitude of the spot suggests it is a member of old Solar Cycle 23, yet the magnetic polarity of the spot is ambiguous, identifying it with neither old Solar Cycle 23 nor new Solar Cycle 24. Stay tuned for updates as the sunspot grows.”
spaceweather.com
The newest from spaceweather.com:
Yesterday’s sunspot (NOAA 1011) has rapidly faded away. The sunspot’s low latitude suggests it may have been a member of old Solar Cycle 23; the sunspot’s magnetic polarity was unusual and did not clearly identify it as a member of either Cycle 23 or Cycle 24. Credit: SOHO/MDI
So, maybe, Solar Cycle 23 has not yet run out. After 400 years of studying solar activity scientifically, we do not know what happens next. After 100 years or so of oceanography we do not know when the next El Nino event will occur. After 80 years of quantum mechanics, we cannot calculate the excitation spectrum of a simple tri-atomic molecule such as H2O with sufficient accuracy, not even the ground state.
The strange Cycle 23 sunspot number 1011 has faded from view in less than a day. The sunspot number is back to zero.
Congratulations to Anthony and Wattsupwiththat for being voted Best Science Blog. A GREAT choice!
SC5 is my #1 choice, followed by 6 and 7.
As wimpy and wispy as SC24 spots are, coupled with the sparseness of activity at perigee, I can easily see a big letdown after March.
We just spent 2008 getting teased with “just a few more months and we’ll know more” and what did it get us?
Burned. Duped. Egg on face.
No thanks, I’ll go with door #5, as that’s the worst case that meets the criteria of “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into”.
Sunspot 11011 wasn’t much better than the one on Sept 11, 2008.
Are we that hungry for spots?
Slim Pickin’s, indeed.
Here’s the USAF/NOAA statement about the most recent sunspot activity:
Joint USAF/NOAA Report of Solar and Geophysical Activity
SDF Number 019 Issued at 2200Z on 19 Jan 2009
IA. Analysis of Solar Active Regions and Activity from 18/2100Z
to 19/2100Z: Solar activity remained very low. Ephemeral Region 1011
(S12W25) emerged early in the period and was spotless by days end.
It sported a few penumbraless spots at its peak and old Cycle 23
magnetic polarity. Little else of significance occurred or was
noted.
So it looks like Cycle 23 has not stopped producing spots quite yet.
Nice post, this seems to confirm my results. If you don’t mind, where did you get the individual cycle data?
Solar Cycle 23 had its genesis with the magnetic reversal at the Solar Cycle 22 maximum
No, this is not how the Sun works. The polar fields are build up as fundamentally a random process. Only 1/1000 of the magnetic flux end up at the poles, corresponding to only a handful of active regions. To generate the next cycle, more flux must first go to the poles, this takes a couple of years. A shear zone [the torsional oscillation] starts to build up shortly after that [now typically two years later] at about latitude 50 degrees. The shear zone is either involved in [or the result of – we are not sure yet which] the generation of the spots just polewards of the zone. The shear zone migrates to the equator a couple of years after reversal. You can see the process here [lower plot]: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/torsional.html and here
http://www.leif.org/research/Torsional%20Oscillation.pdf and [in a little while when a DoS attack has been defeated] an up-to-date version at http://www.leif.org/research/SolarCycleMinima.ppt
The bottom line of all this is that the cycle is born a few years AFTER polar field reversal and that the time between reversal and birth can vary. So, there is no direct physical reason the line things up at reversal or maximum [these two don’t always coincide either]. Doing so anyway is just numerology.
My take on all this:
(1) Although dedicated scientists, including brilliant contributors to this blog, are trying very hard, no one has proven that they can accurately model solar cycles.
(2) If the right temporal averaging routine is applied to a variety of sun-related factors (eg. solar cycle length, sunspot number, geomagnetic effects of solar wind, proxies of cosmic ray intensities), correlations with global and regional temperature are much stronger than that with CO2 and this is not merely because it is the “noise” on an underlying greenhouse gas forcing trend. The correlation works broadly as well, at any time scale, even if you go back millions of years. We should be trying to figure out why the correlations are fairly consistent. On the basis of solar radiation intensity variations, one would not expect the effect to be strong, a point often raised by the AGW crowd. However, the correlations are reasonably strong and indicate some sort of causation. Does Svensmark have it right? I don’t know, but there is something there. Just because we do not have a mechanism doesn’t mean it is all wrong and greenhouse gases are controlling the trend. Which is more likely… that a factor with poor correlation over the past 500 million years is the control, or that a factor with moderately strong correlation is the control?
(3) Very intelligent people can be delusional. When surrounded by like-minded individuals, people will believe very strange things. As a scientist, I can say that this includes people with Ph.D.’s (I happen to be one of them, and feel that this, in its own right, adds very little to credibility). Hence, I am only mildly surprised that many climate scientists scoff at the idea that the sun is important in climate variability. I don’t think many of them know they are part of the politicization of the AGW debate (which they say is over), but I see it daily. I actually don’t think it’s a conspiracy. Instead, my hypothesis is that, because many of the skeptics are vocal and linked to organizations that don’t exactly have a reputation for environmental friendliness, skepticism becomes unacceptable amongst academics at most institutions. They are operating within the AGW paradigm. I know this sounds ‘Kuhnian’, but it’s true: any skepticism (which is supposed to be a pillar of scientific thought) is treated with an unusually high degree of suspicion and we are lumped in with a variety of world views which we may or may not hold. I like to consider myself as an outlier: an alternative-thinking environmentalist (seriously, not only a partial climate change skeptic, but even an atheist, a conservationist, a vegetarian… the whole nine yards), who feels that the effect of CO2 has been overestimated by the IPCC (incidentally, I accept their theory – I really do – just not the magnitude, and I feel that CO2 is by far the weaker of the two in the temperature-CO2 trend over the ages). I haven’t met another skeptic like me… I digress and admit that much of this is irrelevant, but this is partly my point. The message here is that some of the most intelligent people I have ever met in my life are fervent and vocal defenders of AGW. What needs to be understood, however, is that neither this, nor ‘consensus’ (real or imagined) can be considered as evidence when they are operating within the governing paradigm. We used to think that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and it fit observations very well, didn’t it ?
(4) With regard to the length of the solar cycle, I understand and largely agree with your analysis, but cycle length, to my knowledge, is not traditionally calculated the way that you have expressed above. Indeed, by traditional measures, I think the cycle length remains below 13 years at present. Clearly, if cycle length is a determinant of the strength of the forthcoming cycle, we would be in for a very weak cycle. The strange thing is that there are exceptions, and my limited understanding is that prediction is more complicated than this. Why is this? I’ll leave this to Svalgaard (who seems to be onto something) and Hathaway (who seems to have a willingness to step down honestly from the bold predictions he is forced to make).
(5) This is my main point. We will soon have a much better idea of the relative strengths of the solar and greenhouse gas controls. Given that we’re coming out of a Grand Maximum into what may turn out to be some sort of period of low activity, we may have a better idea of the relative strength of solar and greenhouse controls on global climate within a decade or so. If a cooling trend occurs, this will give AGW proponents something to think about, especially if this extends through periods without cooling oceanic oscillations such as La Nina. If the reverse is true, and solar cycles fail to be the main climate driver for the first time in a very long time (an argument could be made for this for 1980ish to about 2000 or so), then many of the skeptics on this forum will have something to think about. That’s the beauty of freedom of speech. Information will get out, and debunk any false ‘consensus’ in the long run. But then again, I’m assuming that we actually are heading into a weak cycle and this assumption is based on little more than an empirically-derived hunch.
I predicted 2009 non-SC24 spots some time ago (5 October 2008). The magnetic polarity of this one was slightly unclear, but I read it as SC23 polarity, (if not SC25), based on the NE-SW orientation of the centroids of the black and white areas. This doesn’t match NASAway expectations, and probably couldn’t fade away fast enough to suit them. (Are euphemisms like ‘pseudospot’ or ‘bichromatic plage’ dancing in NASA heads? Nah. One swallow doesn’t make a summer. But what does a robin in January make?)
RE: As the graph above shows, Solar Cycle 23 is now 19 years old. Only 9% of the named solar cycles produced spots after this.
I’m curious as to what % of the solar cycles that reach 19 years, go longer?
lulo (21:34:23) :
That was a very well reasoned statement. Thank you.
The question I have is: how worried should we be about the future climate?
hmmm … Barycentric Tidal Theory. BTT … ugly acronym.
Everything seems to point in that direction. Could we get a couple programmers actually working on something that might lead to some level of understanding?
Unlike Werner Weber’s initial depressing statement on the level of knowledge we have on the subject we do understand gravity fairly well.
All we need is a bit of help correlating the location of the mass and its movement over time in our solar system. Then we could put the tired statistics to bed and do a little ‘high tide’, ‘low tide’ calculation. From what I’ve read, the sun is in ‘low tide’.
Anyway, like lulu inferred … reality will tell us to look harder at the solar influence over the Earth’s climate.
In the mean time I will run my coal fired power plant I chose to work in knowing I am helping the biosphere by liberating carbon from the Earth’s crust, so efficiently scrubbed from the atmosphere over time. At the same time, I will endeavor to reduce NOx, SOx, lead, mercury and other real pollutants.
“After 400 years of studying solar activity scientifically, we do not know what happens next. After 100 years or so of oceanography we do not know when the next El Nino event will occur. After 80 years of quantum mechanics, we cannot calculate the excitation spectrum of a simple tri-atomic molecule such as H2O with sufficient accuracy, not even the ground state.” – Werner Weber
Thanks Werner that’s the most positive thing I’ve read all week! I hear so many jaded twenty somethings saying all the best science is done, and the science is settled. When nature continues to throw us new questions on a daily basis. I bet we know about 5% of how the universe actually works.
Human beings when it comes to life on this planet, got on the bus last, have no idea how the bus works, and somehow we think we’re driving. As a race we are quite insane, and it makes me laugh.
[snip]
REPLY: Humorous yes, and I appreciate humor, but it really has nothing at all to do with this thread. Try posting on the Obama inauguration thread, which is political. Unfortunately WordPress.com does not provide any method for me to move comments to other threads. – Anthony
The sun delivers to the earth 10**17 Watt or 10**8 Gigawatt of power, the equivalent of 100 Millionen big power stations – the Chinese are presently opening 50 new such 1-Gigawatt coal fired power stations per year.
The sun seems to deliver this power with a 0.1 %, maybe 0.2 % variation over decades, centuries or even much longer. There are no indications of larger variations on a century span.
Strong variations are caused by the sun concerning the galactic cosmic ray spectrum, intensity changes of order 20 % occur during solar cycles. The fingerprints of these variations correlate well with global temperature variations, over the last millenium, over the holocene, over the ice age as a whole – I mean the Bond events and the Dansgaard-Oeschger events (see Fred Singer), not the big variations of the Milankovitch cycles. You may go back even further, see the Veizer Shaviv paper.
However, the power delivered on earth by GCR is 1ppb of the solar power (10**-9), or equivalent to a 100 Megawatt station, 1/10 of one big one.
Now, the GCR’s are very special and may induce a lot of effects, one of them could be controlling cloud formation (Svensmark). This could indeed influence climate on the large scale seen by global warming.
On the other hand, mankind is presently producing power from fossile fuels on the scale of several ppm of the solar power arriving on the earth.
Lulo,
I too am an environmentalist, an environmental professional, a forester, and a steward of the land. Studying and stewarding the environment has been my vocation and avocation for 35 years, all my adult life. I know the weight of responsibility for large tracts of land and to the people who depend on that land for vital resources such as food, fiber, water, wildlife, recreation, public health and safety, and heritage.
I too am disaffected by academics who have never shared such responsibilities and who cling to old paradigms peppered with anomalies. How trite and removed they seem, and decidedly unscientific. The dire reports of boiling seas, the end of Creation, and other alarmist nonsense is an embarrassment, and should be rejected by serious people. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about the intellectual bankruptcy of academia today.
I don’t know what SC 24 will be, or if it will affect the climate. But as an agrarian I do know that falling temperatures present hardships, whereas rising temperatures offer bounty and productivity. Warmer is better, based on modern observation of our biosphere as well as study of paleobotany and paleozoology. Fear of warmth is misplaced, illogical, a-historical, and a-scientific, but concern about deepening cold is rational for many reasons.
The alarmism about global warming is a stunning example of human folly. We are no wiser today than we were a thousand or ten thousand years ago. Folly still rules the human condition. In the temples of academia, where rationality should be worshiped, folly is more powerful than ever. That tragedy, the failure of reason after millennia of striving, is perhaps the thing to be feared the most.
Leif Svalgaard (10:29:37) :
I said:
The Hale cycle is 2 Schwabe cycles, and whether it starts at maximum or minimum is beside the the point. Archibald through creative thinking has a found a statistic that is interesting. It might be time for the more creative amongst us.
Svalgaard replied:
The difference between ‘wrong’ and ‘nonsense’ is that the former is just being factual incorrect, the latter is being conceptually incorrect.
So, the currently fading SC23 spot belongs to the ‘Hale’ cycle that started in 1990 at the maximum of cycle 22 according to ‘creative’ thinking. Schwabe and Hale cycles start near minimum according to established nomenclature. Mixing min and max is what is nonsense.
Even if we count from previous maximum, SC22 produced spots 19 years later, SC21 produced spots 20 years later, SC20 produced spots 20 years later, SC19 produced spots 20 years later, etc. Being factually correct beats creative thinking every time. The butterfly diagram http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif is good for this.
I said:
I might wait for Dr. Archibald’s response.
Very timely, thanks Dr. Archibald. BTW this discussion will all be irrelevant very soon, my report is not finished yet but shows incredible correlation going back nearly 6000 years that except for times like the MWP we have had grand minima (of different levels) every 172 years (Jose’s work will need to be revisited) along with grand maxima peaks looking to follow the same 172 year pattern. Basically every decent peak and trough on the 11000 yr C14 and 10Be graph is accounted for by two solar system line ups…..this will change the face of solar science I am thinking.
Leif Svalgaard (21:28:52) :
…, more flux must first go to the poles, …
How can flux “go to the poles”? Flux is energy across a given surface, isn’t it?
lulo (21:34:23) :
As I understand it from Leif Svalgaard, the correlation between the sun and climate is only an empirical one. As long as we don’t understand how the 1% TSI variation can impact the climte I have to agree with him. Empirical correlation is only grounds to do more science, not science on its own.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. This is not possible to refute. OTOH we can argue how elevated levels of CO2 changes the climate.
To those who have tried to follow the Svalgaard thread at CA these arguments will be familiar.
I’m curious : how many of the sun spots of the last year would have been observable using technology available during the Dalton Minimum?
I’m not expecting an answer. Only God knows exactly. But it’s pretty safe to say less than with SOHO.
Jeff Id, go to SIDC for a lot of your solar needs: http://sidc.oma.be/DATA/monthssn.dat If you email me via my website, http://www.davidarchibald.info , I will send you my worked up spreadsheet.
Ah, Dr Svalgaard, a couple of old Carrington rotation plots don’t prove anything.
SMSgt Mac, two of the 23 went longer.
Keeping in mind that windmills are hazardous to birds, be wary of the unintended consequences of believing and contributing to the all-knowing environmental lobby groups.
Water vapour (0.4% overall but 1 – 4 % near the surface) is the most effective green house gas followed by methane (0.0001745%). The third ranking greenhouse gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves in cold water and bubbles out of warm water. The equilibrium in seawater is very high; making seawater a great ‘sink’; CO2 is 34 times more soluble in water than air is soluble in water.
Correlation is not causation to be sure. The causation is being studied, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome.
“Using a box of air in a Copenhagen lab, physicists traced the growth of clusters of molecules of the kind that build cloud condensation nuclei. These are specks of sulphuric acid on which cloud droplets form. High-energy particles driven through the laboratory ceiling by exploded stars far away in the Galaxy – the cosmic rays – liberate electrons in the air, which help the molecular clusters to form much faster than climate scientists have modeled in the atmosphere. That may explain the link between cosmic rays, cloudiness and climate change.”
As I understand it, the hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center goes as follows:
Quiet sun → reduced magnetic and thermal flux = reduced solar wind → geomagnetic shield drops → galactic cosmic ray flux → more low-level clouds and more snow → more albedo effect (more heat reflected) → colder climate
Active sun → enhanced magnetic and thermal flux = solar wind → geomagnetic shield response → less low-level clouds → less albedo (less heat reflected) → warmer climate
That is how the bulk of climate change might work, coupled with (modulated by) sunspot peak frequency there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, the planets cool.
The ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that. In addition, although the post 60s warming period is over, it has allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with humidity, clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat.
Check the web site of the Danish National Space Center.
http://www.space.dtu.dk/English/Research/Research_divisions/Sun_Climate/Experiments_SC/SKY.aspx
Just read that Livingston reported a gauss of 1969 for spot 1010
Could this be why we’re seeing sunspecks rather then sunspots?
To me it seems most likely the magnetic flux is a tidal effect created by the varying interacting gravityfields in a indeterminable range.
Any spacetime distortion of sufficient magnitude can disrupt the delicate balance of the local solar system at any given distance.
Making the tidal shearing of the gaseous seas a chaotic system seemingly cyclic because our limited lifespan can’t encompass the scale.
You have a better chance predicting the weather 🙂