“Here we report a new annual resolution 10Be record spanning the period 1389–1994 AD, measured in an ice core from the NGRIP site in Greenland. NGRIP and Dye-3 10Be exhibits similar long-term variability, although occasional short term differences between the two sites indicate that at least two high resolution 10Be records are needed to assess local variations and to confidently reconstruct past solar activity. A comparison with sunspot and neutron records confirms that ice core 10Be reflects solar Schwabe cycle variations, and continued 10Be variability suggests cyclic solar activity throughout the Maunder and Spörer grand solar activity minima. Recent 10Be values are low; however, they do not indicate unusually high recent solar activity compared to the last 600 years.”

Another way to get to it:
http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/gl0911/2009GL038004/
or even:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009GL038004.pdf

The paper lends support to some recent conclusions of mine:
1) the sun is not coming down from an all-time high [20th century not a Grand Maximum]
2) solar magnetic cycle persists through Grand Minima [maybe
Livingston and Penn have something]
3) Heliospheric magnetic field does not have large swings and cosmic ray modulation doesn’t either

I”f there were a universally accepted research budget”
Just imagine, for example, by the United Nations…Absolutely NO!

Here we come into language difficulties. By universal I did not mean global. Rather something reasonable as for example a percentage of the GDP for a country, accepted universally, i.e. by all, within the country. A budget that should be divided to institutes and not persons. It is the creation of researchers as contractors that in my opinion has created the mess of AGW. Gives them carrots for sloppy science and self advertisement and filling the pocket.

Ideally researchers should be like monks, dedicated and chasing their vision. They should be given a salary in order to live well and respectably and no incentives to make more personal money out of their work.

It is true that there has been too much carrot in gaining research grants in the past generation or so of scientists. This has resulted in too much self advertisement and self aggrandizement by a lot of researchers and research groups that should have known better, all in order to acquire for their group/institute a larger part of the pie of funding.

My feeling is that research was carried out much better before funding became centralized and bureaucrats found out they could wield power with apportioning the funds.

If there were a universally accepted research budget, it should be apportioned to institutes/universities in a democratic way: number of researchers, number of students, location, etc weights with results of previous years should be devised so a fair share could fall on institutes and not on individual researchers. The institutes then could fight it out within their ranks on how it should be divided. There would again be politics and back stabbing etc, on a much smaller scale but little chance of such gross polarization of a discipline the way we see with climate presently.

Also it would be good to have five year or seven year funding plans both internally in the institutes and externally so there could be stability in research objectives and no great hurry to come out with half baked results.

So my stick will be the peer pressure within each institute, that will be different in each, and thus no world coherence and consensus on temporary results could become fashionable as easily as now. Now the purse control of the central agencies creates Hansens and Gores etc.

“Not everyone agrees on whether it’ll be so quiet, however; Mausumi Dikpati from the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado – who was one of the experts on the panel that came up with the conclusion she disagrees with – for example:

The panel consensus is not my individual opinion… It’s still in a quiet period. As soon as it takes off it could be a completely different story.

That story, she says, will be a cycle 50% more powerful than the last, and something to silence those of us who’re worried that the sun is slowly going out a la disaster movies, despite knowing better.”

When governments fund research, expect results to support political goals. When corporations fund research, expect results to support economic goals.

That is the framework, sure, but what should society do in order not to get into run away situations as where we are now.

The story about crying wolf too often holds , and in this day and age we should not wait for a real catastrophe before finding a way to check the wolf calls.

I believe the measurement you’re looking for is “-ish”.

I can’t find the link right now, the pertinent server seems to be down….

“[...] This incessant need for advertisement of research results so as to get the necessary funding has to be addressed soon by the scientific community, not only of the US, where the fashion started, but also the EU where it has caught the fancy of the bureaucrats. It has played a large role in this snowball called global warming and renamed climate change…

Maybe Anthony could start a thread where we could exchange ideas of how research could be funded without such overwhelming bureaucratic/political government interference [...]”

I remember a time (50′s into the 60′s) in the US when many corporations had large R&D staffs that usually included a few scientists free to pursue any pure research of their own interest. Results were often kept secret as they might have great potential for future commercial application. Also, the space race was on and there was a lot of basic research conducted in support of that effort.

I’m betting there are a lot of readers here who remember a time when you not only were NOT in a hurry to race to the press with results but were in BIG trouble if you discussed your work with anyone, even people in another department.

Times have changed with the exception that there’s still a coffee or wine study published every week or two, just like always ;o)

When governments fund research, expect results to support political goals. When corporations fund research, expect results to support economic goals.

A little starvation could fix that number right smartly.

Trouble will be what to do if the researcher is not a scientist, say a railways’ engineer like the one at the IPCC or a Nobel prize winner…

Makes no difference :-)

Trouble will be what to do if the researcher is not a scientist, say a railways’ engineer like the one at the IPCC or a Nobel prize winner…

It depends on the model. Here’s a simple prediction model which was very accurate as of 1997:

“It was once observed that if an old AFL football team wins the Superbowl, a bear market will ensue on Wall Street in the next year, while an NFL team victory presaged a bull market”