Jack Eddy – discoverer of the Maunder Minimum and LIA, 1931-2009

We are indebted to Jack Eddy’s attitude. More power to people like him.
Many of us had no chance to know you Jack, but from the few words shown here it must have been a privilege for those who did. The rest of us are just grateful that his work was so enlightening.

In that interview, he seemed to be a man still humbled and in awe of the first step in the scientific process. Observation. It is a rare scientist, one with books and papers listed in a pages long bibliography, who still believes that there is more to discover. No wonder Leif liked him.

Jack Eddy, unpresumptuous genius.

I repeat and endorse Ian Cooper’s words: Many of us had no chance to know you Jack, but from the few words shown here it must have been a privilege for those who did.
Further… those few words Anthony quotes from Jack Eddy are both inspiring and humbling. May history make note of this man’s contribution to knowledge, and place on record his wisdom.

A true scientist has passed on. The world should mourn. I do.

That excerpt is spot on, in my opinion ! This man understood fundamentals that few too scientists ever stop to even ponder.
Condolences to the Eddy family and his close associates !

This humble man of science and astute observer of mankind will be missed. From the interview……..
” I still believe that to some extent, for there is a hypnotism about cycles that seems to attract people. It draws all kinds of creatures out of the woodwork. “

A man of Truth.
Rest in peace.

Dr. Eddy will be honored with a toast and will always be remembered. My humble condolences to his family, friends and co-workers. I also am in favour of “The Eddy Minimum”.

I heard about the Maunder Minimum long before I heard anything about AGW, so I have been a skeptic for quite some time. For this I owe thanks to Jack Eddy. It is sad he is not with us so see the full development of cycle 24 and it’s implications for solar science.

A very generous man, and loved by all. My heart goes out to his family and friends. Thank you Dr. Svalgaard for requesting to name this current minimum after Jack.

Condolences to family and colleagues.
I read that fascinating interview as well as an essay at:
http://engr-sci.org/history/climate/solar.htm#eddy
His seems to have been an interdisciplinary approach that challenged a consensus and we are the richer for it.

I’m sure I speak for all of the Kiwis on this site, when I express our sorrow at hearing this news. I can only echo Mike Bryant’s words:
As I read the rest of the interview I came to see in Eddy a very polite and humble man with a towering integrity. This type of integrity should absolutely be celebrated. Condolences to all who called this man a friend or a loved one. Your loss is also the world’s loss.
The Eddy Minimum is an appropriate memorial to the man and his work.
I support the Eddy Minimum; I never agreed with attaching Gore’s worthless name to it.
Haere ra, Jack.

I too learned about the Maunder Minimum( and other minimums) in the 70’s at school, a few years after we were all told (me 6 or 7 at the time) we were causing the NEW ICE AGE with our carbon monoxide and CFC/HFC emissions/aerosols that caused cooling and a ozone hole! OH DEAR!
We tried fixing it through government banning and grants to believers. Nope, we didn’t do squat of a difference. They said in public forms, TV, Radio and print. We’ve got to SAVE THE WORLD from a depletion of ozone that can make the sun more intense, creating more cancers because harmful rays are coming in, OH DEAR! Beware the sun!
But then things started getting warmer and we called our new war on CFC/HFC’s.. WON! Changed over our cheap easily made safe refrigerates out for expensive government mandated corporate makers. And made toxic emissions into life giving co2 for plant/ocean/human food.
Skip forward 30 F-ing years in understanding and now “the sun has nothing to do with the heating in the last 30 yeas , it’s the CO2 in the atmosphere building up and the warming of the air for almost 200 years that is causing this!”
Yep, and here we are today. Still no proof, going full circle and ended up at the next shift in climate like back to the 70’s.
When I think about the minimums, I think back to the time that I read about the Dalton min/Maunder Min. and was exploring my love of earth sciences and palaeontology.
I learned about tens of thousands, if not millions of climate variations from our sun. Extinctions and flourishing, depending the area and time you live in.
The person Jack Eddy I never knew, but his science did reach/touch me and this is why I’m still fighting AGW/C 30 year old garbage. The old real sun science that makes up my thinking today, is still there!
I’ve held the knowledge(his) of the suns minimums and then the understanding of solar variations in a cycle. The powers of the sun and our civilizations survival/adaption.
I too think “The Eddy Minimum” is only logical and right.
RIP

It would seem we have lost a great scientist. May the principles and integrity he stood for prevail.
Condolences to his friends and family.

If this link has been posted, my apologies, if you don’t know who Jack Eddy is or what he accomplished this is the quickest read that covers most of it that I found;
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/eddy_int.htm
My sincere condolences to everyone who knew him personally.

Only a few dream and then live the dream. Here is a man who did.

Leif, you have my sympathy as well.
A suggestion of raingear for next week’s conference in Boulder was made already. You might consider warm clothes as well if you intend to visit Rocky Mountain National Park. Trail Ridge Road was closed again last night because of snow, the third or fourth closing since it opened for the season just before Memorial Day.

“Entering a new field with a degree in another is not unlike Lewis and Clark walking into the camp of the Mandans. You are not one of them. They distrust you. Your degree means nothing and your name is not recognized. You have to learn it all from scratch, earn their respect, and learn a lot on your own. But I also think that many of the most significant discoveries in science will be found not in, but between the rigid boundaries of the disciplines: the terra incognita where much remains to be learned. It’s not a place that’s hidebound by practice and ritual. I have always tried to keep moving between fields of study.” — Jack Eddy, 1999.
His life and achievements, eloquently stated, are the quintessential rebuttal to “doesn’t have a degree in climatology”.
Eddy minimum indeed.

Truly a sad day. I was taken with his early publications on the subject and tracked them down and sumamrized their main points in a couple blog posts:
http://digitaldiatribes.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/landscheidt-part-4-eddy-summary/
http://digitaldiatribes.wordpress.com/2008/06/13/landscheidt-5-review-of-eddys-the-case-of-the-missing-sunspots/
(While under the Lnadscheidt category because of his references to Eddy, the two posts above are almost strictly summaries of the Eddy Papers).
Included at the end of that second post is a quote that jumped out at me, which I will repeat here, from Eddy’s “Case of the Missing Sunspots.”
“It would seem that Maunder and Spoerer were right and that most of the rest of us have been wrong. As is often the case in the onrush of modern science, we had too quickly forgotten the past, forgotten the less-than-perfect pedigree of the sunspot cycle and the fact that it too once came as a surprise. We had adopted a kind of solar uniformitarianism, contending that the modern behavior of the sun represented the normal behavior of the sun over a much longer span of time.”
The “scientific consensus” on climate change jumped out at me when I read this. Keep questioning! The truth will eventually bare itself, whether or not in our lifetimes.
RIP, Mr. Eddy.

Bob Kutz (05:18:01) :
If this link has been posted, my apologies, if you don’t know who Jack Eddy is or what he accomplished this is the quickest read that covers most of it that I found;
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/eddy_int.htm
My sincere condolences to everyone who knew him personally.

It was fascinating to read, in the interview, of Jack Eddy’s navigation through the often wayward and uncertain currents of academic science, and especially about his confirmation of the historical evidence of the Maunder Minimum using contemporary tools—proof positive of the value of interdisciplinary research.
It is a little puzzling to read, at the end of the interview, that he seemed to have espoused the anthropogenic hypothesis of recent global warming:

EDDY: Probably all that fame of sorts and TV shows and stuff, the Today Show and all that kind of stuff, was probably not the best for me, because it made me even more dilettante. But along came Herb Friedman about that time, and asked me if I would want to take part in a thing they were thinking about, really reviving the International Geophysical Year and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program. And so in the early ’80s, 1983 I think, I started sticking my toe in that one and became very fascinated by what you could learn about the Earth as a whole if you tied all the sciences together, and if you looked at the cracks between biology and atmospheric science, or between geology and oceanology and stuff, that there was an awful lot to be found there that might be secrets about how the world worked. And in the course of that I became more and more aware of and concerned about global Warming than I had been.
WEART: This was not a concern of yours before that point?
EDDY: It definitely was not, and I must say, the reason I got off on the interdisciplinarity of sciences at that time, in the early ’80s, was not that I was so fascinated by the possibility of greenhouse warming. As it was, I was fascinated by the notion of bringing people together from different disciplines and mixing the chemistry and see what happened. And so I was the first chairman on the Academy Committee on what later became the sort of Global Change Program. I did a lot of work there. I set up a new organization within NCAR, who had decided to hire me back.

Not to introduce a negative note (from the standpoint of this blog). Did Dr. Eddy ever consider that the late 20th-century warming, such as it was, might have been caused by a solar maximum?
/Mr Lynn

The Eddy Minimum, in honor of a truly great scientist, dedicated to discovery, definitely.

“I truly believe the sayings that there is no hope for the satisfied man and that without fear there is no learning.”
Wise words indeed, words to live by.
Here is a poem I often turn to on such occasions.
“I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass,
And by the streamers of white cloud,
And whispers of wind in the listening sky;
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.”
~ Stephen Spender ~

Eddy, J.A., “The Maunder Minimum” Science, Vol 192 1976
Eddy, J.A., “Historical and Arboreal Evidence for a Changing sun” AAAS Selected Symposia 17; The New Solar Physics, 1978 pp 10-33
Eddy, J.A., Climate and the Role of the Sun” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol X, No 4, spring 1980
Just a few Jack Eddy Reference works from “The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection” By Willie Wei-Hock Soon and Steven H. Yaskell.
So another name sails off into the sunset. We all stand on the shoulders of such men and women who have gone before.
RIP Jack A. Eddy.
George

My condolences to the Eddy family and to Leif.
I quite agree that the minimum needs to be historically significant to deserve his name being attached to it. Let us hope that this requirement is not met for a long time yet…

Arthur Glass (08:19:16)
The Spender poem is beautiful.
How appropriate.

Leif !!! EDDY Minimum it is !!!

Thanks for the WUWT obituary post, and the link to the exceptionally good interview transcript. It is for individuals such as he that research funding should concentrate, instead of the ‘overwhelming consensus’ departments concerned only with political paradigms. One good brain eclipses them. His name should certainly be immortalised somehow.

Thanks Jack

Dear Friends,
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your beautiful thoughts and words about my precious, beloved husband of 17 years, Jack. I wish he were here to read them, for he was so humble and sweet, and did not know how truly loved and respected he was in your community. He was and is my whole life, and I miss him more than anyone could ever imagine.
With love,
Barbara (Mrs. John A. Eddy)
REPLY: Dear Barbara, thank you so much for your visit here during this difficult time. Know this, Jack is held in high esteem and will be rewarded for his contributions to science. My sincerest condolences. If Jack had a cause or affiliation that he would have liked to see tributes sent to, don’t hesitate to mention it and I’ll make sure it is prominently posted here. Kindest regards, Anthony Watts

My first reading of Jack Eddy’s work in Science in 1976 has always remained vivid, just like other dramatic events, eg the assassination of President Kennedy, the first Moon walk and the first Challenger explosion. By way of background, I live in Canberra, Australia.
At the time in 1976 I had since 1974 been a member of the Priorities Review Staff, a small group of analysts set up to advise the newly elected Prime Minister Whitlam about the goals and strategies of his Government. By 1976 the Whitlam Government was no longer in power, the PRS had been abolished and I was advising Prime Minister Fraser about foreign policy and intelligence and security matters. But those of us that had worked for Gough Whitlam kept in touch.
Eddy’s paper ran counter to our entire outlook. We were of the view that governments could and should change anything for the better (or worse). My focus had been social and education policy. The idea that agricultural productivity and therefore the supply of essential foods might be largly regulated by the Sun and beyond government’s capacity to influence seemed absurd from within this outlook. Our general view was that Eddy’s idea was just another crazy idea. And yet the thought hit me vividly that just as the tides are outside our control so might ultimately agricultural productivty. I didn’t think much beyond that – I had no understanding of the Sun or the climate. The thing that struck me, and perhaps why my memory is so vivid, was the idea that forces external to the planet might have such power and governments might be so puny. But I was still in the camp of government can – and should – do anything. Improvements to agricultural productivity was one. Over the next decades I thought no more about the Sun and Jack Eddy and all of that until I stumbled upon the work of Rhodes Fairbridge about six years ago. By that time I had a better sense of the limits of government and about the proper role of government. Broadly speaking, I find myself in broad agreement with Douglass North and the institutional economists.
I now deeply admire Jack Eddy for being so persistent and successful in getting his research published and helping to break and unfortunate paradigm that I once held dear.
I can understand those who find repugnant and absurd the idea that our planet’s climate dynamics might be entirely out of the influence of governments whether because the dynamics arise form internal oscillations of very complex systems or because of a determinative role of the Sun.
As with agricultural productivity, there is much that governments can do to improve things and manage our adaptive efficiency. But if the temperatures plummet, if the droughts come, if things warm up a lot, if the floods come, we can’t stop what’s happening; we can learn to predict better and adapt better, but that’s about it. I am eternally grateful to Jack Eddy for helping to break an old paradigm. In my case, I was a very slow learner – almost 30 yrs – before I really understood what he was saying back in 1976.

Please delete the apostrophe in our’s moderator… thank you

Leif, while it is noble of you to want honour your friend by naming the minimum for him, you are spitting on Ted Landschiedt’s memory in the process. Ted Landscheidt is the one who predicted the minimum, not Jack Eddy.
However well intentioned your proposed action might be, I find it despicable that you are trying to steal the fame from Ted. He, like Jack, was a good man, and you are proposing joining with a host of AGW supporters in trying to erase the memory of Ted and his work.
Finally, many people already call the upcoming (perhaps) minimum the “Landscheidt Minimum”. You’re swimming upstream. You might even succeed, but to me and many others, it will always be the “Landscheidt Minimum”.
As a result, you are dishonoring Jack Eddy’s name by falsely giving him credit in the naming. This does neither Jacks, nor your, reputation any good. Ted’s friends will certainly not thank you if you are successful, and I count myself among them. Your good intentions are leading you down a very ugly path.

len, Anthony is of course free to delete my post if he wishes. However, Ted Landscheidt predicted this minimum twenty years ago. Not last month or last year. Twenty years ahead of time. If the minimum actually occurs, this surely must rank as one of the most significant predictions in solar history. Why should such a remarkable achievement bear anyone else’s name, no matter how good a scientist that other man might be?
To try to strip Ted of this honor just because Jack Eddy is a good man and Leif was his friend seems to me to be the kind of thing an AGW supporter might do, on a par with giving the Nobel Prize to Al Gormless … but I expect more of a scientist.

I, too, mourn the loss of this great astronomical figure. His knowledge and contributions have caused an unquestionable inprint in the fabric of our field. He has added a breadth of expertise to something that was once nebulous and an unknown frontier. My day is ruined.
Rest in Peace. God Speed.