Leif Svalgaard writes to inform me that Livingston and Penn have published their article recently in EOS, TRANSACTIONS, AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION.
As WUWT readers may recall, we had a preview of that EOS article here.
L&P write in the EOS article:
For hundreds of years, humans have observed that the Sun has displayed activity where the number of sunspots increases and then decreases at approximately 11- year intervals. Sunspots are dark regions on the solar disk with magnetic field strengths greater than 1500 gauss (see Figure 1), and the 11- year sunspot cycle is actually a 22- year cycle in the solar magnetic field, with sunspots showing the same hemispheric magnetic polarity on alternate 11- year cycles.
The last solar maximum occurred in 2001, and the magnetically active sunspots at that time produced powerful flares causing large geomagnetic disturbances and disrupting some space- based technology. But something is unusual about the current sunspot cycle. The current solar minimum has been unusually long, and with more than 670 days without sunspots through June 2009, the number of spotless days has not been equaled since 1933 (see http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html).
The solar wind is reported to be in a uniquely low energy state since space measurements began nearly 40 years ago [Fisk and Zhao, 2009].
The full article as a PDF is available here
Leif also provides his version of their Figure 3 (showing umbral intensity -vs- total magnetic field which I’m sure he’ll want to discuss here.
http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston%20and%20Penn.png
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Sounds OT to begin with, but see what you think of this extract from a reader’s letter from today’s motoring section of the Daily Telegraph –
“I’m looking for a premium SUV, with diesel engine and automatic transmission, and can spend up to £40,000. I’m concerned that winters in this country are going to become more severe, due to decreased sunspot activity. The poor state of local roads makes cars like this all the more appealing.”
Someone who’s prepared to put a lot of money where his mouth is.
Is the sun still “behaving normally”?
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/11jul_solarcycleupdate.htm
At what point might we be able to make the determination that the sun is behaving abnormally for a 4.5 billion year old G2 class star?
That should be “Leif” in the first line, not “Lief”.
I wonder how the relatively impressive sunspot group we had in early July fits the trend of decreasing magnetic flux; the paper was written in June.
Since the July sunspot group, we have reached 35 sunspot-free days and counting. If we can make it past 42, this will become a top-ten recorded streak! I for one hope the sun keeps this especially quiet solar minimum going. It’s a great experiment. The more unusual and longer the better. From it we may be able to discern unambiguously the extent to which solar activity influences climate.
Slowly but surely, the AGW cows are coming home …
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As the evidence builds (don’t we have enough already?), the AGW theory is revealing itself to be morally broke and mentally bankrupt.
The ‘tipping point’ (gotta love that phrase!!) may soon be reached, but it won’t be the ‘tipping point’ the theorizers profess.
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And about the only ‘tipping’ that will be taking place will be that of frozen cows in icy pastures. But not quite yet …
Telboy (11:22:00) :
“I’m looking for a premium SUV, with diesel engine and automatic transmission, and can spend up to £40,000. I’m concerned that winters in this country are going to become more severe, due to decreased sunspot activity. The poor state of local roads makes cars like this all the more appealing.”
But the last time the Sun was equally quiet (in terms of spotless days) was 1933 when the global temperature was on a rise leading to a maximum in the early 1940s.
peat (11:41:40) :
I wonder how the relatively impressive sunspot group we had in early July fits the trend of decreasing magnetic flux; the paper was written in June.
The July group fell on the predicted line and is indeed included in my Figure. The field strength was 2150 and the contrast 0.79.
Kevin Kilty (11:47:33) :
But the last time the Sun was equally quiet (in terms of spotless days) was 1933 when the global temperature was on a rise leading to a maximum in the early 1940s.
Leading to the obvious conclusion, no?
Kevin
I am confused by the claims of cooling also, as 1933 heralded a period of extreme warmth as you say.
It would be nice to have some of the sunspot experts and pundits make some definitive forecasts for the next five years. Will it get colder? Will it get warmer? Will it stay the same? Does anyone really know?
tonyb
The chart sez “. . . Penn Umbral Data”
Pun, right ?
Here is the obvious question, and I’m open to the fact there may be a logical answer. If we can’t find any coorelation between low and high periods of sun spots and earth climate, then how come there is a coorelation between the temperature minimums like Dalton and Maunder and low sun spot activity?
“Kevin Kilty (11:47:33) :
But the last time the Sun was equally quiet (in terms of spotless days) was 1933 when the global temperature was on a rise leading to a maximum in the early 1940s.”
That may be so, but the last time a solar cycle was 12.6 years long was solar cycle 5, which began 211 years ago. (Dalton Minimum)
Solar Cycle 16 began in August 1923 and ended in September 1933 making it 10.1 years long with 568 spotless days during minimum.
SC 23 is currently at least 12.6 years long, and might become even longer if the next 15 days have zero spots.
Remember too that the Layman’s spot count has over 211 spotless days for 2009 so far.
Didn’t the original L&P paper’s extrapolated curve indicate that sunspots should become invisible by 2014?
Gary from Chicagoland posted this chart:
http://www.global-warming-and-the-climate.com/images/sunspot-lenght-&-teperature.gif
It seems to show that that period including the 30’s, and 40’s was a period of very short cycles. As was the period leading up to it. Now, we’re having at least one Very Long Cycle.
This could get interesting.
Kevin Kilty (11:47:33) : wrote
quote But the last time the Sun was equally quiet (in terms of spotless days) was 1933 when the global temperature was on a rise leading to a maximum in the early 1940s. unquote
Before looking for correlations, might I suggest you try to find unmanipulated data? The GISS and HADCRUT graphs have both been severely adjusted — my personal bete noir is the Folland and Parker bucket correction. Without that correction the global increase in temperature is delayed until 1939/40 and the bump associated with the rise peters out — or drops precipitously — in the late forties.
JF
TonyB (12:12:16) :
Kevin
I am confused by the claims of cooling also, as 1933 heralded a period of extreme warmth as you say.
It would be nice to have some of the sunspot experts and pundits make some definitive forecasts for the next five years. Will it get colder? Will it get warmer? Will it stay the same? Does anyone really know?
tonyb
——
How early in the 1940s?
From my memory of history weren’t the winters of the early 1940s particularly cold? Hitler’s Russian campaigns 1941-43 where the winters were as bad as that met by Napoleon in 1812, The Battle of the Bulge Ardennes 1943-1944.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge
I am pretty sure the winter after the Battle of Britain was unexpectedly severe.
But if someone knows better…
Presumably if there is an effect it’s somewhat diminished by the enormous thermal intertia of the Oceans.
peat writes “The July group fell on the predicted line and is indeed included in my Figure. The field strength was 2150 and the contrast 0.79”
Do you have a reference for this? Something that has been pu blished somewhere? TIA.
Actually if you look at the linked chart above, 1944 was at 36 days. Since we are now at 35 days, the article is at least slightly incorrect (unless we go another day).
Leif
Do we have a spectrogram of the sun across many wavelengths to look at to compare the sun’s radiant output across a wide spectrum so that we could compare the output during a solar max, to this solar minimum?
You have convinced me that TSI variations may (though there is data from early space experiments that put the average insolation at 1358 per m2) not be enough to cause swings in climate. However, I am still intrigued with the idea of coupling factors between the radiant output of the sun and the absorption of this radiant output in the Earth’s atmosphere.
We know from a USAF mission designed to measure this, that the Earth’s atmosphere has contracted more than at any time in the space age. This is interesting and possibly significant. It would be interesting to see what the average global lightning energy is at this time versus what it was during the last solar max. I think that there is a mission measuring this flying today.
Lets start to look at these differences between the Earth during solar max and this extended solar minimum to see what influences may be apparent during this period that may not have been during previous short period minimums.
Leif:
The following seems to be the most interesting observation in the paper… do you have any comments?
“The same data
were later published [Penn and Livingston,
2006], and the observations showed
that the magnetic field strength in sunspots
were decreasing with time, independent of
the sunspot cycle. A simple linear extrapolation
of those data suggested that sunspots
might completely vanish by 2015.”
The difference I see with this cycle vs the cycle in 1933 is this:
Months with average ssn <=10
1933: 20
2007: official 18, including July 2009: 28
Months with average ssn <=5
1933: 4
2007: official 10, including July 2009: 20
(note) the official average ssn in belgium stops at Sept 2008 since todays numbers will effect the average. If the ssn starts increasing soon, then the average will pick up, otherwise……
A better comparison might be 1911, since there were 30 months with ssn <5 and 40 months with ssn <10.
Cycle 19 had 0 months with ssn < 5 & 2 months < 10 while cycles 20 & 21 had zero months with ssn < 10.
This also correpsonds to the infamous warming period of AGW.
Perhaps the issue of solar activity and temperature on earth is not so much the peak of the cycle, but how low it goes and how long it stays there, combined with the behavior of cycle minimums in consecutive cycles.
TonyB (12:12:16) :
Some seem to understand more. Piers Corbyn has been highly successful using the sun as the main ingredient for making his forecasts. And he says the cause of warming in earth has “Absolutely nothing to do with man”.
He says that on October 28th he’s going to reveal ‘key aspects’ of his technique. How many of us will be sitting front and center on that day?
SOHO was not in space in the 30’s. What can be seen by SOHO and telescopes of the 30’s is different. Also, SOHO is never affected by clouds, humidity, night, etc.
The comment was:
——————-
Kevin Kilty (11:47:33) :
But the last time the Sun was equally quiet (in terms of spotless days) was 1933 when the global temperature was on a rise leading to a maximum in the early 1940s.
——————-
Yeah, imagine that: Right smack dab in the middle of a worldwide economic depression when most people didn’t have the money for much more than a few scraps of food, manufacturing was darned near at a standstill, and people were dying from starvation as the —ahem— ‘carbon footprint’ of humanity was as about as low as it could get without more people AND ANIMALS dying off.
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And while you’re at it, Kevin, why not talk about how it was that with all the people in the northern hemisphere in the year 1300, burning all that peat, coal, wood, and dung for cooking and heating, producing the massive amounts of carbon —far more than now due to the relatively archaic methods of combustion— the Earth got so miserably cold that people died from exposure and starvation?
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Oh, and wait: What about when there were FEWER people around before the year 1000 AD, and the Earth got blazingly warm such as to facilitate longer growing periods in the northern latitudes, and allowed for the SUCCESSFUL settlement of the southern reaches of Greenland?
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While the lack of Sun spots ~might not~ be ‘the cause’ in and of itself of either warmer or cooler Earth temperatures, there sure as heck is a completely undeniable connection between their paucity and lower Earth temperatures in the past.
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Your remark then, is the essence of pointing to ~just one~ event on a multi-event graph and making an entirely invalid declaration whilst ignoring everything else surrounding it.
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A person has a pimple on his face. Is the pimple a part of the person, or vice-versa?
@ur momisugly Sandy in Derby
Battle of the Ardennes was 1944/5 ; (had to have D-Day first), but yes, your point is still valid. The “Band of Brothers” episode featuring it made me turn the heating up!
The comments were:
—————–
SandyInDerby (13:07:30) :
How early in the 1940s?
From my memory of history weren’t the winters of the early 1940s particularly cold? Hitler’s Russian campaigns 1941-43 where the winters were as bad as that met by Napoleon in 1812, The Battle of the Bulge Ardennes 1943-1944.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge
I am pretty sure the winter after the Battle of Britain was unexpectedly severe.
But if someone knows better…
——————
You simply ~MUST~ remember here that it’s NOT how cold it got, but how WARM it gets.
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The warmists have no interest in the truth of the matter.
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Oh, and one other thing: When it ~does~ get colder, why it’s because of the ‘climate change.’
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See? it got colder because it got warmer … yeah.
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Remember: Global cooling is the result of ‘global warming.’