Guest post by David Archibald
Solar Cycle 24 is now over a year old, so it is appropriate to see how it is ramping up.
Solar Cycle 24 was a late starter, about three and a half years later than the average of the strong cycles in the late 20th century and almost three year later than the weak cycles of the late 19th century. It was almost as late as Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum. The last few months have seen it ramp up relatively rapidly.
[Note: Solar Cycle 22 and 23 are overlaid on solar cycle 3 and 4 above to show similarity]
Plotting up the last three solar cycles relative to the Dalton Minimum, another solar minimum is not precluded by the data to date.
With Solar Cycle 23 ending up at twelve and a half years long, applying Friis-Christenson and Lassen theory to the temperature record of Hanover, New Hampshire results in a two degree centigrade decline in the annual average temperature at this location over the expected twelve years of Solar Cycle 24, from December 2009 to late 2021. Given some record low monthly averages in the northeast US in the recent summer, and the current cold winter, this cooling is well under way.
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Thank you for this update on Earth’s heat source – the Sun!
Propaganda can deceive a lot of folks, but propaganda can’t change what is.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA PI for Apollo
Say what you will, but I do not like the looks of the 10.7 cm data at all. The gamma rays are still off scale to the top. Unfortunately no measurements of either were available in the Dalton Minimum. We are roughly due for a de Vries minimum so we may very well be getting one.
“twelve years of Solar Cycle 24, from December 2009 to late 2011.”
Should “2011” read “2021”?
REPLY: Thanks typo corrected
I should correct the gamma ray statement with the C14 analysis that can be done carefully. There seems to be a bump up at the Dalton Minimum, but that is just eyeballing a chart.
Wouldn’t it be nice to see climate scientists with any honesty left report this and conclude that reducing CO2 emissions may be the wrong thing to do, and in fact we should temporarily accelerate CO2 emissions to avoid a cold snap over the next couple of decades. By then we should be in a better position to move to more advanced power generation systems, such as nuclear fusion.
In the second figure shouldn’t the green line be labeled Solar Cycle 23?
Why does solar cycle 5 look so smooth in the first graph and solar cycle 24 looks jagged? I see that the big cycles are averages of many cycles, so they would be smoothed, but cycle 5 just looks unnaturally smooth.
Oooooo. Nut cases like the warming. Warming equals panic and control. Not food and water.
Aren’t there some sort of laws we can pass to prevent the possible catastrophic losses that arise from “climate change” impacts of solar cycles?
There is a similar graph of SC24 verses SC5 that is updated monthly at the Layman’s Sunspot Count. Geoff also agrees with David, although Geoff’s graph shows a closer correlation . This will be interesting to watch.
http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/50
I doubt if Leif Svalgaard would agree with the statement “Given some record low monthly averages in the northeast US in the recent summer, and the current cold winter, this cooling is well under way.” (due to sun activity) Would appreciate hearing from him regarding this. Certainly looks like the sun would have an influence but what if it ramps up to Hathaways original prediction. This is the trouble with making predictions based on our lifetime! The universe has been around for 5 billion years LOL. BTW glad to see we are seeing some science posting back rather than “climategate” etc…
How does that fit with Livingston and Penn paper: “Sunspots may vanish by 2015″? Is there an update to their graph?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/02/livingston-and-penn-paper-sunspots-may-vanish-by-2015/
Will solar cycle 24 ramp up and then collapse to throw us right into a Maunder Minimum?
Thank you, Dr. Archibald. Those charts certainly put thingsin perspective. The prospect of a 2C decline in temperature does not make me a very happy camper, especially with our governments striving mightily to combat global warming.
This is so cool. Reflect for a minute the importance we place on a month by month divergence of periodic sequences to a sun that has been doing this for billions of years. Our month by month divergence is nothing compared to the stable activity of the sun over this time scale. Consider now our 20 plunges into glaciation that have each lasted over 100,000 years and our 20 periods of interglatial warming that lasts about 20,000 years.
The issue isn’t so much what is the impact of these changes to the planet, because the planet has survived these changes, The question is what would be the impact on our current civilization (less than 7000 years old) to major switchbacks to cold, indicated by long term solar activity.
You have to wonder if that drop will be expressed in the same manner as we saw this last winter, with a negative AO, and a blast thru the center and eastern seaboard of the continent. I’m hoping so, because my little northwest corner stayed warm… 🙂
I think we’ve already passed this cycles max and are headed towards minimum again with the new cycle magnetic polarity showing up in early 2013. We’ll probably be seeing mostly “specks” soon, again, and see 10.7 flux dip below 70 by the end of March.
Very interesting and clear summary, thank you.
Are we facing a new solar minimum? The only way to know is to live and see, correlation and extrapolation are possibilities but not certainties. One thing is certain, though: I am NOT interested in Leif Svalgaard’s opinion on anything.
@Peter of Sydney (21:58:28) :
“Wouldn’t it be nice to see climate scientists with any honesty left report this and conclude that reducing CO2 emissions may be the wrong thing to do, and in fact we should temporarily accelerate CO2 emissions to avoid a cold snap over the next couple of decades.”
Accelerate CO2 emissions to avoid a cold snap? Are you serious? Only if you really do believe that increased CO2 levels causes global warming to the extent believed by the AGW alarmists.
@Stephan
“The universe has been around for 5 billion years LOL”
Umm… Shouldn’t that be “14 billion”, give or take? 😉
The universe has been around for 5 billion years >> Stephan
Try again.
Henry @ur momisugly Peter of Sydney
Increasing CO2 will only help growth (of forests and crops) if the temp. is right.
I don’t think that will affect global temperatures much.
Henry @ur momisugly ShrNfr
What is the “De Vries” minimum. Have not heard about that one yet
Henry @ur momisugly ….
Anyone dare to make a prediction about the weather during the 2010 Soccer world cup? This is in our winter, June & July < South Africa.
We fault proponents of AGW for their faith in CO2 as the cause of the warming (or climate change) when there is no sufficient mechanism.
How then can we claim catastrophic cooling based on these numbers from the Sun? What is the sufficient mechanism in this case?
In the first graphic of the post is a plot of “Solar Cycle Amplitude” vs “Months after peak of previous Solar Cycles”. A plot of SC 25 is shown to date and a plot of SC 5 is shown. I can have confidence of the plot of AC 24 having accurate basic however, what is the confidence in the accuracy of the SC 5 plot? What are the + and – on the SC 5 plot?
John
Mr. Archibald, can you takes some info I have stumbled on through many papers read in the last few months. It might let you leave one possibly open which might not be in your ensemble of knowledge to date.
Last year I noticed a 9 cycles in 100 year period in the current 1700-2009 data from SIDC when passing an eleven year simple box filter over the yearly data to remove the sine imprint. Of coarse, 1700 seems very close to the end of the preceding Maunder period. The years 1711, 1811, 1911 are all years immediately before a big rise in the smoothed graph data each century. I couldn’t answer the extra year.
Later, just by happenstance, I found something curious from a paper on reconstruction of solar cycles dating back to some 800 B.C. Of coarse, most are Chinese observations by eye at daybreak. Logically each observation most likely is not at an inter-cycle minimum year therefore cycle length can be extracted even in this very sparse data. The paper found the cycle length not at 11.003 years but 11.16 years over this 2800 year period. Other papers have listed this 11.16 year cycle length.
That seemed to answer why 9 by 11 equals 99 was not aligning but 9 by 11.16 equals 100.4 was, but random length-skewing seems to force alignment every ~100 years. Its as if an extra year was forced in every nine cycles of an apparent 11 year average length.
If the Dec. 2009 cycle start you mentioned above falls apart in the following months, this could point, if a minimum is not upon us, that 2011, or nearby, could be when the next cycle actually begins. It would be stange if that happens. I know, looking at cycle 21, 22, and 23 this is two to three years out of alignment but could be why the sun is acting somewhat unusual of late. That pattern has been a curiousity to me ever since. Time will tell if there is anything to it.
Thought you might find that curious also.
There is not enough data presented here to make any conclusions.