We covered this story about solar magnetic field strength and sunspot contrast months ago on WUWT, and for a couple of years now I have been pointing out that the Ap Interplantary magnetic index took a dive, and has stayed at low levels. For example, this month, it remains stalled:
Late last year I ran this story:
In June 2008, WUWT published a wake up call, which had at that time, been mostly ignored by mainstream science:
Livingston and Penn paper: “Sunspots may vanish by 2015″.
But the rest of the world is now just getting around to realizing the significance of the work Livingston and Penn are doing related to sunspots. Science just ran with a significant story that is getting lots of press: Say goodbye to sunspots
Here’s a prominent excerpt:
The last solar minimum should have ended last year, but something peculiar has been happening. Although solar minimums normally last about 16 months, the current one has stretched over 26 months—the longest in a century. One reason, according to a paper submitted to the International Astronomical Union Symposium No. 273, an online colloquium, is that the magnetic field strength of sunspots appears to be waning.
…
Scientists studying sunspots for the past 2 decades have concluded that the magnetic field that triggers their formation has been steadily declining. If the current trend continues, by 2016 the sun’s face may become spotless and remain that way for decades—a phenomenon that in the 17th century coincided with a prolonged period of cooling on Earth.
Meanwhile, both the sunspot count and the 10.7 cm solar radio flux continue to lag well behind the prediction curves:
These three indicators, taken together, suggest the solar magnetic dynamo is having trouble getting restarted for solar cycle 24, which so far is not only late, but groggy.
But back to the Livingston and Penn article from Science. The most telling graph is one that Dr. Leif Svalgaard keeps updated:
Here’s the issue, which WUWT summed up when we printed excepts of Livingston and Penn in EOS. 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.
In a nutshell, once the magnetic field gets below 1500 gauss, sunspots won’t have enough contrast to be visible.
Now maybe with the Science magazine article, the powers that be at the National Solar Observatory will give them more telescope time.They’ve had a lot of trouble getting time because the “consensus” of solar science didn’t embrace their idea. That may be about to change. With something this important, one would hope.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
If this continues it will play merry hell with food and survival for millions, I’m more worried by this than fictitiousl warming and carbon being a problem.
So much agri is geared to warm weather survival if it tips to cooler, there will be a messy catch up to come.
Livingston and Penn paper: “Sunspots may vanish by 2015″.
I suggest a later date about 2020-2022
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC2.htm
Remember too, the government’s count of sunspot activity is being inflated.
Days without sunspots are counted as having them.
Kinda like 600 degree days & nights in Egg Harbor, Wisconcin.
“They’ve had a lot of trouble getting time becuase the “consensus” of solar science didn’t embrace their idea.”
Why should they embrace the idea of solar activity driving climate change?
The “consensus” of solar science have been cooking the sunspot books right along with the tempurature record.
Another Maunder Minimum on the way?
Good job we’re pumping out all these Greenhouse Gases to mitigate its’ effects (:-
Perhaps the sun is experiencing “climate change disruption”.
I expect soon to see a rebuttal about proper adjustments being required before the desired outcome is achieved.
Has the jury come back in, concerning the idea that fewer sunspots allow more cosmic rays to create more cloud cover which causes more cooling? It seems the idea ought be verified, or debunked, by now.
Thanks for the followup, Anthony! This is exciting and interesting research, certain to raise many hackles in the CAGW crowd.
Dr. Jasper Kirkby of CERN gave a very interesting presentation that tied past climate change to sunspot activity in this colloquium presentation, “Cosmic Rays and Climate”
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1181073/
I highly recommend it, it is quite accessible and skillfully presented. He brings up the L&P theory and ties it into effects on climate change.
They’ve had a lot of trouble getting time because the “consensus” of solar science didn’t embrace their idea.
The solar science consensus seems to have taken a severe beating in the last few years… reality has clearly demonstrated that the solar science consensus theories are deeply flawed… even the best gatekeeping in the galaxy cannot gloss over the failed predictive power of the solar science consensus… thankfully there are scientist like Livingston and Penn who are still willing to consider the implications of their observations… thankfully there are other non-consensus solar theories that are now gaining momentum and electrifying the non-consensus scientific community.
In the immortal words of Chuck Berry Roll Over Beethoven
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ykCYwhfdMs&fs=1&hl=en_US]
“In a nutshell, once the magnetic field gets below 1500 gauss, sunspots won’t have enough contrast to be visible.”
And part of that nutshell has already hidden some of the spots. Project the upper line of the scatter on the L&P Umbral Data.
This line says that 1/4 of scatter of spots has already found itself at unity (same brightness of quiet sun background) and therefore invisible. A portion of those falling close to unity (.85 ? to 1.0) are dimmed.
Now, for something you might not have noticed:
Compare these spots
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/TempGr/BigSunAIA4500.jpg
with the position and brightness of the Active Region they occur in here:
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/TempGr/BigSunAIAoverlay.jpg
Are the spots/MF’s weakened or obscured? Are the increased speed of flows responsible for weakening/dispersing the magnetic lines or are they dredging/churning up obscuring material? How would you know?
The darker spots are all at the edges of the AR, and the big spot has it’s penumbra ‘crowded’ by the AR.
The latest L&P paper says Solar Max is likely to be 66 smoothed SSN.
This: http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/TempGr/uSC24vs13_14.GIF says that the SSUCA (sunspot umbral corrected area) is flatlined so far. 1903 breakpoint is coming up quickly. The Sun is going to have to step up to the plate and turn it’s corner to make/exceed the SC14 SSN smoothed Max of 65, or it’s not. There isn’t a whole lot of time to wait for the answer.
Tom Rowan says:
September 18, 2010 at 8:15 am
Remember too, the government’s count of sunspot activity is being inflated.
To blazes with the govt’s sloppy SSN work.
Look at the 10.7 cm flux and the Sunspot Measured Area.
Why do you think L&P are measuring gauss and intensities?
There are many options happening right now. Jumping on the L&P bandwagon may be popular but when you look at the science involved questions must be asked. Sure we are entering a solar cycle that has not been experienced in the modern age, L&P are recording this, but the method is flawed and without mechanism.
Their new paper acknowledges their critics, but they need more access to telescope time, but it might not help their cause. The magnetic record follows the 11 year solar cycle, the next 2 cycles will be very low, boosting their claims but without knowledge of why. If they had complete records we would still see a slight rise in gauss over this cycle.
A debunking of L&P here: http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/65
Ok. I give in. I believe in global cooling.
solarcycle24 keeps track of these charts but also has David Hathaway’s prediction for cycle 24 here.
Awhile back you had an animation of earlier predictions of cycle 24. It would be interesting to see how they compare now.
The paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1 notes a recent uptick in umbral magnetic field strength. It includes a graph with three different linear projections, one is from their earlier work, the others cover more data and have an intercept 14 years later, 2021-2022:
I extracted the figure, see http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/penn_2010.gif
One thing I see in the figure is that we may be missing sunspots – the high-gauss spots have a different trend than the low-gauss spots. I think this means that sunspots are not being seen and are not being used in the computation for the annual average, and this may result in too flat a slope of the all-data projection and maybe even the SC23 projection.
Note also that when the average strength reaches 1500 (where average implies including sunspots invisible in visible light), the sun won’t be bare, there will still be many spots with a strong enough field to be visible, though they’ll look rather anemic. From the paper:
rbateman says:
September 18, 2010 at 9:13 am
The 66 SSN is based on the 2017 crossing, which assumes a decline of 50 gauss/yer. With the newer, slower, declines (50 gauss per year) they come up with 87 for SC24 and 20 for SC25. At the 65 gauss/year rate, the projection is for a SC25 peak of only 7!
As I mention in another comment, I think 50 gauss/year is too conservative, but no matter how you look at it, things are going to look interesting for decades. I’m sure you appreciate your ring-side seat.
Ric Werme says:
September 18, 2010 at 9:54 am
One thing I see in the figure is that we may be missing sunspots – the high-gauss spots have a different trend than the low-gauss spots. I think this means that sunspots are not being seen and are not being used in the computation for the annual average, and this may result in too flat a slope of the all-data projection and maybe even the SC23 projection.
And how would we know? One way is that the SC progression of ramp would appear stalled out, especially is the slope of ramp matches the downslope of the upper bounds of scatter on the graph you extracted from the paper.
This would be during ramp. Darned if the cycle doesn’t appear stalled/nearly stalled/lethargic as regards progression of activity.
What happens when ramp is over and the cycle de-ramps?
Poof. Bad doggie.
In reply to Caleb’s question:
“Caleb,
Has the jury come back in, concerning the idea that fewer sunspots allow more cosmic rays to create more cloud cover which causes more cooling? It seems the idea ought be verified, or debunked, by now.”
Planetary cloud cover does appear to be increasing. (See the graph in Roy Spencer’s blog.)
It should be noted in terms of mechanism that planetary cloud cover appears to be modulated by two mechanisms. GCR levels and solar wind bursts which remove cloud forming ions via the process electroscavenging. (The solar wind bursts create a charge differential in the ionosphere which removes the ions.) Planetary cloud cover closely tracked GCR levels up until around 1994 at which time planetary cloud cover was reduced, it is alleged due to solar wind bursts. (See Tinsley’s summary of the mechanisms and the observational data below.)
The solar wind bursts make it appear that higher levels of GCR do not modulate planetary cloud cover as the solar wind bursts removes the cloud forming ions.
“Anomalously High Oceanic Cloud Cover
The following plot shows an AMSR-E estimate of anomalies in reflected shortwave (SW, sunlight) corresponding to the blue (Global) SST curve in the previous figure. I have estimated the reflected SW anomaly from AMSR-E vertically integrated cloud water contents, based upon regressions against Aqua CERES data. The high values in recent months (shown by the circle) suggests either (1) the ocean cooling is being driven by decreased sunlight, or (2) negative feedback in response to anomalously warm conditions, or (3) some combination of (1) and (2). Note that negative low-cloud feedback would conflict with all of the IPCC climate models, which exhibit various levels of positive cloud feedback.”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/08/still-cooling-sea-surface-temperatures-thru-august-18-2010/
Paper by Georgieva, Bianchi, & Kirov “Once again about global warming and solar activity”
http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt760405/PDF/2005MmSAI..76..969G.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JA014342.shtml
If the Sun is so quiet, why is the Earth ringing? A comparison of two solar minimum intervals.
Expanded version of a paper by Tinsley and Yu, “Atmospheric Ionization and Clouds as Links Between Solar Activity and Climate”
http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/pdf/Atmos_060302.pdf
It is no surprise that if a researcher spends years on a pet project, he would whish to present it in the most favourable light. I think that the trend line on the L&P contrast chart are somewhat misleading. I decided to take another look using a moving average, and than look at its trend.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/L&Pcon.htm
It is obvious that the L&P effect peaked some time in the mid 2006, but since then the trend was flat. I think it is a useful scientific exercise, but by no means conclusive.
It would be useful if Dr. L.S. can link latest numerical data.
I have always believed in replicated measurements. Does anyone know if other scientists, using a different telescope, contemplate replicating the L&P findings? Surely, if the issue is important, this ought to be the next step.
Vuk,
I believe Leifs L&P numerical data are here.
Jim Cripwell says:
September 18, 2010 at 11:05 am
It would be an important step.
Therein lies the catch 22: Telescope time at big observatories is by no means in abundant oversupply, but is more of a precious commodity, being scheduled a year or more in advance. If your allotment (should you get some) timeslot is clouded out, you are SOL.
vukcevic says:
September 18, 2010 at 10:58 am
It is no surprise that if a researcher spends years on a pet project, he would whish to present it in the most favourable light. I think that the trend line on the L&P contrast chart are somewhat misleading. I decided to take another look using a moving average, and than look at its trend.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/L&Pcon.htm
It is obvious that the L&P effect peaked some time in the mid 2006, but since then the trend was flat. I think it is a useful scientific exercise, but by no means conclusive.
It would be useful if Dr. L.S. can link latest numerical data.
Use the gauss data instead and see what turns up. The paper is mainly about magnetic fields. Also keep in mind that some sunspots have already disappeared due to L&P. This will naturally skew the later readings upward slightly. A truly linear decline will appear to be slowing down, continuously approaching an asymptote of 1500 Gauss due to the fact that the smallest values are being removed (i.e., not observed due to invisibility). In the meantime, the number of spots will decrease. The only way to disprove L&P is to show that the Gauss data is rising for a significant period of time. Proving that the decline is slowing down is not enough. So far all readings are within the error for an asymptotic slowdown. Add the invisible spots in and you likely get a true linear slowdown with the average crossing 1500 Gauss at the original predicted point of 2015. The real average will never cross 1500 Gauss until such time as every spot is eradicated from the sun.
Here is the text data:
http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston.txt
The big question of course, is whether or not a Solar Minimum, Grand or Lesser, will cool the earth. There is no known mechanism, and isotope studies suggest minimums don’t, though history suggests they do.
I’d like to know if the recent discovery of processes on the sun that can modify radioactive decay rates on earth have any role in elucidating any of these mysteries?
===========