Max amplitude 50-60. Carbon copy of the Dalton. Interesting times, indeed…..

Wal Thornhill writes:
“Sunspots are dark instead of bright, which is prima facie evidence that heat is not trying to escape from within. And the Sun’s corona is millions of degrees hotter than the photosphere. These simple observations point to the energy source of the Sun being external. Add to this the dominant influence of magnetic fields on the Sun’s external behavior and we arrive at the necessity for an electrical energy supply. It is the “subtle radiation traversing space which the star picks up,” and which Eddington immediately dismissed because his gravitational model required energy to be generated at the core of the star to bloat it to the observed size.”
Eugene Parker writes:
“[T]he pedestrian Sun exhibits a variety of phenomena that defy contemporary theoretical understanding. We need look no farther than the sunspot, or the intensely filamentary structure of the photospheric magnetic field, or the spicules, or the origin of the small magnetic bipoles that continually emerge in the supergranules, or the heat source that maintains the expanding gas in the coronal hole, or the effective magnetic diffusion that is so essential for understanding the solar dynamo, or the peculiar internal rotation inferred from helioseismology, or the variation of solar brightness with the level of solar activity, to name a few of the more obvious mysterious macrophysical phenomena exhibited by the Sun.”
More from Wal Thornhill …
“Countless billions of dollars have been wasted based on the thermonuclear model of stars. For example, trying to generate electricity from thermonuclear fusion, “just like the Sun.” The thought that solar scientists have it completely backwards has not troubled anyone’s imagination. The little fusion power that has been generated on Earth has required phenomenal electric power input, “just like the Sun!” The Sun and all stars consume electrical energy to produce their heat and light and cause some thermonuclear fusion in their atmospheres. The heavy elements formed there are seen in stellar spectra. It explains why the expected solar neutrino count is low and anti-correlated with sunspot numbers. It explains why many stars are considered “chemically peculiar.” Get the physics right first and the mathematics will follow.”
(These quotes come from “Our Misunderstood Sun” at http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=ah63dzac, and are intended to remind people that putting sugar sprinkles onto a turd does not make it taste or smell any better. We need to be looking at errors in the foundational assumptions that go into these models.)
REPLY: “And the Sun’s corona is millions of degrees hotter than the photosphere. These simple observations point to the energy source of the Sun being external. ”
Really? What rubbish. – Anthony

I don’t suppose this will do anything to stop the flood of legal immigrants from New York to Texas. A little 2010 census humor there.
What’s behind the rise of Texas?
[link was missing target URL, so I edited out the HTML that was broken. -MOD-e]

By Ruben Navarrette Jr., Special to CNN
[snippage – go to link for full article]
It makes for quite a sea change. We are seeing the transfer of influence and prominence away from what has long been considered the power corridor of Boston, Washington and New York and toward the Sunbelt.
Texas is the buckle in that belt. If you want to catch a glimpse of the future, you don’t go to Alexandria or Syracuse or Worcester. You go to Austin, Houston or San Antonio.
A generation or two ago, Americans left the Northeast and headed west to California in search of the Pacific, milder climate, bountiful farmland and a spirit of tolerance. Now, they’re still leaving the Northeast — but also leaving California — to head to Texas in pursuit of lower taxes, less government regulation, lower home prices and a spirit of independence.

The graph is too noisy to take any kind of “aha” moment… it’s still very possible for the graph to catch up to the prediction. Check the spikes.

re; missing link to CNN article
Darn. I hate when that happens.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/12/23/navarrette.texas.growth/

Re: “REPLY: “And the Sun’s corona is millions of degrees hotter than the photosphere. These simple observations point to the energy source of the Sun being external. ”
Really? What rubbish. – Anthony”
Anthony, you’re making a critical error here.

How many denials are we going to hear from the AGW crowd when the price of firewood and heating oil skyrockets during the next mini-Ice Age??? Oh, that’s right… it’s all just ‘climate change’ and ‘local weather’.

We in the UK have just had a trial run. Won’t be so bad as long as we don’t expect to go anywhere or do anything.
Hopefully nature will give us another couple of winters trial preparation to adjust to the changes.
Anyone for skiing on the Kent coast?
I’m thinking ski-doo trecks along the Thames, past the Houses of Parliament.

@teh article
> The Ap index being zero, indicates that the sun’s magnetic field is low.
Actually, the Ap index (and its logarithmic cousin Kp) are strictly measures of fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field, not the solar magnetic field. It is a measure of tiny changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, caused by interaction with Earth’s ionosphere and plasmasphere, and indirectly with the Sun through interaction with the solar wind, a magnetized stream of electrons and protons.
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/geomag/kp_ap.html
These magnetic perturbations of the Earth’s magnetic field (~ 50,000 nano-teslas [nt]) are on the order of a few nt. A magnetic storm is a period of high fluctuation, as much as 500nt, caused by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and such.
Think of geomagnetic storms as magnetic “quakes”, analogous to earthquakes, except the magnetic field is trembling, not the ground.
So the title of this article “Solar Geomagnetic Ap Index Hits Zero” is a misnomer and should read “Terrestrial Geomagnetic Ap Index Hits Zero”, and even that is a bit redundant, geomagnetic says it all