Guest post by David Archibald
Predicting the amplitude of Solar Cycle 24 was a big business. Jan Janssens provides the most complete table of Solar Cycle 24 predictions at: http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/SC24.html
Prediction activity for Solar Cycle 24 seemed to have peaked in 2007. In year before, Dr David Hathaway of NASA made the first general estimate of Solar Cycle 25 amplitude:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10may_longrange/
Based on the slowing of the Sun’s “Great Conveyor Belt”, he predicted that
“The slowdown we see now means that Solar Cycle 25, peaking around the year 2022, could be one of the weakest in centuries.” He is very likely to have got the year wrong in that Solar Cycle 25 is unlikely to start until 2025.
In this paper: http://www.probeinternational.org/Livingston-penn-2010.pdf,
Livingston and Penn provided the first hard estimate of Solar Cycle 25 amplitude based on a physical model. That estimate is 7, which would make it the smallest solar cycle for over 300 years.
This is figure 2 from their paper:
Livingston and Penn have been tracking the decline in sunspot magnetic field, predicting that sunspots will disappear when the umbral magnetic field strength falls below 1,500 gauss, as per this figure from their 2010 paper:
Dr Svalgaard has updated of the progression of that decline on his research page at:
http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston%20and%20Penn.png
With data updated to year end 2011, the line of best fit on Dr Svalgaard’s figure of Umbral Magnetic Field now intersects the 1,500 guass sunspot cutoff in 2030:
Using the Livingston and Penn Solar Cycle 25 amplitude estimate, this is what the solar cycle record is projected to look like:
And, yes, that means the end of the Modern Warm Period.
===========================================================
Further reading:
Sun Headed Into Hibernation, Solar Studies Predict –Sunspots may disappear altogether in next cycle.
NASA Long Range Solar Forecast – Solar Cycle 25 peaking around 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
BRRRRRRRRRRR … that’s going to be really really COLD
On the bright side, Sahara desert expansion might slow down or even reverse.
Somehow I doubt the projection of a SSN of 7 will prove accurate. We are looking at a curve fit based on 10 years of data. We do not know if this data is oscillatory or what the oscillation period is, if there is one. L & P may have found the explanation for the various grand minimums through out history, but we do not have enough data to know what the long term behavior of this phenomena is. Lacking at least one complete cycle of data the trend line is only speculation.
Nevertheless this is very interesting and thought provoking.
I am in two minds about this. One the one hand it appears (if I have my interpretation correct) that we are headed for a couple of decades of rather cold weather and that this is going to have some detrimental effects on global health and food production etc.
On the other hand it appears that a new mini ice age is about the only think that will convince people that Gaia of Warming does not exist and that we should return once again to scientific reasoning.
I think that we have been lucky that the Church of CAGW picked the late 20th century to pull this scam. If this had all kicked off as we were entering a few of decades of warming there would be no way to refute their mad computer generated claims since logic and scientific method have both been well and truly banned from the battlefield.
Oh deary deary me.
May one suggest we start pumping out CO2 with even greater vigour?
Population of nine billion by then to feed…..
PaulR – you’ve got it backwards. The Sahara expands during cold periods and contracts during warm periods. Not only will the Sahara expand, the SW US, Australia, and other areas at the intersections of Midlatitude arid zones, Mediterranean zones and Subtropical arid zones, will be in dire straits, with megadroughts rife.
And as I write this, here in California, we are probably looking at a record dry rainfall year, unless the persistence of the current block ends and the MJO breaks out of its current death spiral.
David Archibald has not been timid suggesting a big step down in in solar activity. He predicted this current cycle would be much less active, and he was right: The NASA prognosticators (who get paid to prognosticate) were saying, “Eh, it will be about the same as the last one” But even David Archibad was thinking Dalton-like minimum – This looks more and more like a Maunder magnitude minimum. The Grand Minimum correlates strongly with colder temperatures. We live in interesting times.
PaulR: The Sahara Desert has been greening up, shrinking for some time now as a Google search will show.
Way ahead of you. That’s why I moved from Denver back to Florida a couple years ago.
Not sure why this signals the end of a warm period. So will the Sun’s IR be that much less during a La Nina (when the oceans absorb IR)? Will El Nino’s not let go of OHC during cycle 25? How does a low cycle translate into measurably cooler temperatures on the ground? I am aware of cloud seeding and cosmic particle theories connected to that. But we are not talking about lots of clouds versus none. We are talking about a tiny bit of extra seeding available from cosmic particles. These tiny differences will show up as frigid temps? Sorry but I don’t see how the math lines up.
We just need to work out what we are doing to cause all this reduction in Sunspot activity. No doubt modern “science” will come up with some new reason justifying a few million in research into anthropogenic sunspot manufacture or whatever.
“It’s worse than we thought it was”
Is that where we are now coming to?
Isn’t it time we started to paint wind-mills black. Loads of ‘free’ energy and a decreased albedo. That’s a Win-Win scenario for when the next ice-age cometh, isn’t it?
There is a 208 year cycle observed in solar proxies for many centuries. Over recent centuries the peak in auto-correlation is for 210 years. Based on this, two weak cycles were clearly expected to happen now.
Low-solar-activity periods are associated with lower general temperatures, but larger latitudinal temperature gradients.
These conditions lead to more/more energetic storm conditions (especially tornadoes, but TCs too), more severe droughts, and declining agricultural/botanical productivity.
Glacial conditions are associated with extreme droughts (esp. in mid-latitudes where lots of folks live), and stupendous winds. Large tracts of the US central plains are typified by wind-scour lake basins and/or sand dune fields that formed and expanded during the ice ages.
Anyone who thinks colder is better is – – to put it gently – – out of their frikken mind.
Careful now, let’s not make too many predictions layered over the solar prediction, we may end up with the prediction snowball effect or PES, therefore increasing the blogging effect or BE, then things are really out of control in the BS effect, or BSE. Good to plan for colder. Plan also what you will eat..
On the other hand, it’s refreshing to see the forecast of doom for once focusing on too LITTLE of something instead of too much. Oh – and something completely and totally outside of possible human influence.
The stratosphere is clear and volcanic activities remain quieter and at a lower altitude. More tranquility in the years ahead if the present conditions hold fairly steady. A clear stratosphere will aid warmth and buy time. Low altitude volcanic action will aid it more should we get it. Then as the next minimum gets toward bottoming look for the volcanic activities to increase and perturb that tranquility again.
Yeah, it’s about time to shift back to ice age warnings. It seems the activists have extracted just about all they can from AGW, it’s been a really nice run.
Just look at the charts.
SELL!!!
Combine this and the current “Cold PDO” that is underway in the Pacific, and I would expect to see some very cold winters in the coming years here in North America.
PaulR says:
January 25, 2012 at 5:31 pm
You have it completely backwards–during the Ice Ages (aka “cold weather”), the earth was cold and because it was cold it was dusty and because it was dusty, the dust found its way into the oceans and onto the glaciers where it was preserved for us to study.
It’s documented.
I find myself on the horns of a dilemma; I want a cold period so the great fraud and it’s perpetraters can be destroyed once and for all but fear for the widespread disruption to food supplies that such occurrence would precipitate.
Do we have an accurate record of conditions in the LIA as they applied to Australia and Canada for example? In the latest cool period from 1940 to 1975 or so Australia experienced a prolonged drought as well as extensive wet seasons particularly in the early 70s. Our winters tended to have colder winters with more frosts but summers still produced hot days and, from our farm records, we managed to produce good crops and fat cattle.
I know Dr. Archibald predicts the northern extent of wheat growing in Canada will move south as temperatures cool mainly because a reduction in the length of the growing season. That probably won’t affect Australia since our wheat areas are controlled by precipitation rather than length of season. If shorter seasons affect the Canadian grain crop would it also affect other northern grain growing areas in the Ukraine and Russia?
My fear is that the preoccupation with Global Warming is preventing research into the far more serious problems associated with a deep cooling. A CSIRO wheat researcher has stated that “there is no point in considering cool weather effects on plants because it’s not going to happen”. This sort of attitude is bordering on dereliction of duty yet is the dangerous outcome of poor and fabricated science. Heads really do need to roll.
The last of DA’s graphs seems to suggest that we had a Modern Warm Period because there was also a Modern Grand Maximum in sunspots. There is compelling evidence that the latter did not exist casting doubt on the association with the former, see e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/IAUS286-Mendoza-Svalgaard.pdf [Right half of Figure 1] or
http://www.leif.org/research/How%20Well%20Do%20We%20Know%20the%20Sunspot%20Number.pdf and finally http://ssnworkshop.wikia.com/wiki/Home
you just know though, that the official ‘line’ is going to be – ‘we’ve added so much CO2 to the atmosphere that we won’t have a prolonged cold spell’ !
it’s the mantra that R Gates and lazy teenager and all the other trolls will bring, not mentioning how all else that they hold dear in their religion has been shown to by junk science, worshiped in their junk science web sites.
current climate science must work to present plausible theory as to the limits, if any, that CO2 can mollify what well looks to be coming.