January solar cycle 24 numbers, a new high for one, continued slumps for others

The standard reply for the Ap is (paraphrasing) nothing to see here, same as it ever was. So how many more months/years before this “pause” have to continue before it becomes something to see?

On Nov 17, 2013, the highest SSN of 282 of the year was recorded, along with the second highest SF of 177. The four day period from Nov. 14-17 had the highest solar flux and SSNs for the year, with a SF of 178 on Nov. 15.
On Nov 17, there was significant volcanic activity in the Pacific ring of fire and tornadoes in the US, under a full moon, even though protons weren’t prominent, and Ap was only 6, and Kp was under 4. Coincidence or causative?
It appears useful to analyze daily solar activity in relationship to daily Earth events. Are monthly averages compiled for simplicity in producing plots or for some other reason?

Why are the ISES predictions biased high for sunspot number? I would have put it at <75 and it is at 85? What is driving the assumption that SSN will be higher than it has been?

RSS middle stratospheric temperature over the same period appears to correlate with the AP nicely.
http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html
It has declined at the rate of .5 K/decade since 2000 maybe providing lots of cold air to feed the arctic vortex.

lsvalgaard says:
February 3, 2014 at 7:55 pm
“My own prediction was 70, but the panel felt that it was easier to reach consensus on 90, and that the uncertainty is such that there is really no significant different between 90 and 70.”
Yet so far, the average of the solar peak seems to be about 60.

John Day says:
True, but the previous max SF was also in winter (Nov 2011), so the relative rankings didn’t change.
Leif says:
They did, from a ratio of 1.0218 to a ratio of 1.0343.

Leif, I wrote ranking not ratio. “A ranking is a relationship between a set of items such that, for any two items, the first is either ‘ranked higher than’, ‘ranked lower than’ or ‘ranked equal to’ the second.” [Wikipedia]
So the Jan 2014 readings were ranked higher than the Nov 2011 values, regardless of any normalization.
I thought your original comment might have created the impression that the Jan 2014 SF value wouldn’t have been a new high if the value had been normalized to 1 AU.
😐

steven mosher,
you were a kid in 1962

3 Feb: Forbes: Patrick Michaels: Will the Overselling of Global Warming Lead to a New Scientific Dark Age?
Will the overselling of climate change lead to a new scientific dark age? That’s the question being posed in the latest issue of an Australian literary journal, Quadrant, by Garth Paltridge, one of the world’s most respected atmospheric scientists.
Paltridge was a Chief Research Scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). The latter is Australia’s equivalent of the National Science Foundation, our massive Federal Laboratory network, and all the governmental agency science branches rolled into one…
Climate scientists have been profoundly defensive about the known problems. Paltridge elegantly explains that this has to be the case, and describes the likely horrific consequences when the day of reckoning finally arrives.
That day is coming closer, because, as Paltridge notes, people are catching on:
“…the average man in the street, a sensible chap who by now can smell the signs of an oversold environmental campaign from miles away, is beginning to suspect that it is politics rather than science which is driving the issue.”
The scientific establishment has painted itself into a corner over global warming…
When the climate science tsunami breaks the shore, the destruction will be massive and universal. It’s fair to say that scientific seismologists like Garth Paltridge have already detected the P-wave of the earthquake, in the form of the lack of warming, which is now likely to extend to at least 23 years. The S-wave isn’t far behind. Scientists, run for cover. Now.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2014/02/03/will-the-overselling-of-global-warming-lead-to-a-new-scientific-dark-age/

Would it not be appropriate for WUWT to offer a better prediction for SSN and add a green line reflective of a less Stalinist adherence to collective consensus? Or are you just being polite?… Leif? I say the green WUWT line should be at ~70 now, sliding to zero at 2019. Can we have a consensus?

ren… Yes I would say that such a line is better. Thanks.
Leif, Thank-you…. Yes the NASA graph is more like what I imagined.

ren… that was very amusing…seriously.

*The red prediction line says 80+

Pamela Gray,
My mind just went somewhere else. The San Onofre reactor buildings came to mind. Damn sunspots. Out damn’d spot. I say!

Hoser,
re:”Northern Hemisphere in 2012, and Southern Hemisphere this year. ”
I went through the WUWT (Leif’s) solar data looking for graphs splitting the SSN etc into North and south sets. I found the butterfly charts but which ones were you referring to?

when this cycle (24) is all over and the debrief seesion starts could I ask for a subkect to be added to the agenda
to construct a `summary for policy makers` with the front page being the original nasa propaganda page indicating the `massive solar cycle 24 being predicted` along with their suggested ssn chart, of course overlaid with the real (and smoothed) ssn.
it could be quite interesting.

DaveR, don’t forget that the classic double top on a stock chart is only classic if followed by a rapid decline. It has no predictive power whatsoever.

Where can I find the official observed 10.7 radio flux number ?
– In http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/weekly/RecentIndices.txt, one finds for January 2014: 158.6;
– In http://www.solen.info/solar/, 157.4 (measured).
Which of those two is the official radio flux number?
N.B.: The projected values of the smoothed sunspot number, showed in http://www.solen.info/solar/, could be exact if the solar activity would follow this simulation:
Sunspot number in
February 2014: 75
March 2014: 65
April 2014: 58
May 2014: 50
June 2014: 62
July 2014: 52
August 2014: 47
In any case, it is almost certain that a new maximum of the smoothed sunspot number is in the make!

Steven Mosher says:
February 3, 2014 at 8:06 pm
When I was kid our house cost 15,000 dollars.
I trust none of you will adjust that number.

Only a dishonest man (or a climatologist?) would adjust that number to something else and replace the historical number with the new “adjusted” number.
An economist might convert all historical house prices into today’s dollars via the published inflation table for comparison purposes without altering the historical record. An economist would never go back in history and “adjust” some house prices up and others down to support his computer model of CO2 (or political party in power or whatever) effecting housing price. (a climatologist might do so obviously, as we have watched them do it over these last decades)
Mr. Mosher, I wager that you would be yelling “it is the hottest year ever” as 2 miles of ice pile up over New York — all in adjusted temp reading of course.

Edim says: February 3, 2014 at 11:40 pm
Interesting indeed:
http://postimg.org/image/cgcg3f7cn/full
http://postimg.org/image/5om10kid3/full

Mosher, adjusting the flux to a 1AU constant is open, unambigous and every agrees on what the adjustment factor should be.
As opposed to the temperature adjustments that are secret and highly arbitrary.
Do you see the difference now?

What sun………
02/04/2014 0758 am
SSW Mount Hope, Sedgwick County, Kansas
Heavy snow e3.0 inch, reported by co-op observer.
Very heavy snow falling in Mount Hope with visibility
less than a tenth of a mile.
[ Pamela Gray says:
February 3, 2014 at 10:09 pm Those double peaks remind me of two side by side hills along the Columbia River…
When you look at it that way the raw data with or without adjustment is fine. ]
I prefer the larger unadjusted numbers.

When I was kid our house cost 15,000 dollars.
I trust none of you will adjust that number.
Seriously, is there some point to this? If you want to discuss adjustments to the thermometric data sets, or some specific set, by all means start a thread on it. Go into detail. I’d welcome it. If you are trying to not so subtly hijack a post on solar activity to defend adjustments made to thermometric data in one or more surface temperature sets, don’t, especially not with oblique and mean-spirited non-sequitors.
Also bear in mind Leif’s comments that scientists are not generally idiots and understand things like elliptical orbits and the in solar intensity pretty well. As several others have pointed out, whether or not one should adjust the data for this in general depends on the use one wishes to put the data to. If one wishes to make inferences about e.g. the state of the sun, one basically inverts the intensity relationship to obtain knowledge on the surface of the sun. If one wishes to make inferences or predictions about the effect of the radiation on the Earth, then obviously one uses the actual measurement at the Earth.
In this regard, why pick on poor, hapless, helpless solar indices in an article on solar magnetic state? Why not go whole hog and attack the widespread use of a single number for solar intensity at TOA instead of correcting for the 91 W/m^2 swing in this number at the TOA as the Earth orbits the Sun even when/if solar state were perfectly constant?
Note well that if you were to open up a general article on land surface temperature reconstruction, nearly all of the “adjustments” made to the data are not of this sort — simple geometry and the application of laws of physics that nobody doubts or can misunderstand or misapply. They are an attempt to reconstruct an accurate and precise record of temperature from a comparative mere smattering of indifferently made surface measurements, and often the adjustments are made in the complete absence of information as to whether or not they are truly justified simply because we lack critical information about local state at the time the measurements were made and those assumptions are bound to be often wrong!
One doesn’t have to go into the distant past to observe this — many of the “official” thermometers contributing to the contemporary measurements of land surface temperatures are utterly and obviously corrupted by siting issues, as has been pointed out repeatedly. My favorite one locally is RDU airport, which tied an all time minimum temperature (for the date) last week at 7 F. The odd thing is that in my backyard 15 miles away, the minimum temperature was 5 F. In the surrounding countryside on all sides, the field of minimum temperatures was 4F to 5F. RDU is in the middle of a web of expressway and increasing urbanization, and the weather station is sitting a few meters away from a huge, heat retaining runway that is doused every few minutes with superheated jet exhaust consisting of CO_2 and H_2O vapor. It always reads hotter than the surrounding countryside.
But how much hotter? How can one “correct” for this obvious UHI effect? That’s very difficult to say indeed, and that is right now, with a huge network of personal (but unofficial) weather stations to observe. Two are within a mile of my house. One (at a local school) is well-sited out in a field, with trees nearby but no concrete particularly close to it. I tend to trust it, as it produces readings within 1F or so of what I read in my back yard. The other is at a house like mine in a neighborhood right next to mine, but they mounted it as far as I can tell right over their driveway facing south. During the afternoons it spikes up to highs that are absurdly higher than any of the surrounding weather stations.
Then there are the problems with the actual inhomogeneity of local temperatures and with just when the high or low temperature of a day occurs. Move a weather station five meters and one can often observe a 1-2 C variation in what it reads across a day — if the house I just referred to put the station elsewhere in their back yard I’m sure their spurious readings would disappear because I don’t think the house is in its own tiny tropical climate zone compared to mine. Then, while the low temperature of the day is frequently but not always at or just after dawn, the high is not so cooperative — it can happen anytime during the day or even the night and indeed is distributed with nonzero weight across all or most of the 24 hour interval, peaked sometime in mid-afternoon. There are problems with the normalization and accuracy of measuring devices. There are problems with record keeping. And we’re still working on contemporary measurements, often at sites set up by professionals using high quality instruments (but in the case of an airfield, for a completely different purpose than recording global surface temperatures — on an airfield they care about conditions at the tarmac as it is these that affect landing planes.
It is in some sense fundamentally abusive to repurpose these readings as part of a surface temperature reconstruction in the first place — they are broke and one cannot really fix them. How can one compare the 7C read at RDU last week to the record it tied back in 1977? In 1977 RDU had a single terminal, and was literally situated in the middle of surrounding woods and cow pastures with only two lightly travelled two lane highways providing access. Today they are rebuilding the second of three terminals for the second time, where the original terminal (still there, although renovated somewhere along the way) is so tiny, stuck out on one end of the airport loop, that people have a hard time finding it or the airlines it services. There are eight lane expressways on 2/3 sides, the original four lane route 70 is now lined with shopping centers, cow pastures and forests have been replaced by giant housing developments — there is even an “Airport Mall” with shopping, outlet stores, dining, hotels, and a square kilometer or so of tarmac. Perhaps when the wind blows in just the right direction, it doesn’t pull warm air in from one of these urban heat sinks. But alas, when it does it pulls it right over the neighboring runway instead.
I would say, if we were to “adjust” its record, that there is absolutely no doubt that we set a low temperature record (for the date) last week for the entire triangle area if not the whole state, but officially no such thing occurred, we merely tied a record set (paradoxically enough) in 1977, not in 1910 or 1870 or whatever date in the remote past one might expect given the 0.5 to 1.0 C global warming we supposedly experienced in the intervening century (depending on whether one takes one’s GISS with one’s coffee, or prefers the more moderate HADCRUT4 on a bagel).
In the end, if I were to try to “adjust” this record, renormalize, account for UHI, I would have to take the field of surrounding personal weather station reports, come up with some sort of criterion for eliminating the obviously broken ones like the one that reads 2 C too high where I can — note well that this is only possible because I have three very nearby readings (one of which I trust a great deal as it is my own and I know right where it is and how it varies over the day and when it reads incorrectly and when it reads correctly) it is inconsistent with, but what would I do if there were two incorrectly sited stations and one correctly sited? What would I do if one were not my own? Even in the best sited station in the area, how do I cope with the spurious variations due to wind direction, due to variation in the instrumental readings themselves as the electronics experiences some occult instability? One thing we teach in physics lab is that one never measures the true length or true time, that one always has to deal with ignored causes such as friction and drag forces and non-inertial reference frames, so that even in the humblest of experiments measuring the local surface gravitational acceleration constant g, one is never going to get the “accepted value” and besides, g isn’t really a constant. Nor is it easy to “correct” for all this, not without knowing the answer ahead of time. In fact, it is difficult and very, very expensive and cannot be done with ordinary undergrad lab equipment.
Then we could talk about GAST vs GASTA. There is a persistent myth that we can know and compare GASTA over a century and a half (or more!) of this incredibly messy, poorly documented data acquired from indifferent instrumentation with uncertain siting and irregular sampling and get results that are precise enough to be of use in estimating how much it has warmed (GASTA) while still leaving us in a state of profound ignorance as to what the mean temperature itself is right now (GAST). GASTA, we are told, is precise to within 0.15 C in HADCRUT4 (and note well, this is with the best of modern instrumentation!) GAST, NASA tells us, isn’t known to within 1C.
Of course, the 0.15C only refers to the last 30 or so years at best. GAST, GASTA, the average surface temperature in 1900 is pretty much a mystery. Maybe we know it within a half a degree. Maybe it is within a degree. Land measurements are sparse and it is absolutely impossible to assess errors like the ones I can directly observe within a mile of my own house, all equipped with fully automated modern instrumentation that never sleeps, gets drunk, takes a holiday, and that records the full 24 hour interval at a granularity of a minute or so so that high and low temperatures really are high and low temperatures even if the one occurs at midnight and the other in mid-afternoon (and with a precision of at least a full 0.1C). And then, in 1900 we knew nothing at all about polar temperatures (especially south polar temperatures) and knew virtually nothing about sea surface temperatures. Perhaps 70% of the Earth’s surface completely unsampled (or sampled by methodology so crude that it might well produce measurements that are worse than no measurement at all, just as undergrad lab measurements of g would be, by being systematically biased too low but with no way to ever correct for that if g were not a constant!
If you insist on using the price of your house as a metaphor, there is one important way in which that metaphor is apropos. The price of a house is not a fixed reflection of its absolute value according to some objective measure, it is a reflection of what people are willing to pay to someone that derives advantage from maximizing that number. When your house was purchased originally, that value was, indeed, what people were willing to pay in dollars. Dollars, of course, are not like degrees, are they? Economics and physics are very similar, no doubt, but degrees F, C, or K are extremely precisely defined in a time-independent way. Instrumentation can be variable, measurement technique can be variable, siting and methodology can be variable, but 1 K then is 1 K now.
Then, house value in dollars is not measured, it is voted on. In the hands of a skilled realtor and with a coat of cheap whitewash, its “value” (as measured in sale price) can vary tremendously from one week to the next, from one potential buyer to the next. Even “house appraisal” is highly variable and subject to collusion and whim — the appraisal of a seller and buyer often not agreeing to within 10% for obvious reasons — both parties have an interest, one in maximizing and the other in minimizing.
The great tragedy of modern climate science is that it has, indeed, become a lot more like selling a house than like making an objective scientific measurement with honestly stated error bars and other limitations in the result. Every single person participating makes a living from the public’s willingness to “buy” the argument that we are on the brink of a climate disaster. The results of every measurement are literally brokered to grant agencies, to the governments of every planet on Earth, and to the public underlying those governments, with a derived value that is 90% due to the perception of disaster, 10% to actual value.
Suppose you wish to convince me that we are in the grip of runaway inflation so that I will invest a tremendous amount of my personal resources in buying contemporary real property, so you try to convince me that housing prices are rising through the roof compared to what they have ever been before. You point to all sorts of new construction (all of which you manage and sell) as evidence of this, and make me sit through a long, dreary presentation on the causes of inflation and how even thought it appears that there are many houses on the market that haven’t increased in price, you can prove that after adjusting for this and that they really have.
I, of course, doubt this. I know that you make money — a lot of money — selling houses, and you make less money selling them at a fair market price than you make if you can get people to pay a bit extra with a glib argument. I look into things on my own. I discover a lot of 50 houses that have been on the market since maybe 1870 — they are all nice, old houses, well-maintained, and they sell pretty much every year. They constitute a record of inflation that isn’t subject to your complex system of “average house value” adjustments for this and for that, because people always pay for these houses in pure gold, not “adjustable” dollars.
It turns out that 25 of the fifty houses sold for a peak price not in the last decade, but in the 1930s. The other 25 sold for a peak price not heavily weighted to the last couple of decades, but spread out pretty uniformly over all the years in between, with about as many selling in the early 1900s as in the late 1900s. At this point I might — with some reason — doubt your system of adjustments.
As a simple matter of fact, roughly half of the state record high temperatures were set in the 1930s. The other half were set in a fairly balanced way over all of the other decades. A perfectly reasonable person might conclude that the continental United States was, as a whole, hotter in the 1930s than it is today, and indeed that it isn’t particularly hotter today than it was anytime in the last 140-150 years. Maybe a bit, but not a whole lot. If one looks at the distribution of continental high temperature records, the same thing is observable.
The thing about being a salesman is that a good one actually believes in what they sell. They have to! Humans are very good at picking up on insincerity. When they try to sell you a house, or a car, for exactly what is on the sticker, they manage to convince themselves that this house really is special and worth that extra 10%, or they manage to convince themselves that the overall market really is higher than what people are paying. They are always completely honest, but honest in a way that is constantly trying to get a potential customer to pay the asking price. And every sale they make reinforces their belief — the true value of what they sell is precisely what people are willing to pay. The narrative is the value.
A good recipe, perhaps, for economics in the free market. A terrible recipe for science. We do not vote on the value of g, we measure it. We do not average over measurements of g conducted by undergrads taking into physics and use them to correct precise measurements; if anything we go the other way. We do not — or should not — make support of research contingent on a perception that the science must work out any particular way, not unless we want science to devolve into confirmation bias tainted car sales, where a good story in consumer reports or a sexy model in car ads set the price. If a scientific narrative fails various simple sanity checks, it is the responsibility of science to be cautious and avoid overreaching its own conclusions, especially when one is confronted with the dread career-ending null result, with a result that continues an essentially boring narrative rather than an exciting, let’s save the world narrative.
I’m a believer not in adjustments per se, especially of the records in the remote past where we cannot possibly know how to correctly adjust them, but in consistency, in justified adjustments in instrumentation that can be directly defended and cross checked. At this point, we have had good instrumentation for ten years (post-ARGO, perhaps), adequate instrumentation for 34 or 35 years, and have sparse records based on good instrumentation for around 60 years. Some of that data is still subject to sanity check correction. At this point the records based on different instrumentation are pretty well mutually constrained — nobody will believe a steadily ramping GISS if HADCRUT4, UAH, and RSS all remain flat. This will become even more so over time — ARGO may or may not be precisely normalized (and is still sparse, dammit) but over time it will only get better as it is forced to be in agreement with multiple independent checks.
In thirty to fifty years, we might actually know how to adjust instrumental records. We will get there by finally having sufficiently good and complete instrumentation that we can get the actual answer without adjustment, as usual. You cannot squeeze blood from a turnip, or information from corrupt antique data. You cannot build a working antiballistic missile system from even a precise set of measurements of g from the early part of the 20th century. We are only now getting to where we can measure local gravity (via e.g. GRACE) well enough to correct for gravitational variation in measured sea level, for the variations an antiballistic missile has to deal with as it follows a long trajectory over a VARIABLE gravitational field that does not, in fact, follow any particularly simple “just physics” formula. Our ability to measure things like surface albedo in real time, global variations in measured surface radiation at the TOA, and more are still next to nonexistent — we can sample a bit, no more. Countless experiments remain to be done, some of them bone simple, such as directly measuring the full upwelling spectrum at the top of the troposphere at one specific location over e.g. the Sahara Desert, where one should be able to directly measure the CO_2 linked GHE with a minimum of confounding influences over timescales as short as a decade.
In the meantime, let’s not get crazy, OK?
rgb

Mosher: oh, tell us, pleaseplease, tell us who of the global warmers use a consistent basis? Do you mean Hansen and GISS?

rgbatduke says: @ February 4, 2014 at 7:40 am
….One doesn’t have to go into the distant past to observe this — many of the “official” thermometers contributing to the contemporary measurements of land surface temperatures are utterly and obviously corrupted by siting issues, as has been pointed out repeatedly. My favorite one locally is RDU airport, which tied an all time minimum temperature (for the date) last week at 7 F. The odd thing is that in my backyard 15 miles away, the minimum temperature was 5 F. In the surrounding countryside on all sides, the field of minimum temperatures was 4F to 5F. RDU is in the middle of a web of expressway and increasing urbanization, and the weather station is sitting a few meters away from a huge, heat retaining runway that is doused every few minutes with superheated jet exhaust consisting of CO_2 and H_2O vapor. It always reads hotter than the surrounding countryside….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I am south of you about 25 miles. We had a temperature of 1 °F at the local small town airport. The airport at Siler City – Muni, Siler City, was 0 °F on Jan 30th. (The record is described as 7 °F (1977) @ KRDU, The Raleigh-Durham International Airport.)
The Climastrology mixmaster would homogenize and adjust those numbers…. actually I do not think those airports are even in the database despite the fact they are a better measure of conditions without UHI

rgbatduke says:
February 4, 2014 at 7:40 am

“lsvalgaard says:
February 3, 2014 at 8:55 pm
Brant Ra says:
February 3, 2014 at 8:46 pm
I said the sun indirectly caused the polar vortex. I was wrong. The sun is directly responsible in that the solar wind interaction with the IMF affects that magnetosphere and thereby affecting the polar vortex.
And you are still wrong. There is no evidence for that. On the contrary: the solar wind interaction is the same in both hemispheres, but breakdowns of the polar vortex almost exclusively happen in the northern hemisphere.”
Oh. So there is no South pole and North pole… Those seem different to me….
Did you not see the the footprints of the magnetosphere are where the polar vortex is located? And that it changes with the solar wind? If there was a just a magnetosphere and no sun I would not expect any change in magnetic activity. But since there is a changing power input(solar wind) into a constant magnetic field I expect changes especially in a plasma system…..
Simple logic…

So what has happened to the sceptic hatred of trying to predict through models?
Seems like there is a lot of predicting going on here – and for what ?
Is it that the wishful thinking has not materialised into reality ?- namely that solar activity was about to collapse – leading to a hoped for maunder minimum and falling global temperatures ?
The Sun is notoriously difficult to predict other than on large scales. Lets just wait and see how this cycle pans out.
Right now we have a high sunspot number, a complex and huge active region flaring and plenty of aurora.
http://www.spaceweather.com/

lsvalgaard says:
February 3, 2014 at 8:55 pm
Brant Ra says:
February 3, 2014 at 8:46 pm
I said the sun indirectly caused the polar vortex. I was wrong. The sun is directly responsible in that the solar wind interaction with the IMF affects that magnetosphere and thereby affecting the polar vortex.
And you are still wrong. There is no evidence for that. On the contrary: the solar wind interaction is the same in both hemispheres,…..
——————–
Ya know, we seem to think that Earth’s magnetic field and magnetosphere is like static or something, standing still. But it is not. It’s part of a rotating body and that’s an important factor here too, twisting up the fields as it orbits within an interplanatary field with daily changes in pressures and densitys. Not to mention that whole solar cycle dealo going on..
Dr S., I think you should watch this NASA depiction of the Halloween storm effect on the radiation belts and Earth’s magnetic field/magnetosphere which is located within. There actually appears a vortex structure around the poles during this storm. So maybe there just might be some processes that are occuring that are not so well understood..yet.. eh
Movie description:
Published on May 17, 2013
This scientific visualization relies on data from the SAMPEX mission, which observed particles in the Radiation Belts during a large solar storm in October 2003. The movie clearly shows just how much the outer belt can swell in extreme conditions. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Don’t worry about that outer belt watch the polar and equatorial reactions, wow..
http://youtu.be/Zp8QB_Q1FrY

Ieif,
That’s if you could see it.

lsvalgaard says:
February 4, 2014 at 7:52 pm
Magnets still operate in a vacuum, or a ‘non-vacuum’ a small magnet can still impose a magnetic gate on a larger nearby magnetic force.
plasma is the stuff that interacts with the crap your pushing.

lsvalgaard says:
February 4, 2014 at 8:24 pm
“In both cases, rotating or spinning the magnet does not ‘wind up’ or twist its magnetic field.
Absolutely not.

When scale becomes involved, forces are always interacting, keep that in mind.

lsvalgaard says:
February 4, 2014 at 8:40 pm
Does not make sense as it stands.
What “Does not make sense” ya fucking arse hole? twisted cunt!!#

@Sparks says:
February 4, 2014 at 8:52 pm
Language WAY OVER the top.

lsvalgaard says:
February 4, 2014 at 8:59 pm
I was agreeing with you.

lsvalgaard says:
February 4, 2014 at 9:18 pm
The “twisting up” isn’t a thing.

Although I admit I haven’t read any Keynes thus far – still on my ‘to read’ list.
Dunno about his economics work, but the man was a god of probability and statistics. His classic stats text is one of the foundations of modern Bayesian reasoning and is in the direct line of the ancestors of the Cox axioms and Cox-Jaynes explanation of a homomorphism of probability theory as the proper basis of science and epistemology. The man was pretty smart.
As for inflation, I’d say increase in the relative money supply, wouldn’t you? It isn’t necessarily that too many dollar (etc) bills are being printed, it is that there are increasingly many relative to the things one can buy with them. Although it is often the case that the government simply prints too much money and deflates its debt as a form of hidden regressive tax, it can also come about through manipulation of the Fed’s interest rates (and by inheritance all interest rates) or just by confluence of circumstance (or, one suspects, highly skilled and deliberate manipulation) in the highly nonlinear and unpredictable market.
But yes, inflation is literally too much money for what one can buy with it, driving the prices for “scarce” commodities up. Kind of scary; it implies that it is impossible for us to ever build a society where everbody is equally rich until there is literally no scarcity. Which makes a sad kind of sense.
rgb

TonyG says:
February 7, 2014 at 12:21 pm
Constitutionally, the individual states are empowered to coin money. The Federal government is not.

That’s not true. The Legal Tender Laws of the 1870s ironed all that out in the US Supreme Court. The upshot: anything the US federal government slaps the US Government Seal on and declares as legal tender in the payment of taxes is legal tender. They could use logs or chopsticks.
The federal agency, the US Mint, creates coins.

Policycritic said: “The USA doesn’t borrow squat! We are the monopoly creators of the US dollar. No one on the planet can make them, or issue them, unless they are counterfeiting. We are 100% monetarily sovereign. Period. ”
Sure, and as I point out that is not sustainable.
Policycritic also said: “Congress has to lower taxes, get rid of FICA to help the middle class and poor, and…”
That’s fine. But please leave printing and spending out of your equation, it is not sustainable.

eric1skeptic says:
February 7, 2014 at 5:08 pm
Policycritic said: “The USA doesn’t borrow squat! We are the monopoly creators of the US dollar. No one on the planet can make them, or issue them, unless they are counterfeiting. We are 100% monetarily sovereign. Period. ”
Sure, and as I point out that is not sustainable.

Of course it’s sustainable! It is how our monetary system works–it’s how the middle class was built in the 50s and 60s–and we’re not alone. There are five countries in the world that are 100% monetarily sovereign, which means they can pay for any debts, buy anything they want that are denominated in their own currencies. The bond vigilantes can’t get them because they don’t have to borrow outside the currencies that they alone create: Great Britain (Cameron is an idiot), Canada, Japan, Australia, and the USA. Japan has a credit rating below Botswana, an extraordinarily high standard of living, and its currency is one of the strongest in the world even with a Debt-to-GDP of 200%: no bond vigilantes there, Japan can thumb their noses at them.
Look what happens when you don’t create and control your own currency: the Eurozone. Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Iceland, Ireland, and 9 others all gave up their own currencies to adopt the experimental Euro controlled by unknown men with cruel tendencies no one votes for. Those formerly sovereign countries turned themselves into US states, incapable of creating (issuing) the currency that they could use to monetize their operations. The Eurozone countries are subject to bond vigilantes that swooped in to loan them money at high rates (because of the risk) taking the country’s national resources as collateral. Look at the unemployment. Look at the devastation to lives. Look at the destruction.
We have a fiat currency, what’s wrong with that? Joe Q Public should know how it works so that he benefits by sticking a hot poker up his congressman’s rear for his lack of action. Because right now those who do know how it works are using their knowledge to scarf everything up for themselves.
[And don’t get me started on Jack Lew–one of the architects of the 2008 Great Recession which no one knows–and Obama because we’ll be here until December. ;-)]

Eric, there’s a great little book, only 87 pages, that came out 10 months by the former Deputy Secretary of the US Treasury, Frank N Newman. It’s called Freedom from National Debt. Think that’s it. Available on Kindle, too. He explains US Treasury operations in simple plain language, and the logic of it, how our monetary system works operationally. How our fiat money works. You might be interested in picking it up. As he explains in the book, the National Debt (also called Debt Held by the Public), that huge $17 trillion+ number is nothing more than a record of all currency created by the federal government since 1791 minus the amount of currency destroyed (taxes). It’s a record of what we own, not owe. We should be experiencing a period of untold prosperity right now, not the shambles this ignorance of how our monetary system works from an accounting point of view is making of people’s lives.

OK, One more because I owe Eric an answer on the things we differ on.

eric1skeptic says:
February 7, 2014 at 6:40 pm
If the banks are incentivized to do speculate in PM’s then that is what they will do. It doesn’t matter whether you think it is criminal or should be regulated or not, they will find a way to do it.

Only since 1999 when they destroyed the common people’s protection of Glass-Steagall, which they should restore. Before that there were separate investment banks that used their own money at the casino, not the public’s. And they didn’t have access to the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort. This is like me waltzing into the Sports Book at the Bellagio and betting with the full faith and credit of the US Government behind me. I don’t even have to use my own money.

Credit should be priced properly so that money is valued properly. With a (for example) 5% rate for savers, they could loan money to small businesses at 10%, absorb risks and make adequate profit.

The only thing credit at a bank should be based on is the creditworthiness of the borrower, and that is based on income, or sufficient collateral. It shouldn’t be based on the underlying value of the financial asset because that incentivizes the lender to increase the value, oftentimes corruptly. And setting a specific saver interest rate is tantamount to a guaranteed income for their clients which banks should not be involved with. Yes, savers get a low end of the deal when borrowers get low interest rates, but we need to get the 70% of the economy that spends the most, the households, back to consuming the goods and services that they can’t afford to buy right now. They need jobs. And once they get jobs and have income for spending on durable goods like refrigerators, TVs, and air conditioners, or non-durables like travel, education, food and clothing, then business (which accounts for only 10-14% of spending) will come back.

Total rubbish. We didn’t build the middle class by printing money and having the politicians hand it out, but rather by productive capacity created by long term investment that came from a sound currency.

You have the procedure backwards. No one prints money and has the politicians hand it out. It doesn’t happen. The term ‘printing money’ is an artifact of the gold-standard days when you printed money against your pile of gold. The US Treasury creates interest-free real money out of thin air on the authorization of Congress with a keystroke. That’s reality. The politicians—our congressmen—appropriate spending in the economy through Congressional appropriation bills: roads, bridges, airports, Hoover Dam, education, telecommunications infrastructure, scientific research, Space Program, et cetera, et cetera. Unless the government spends first, there is no new money possible in the economy (the old money just circulates between spenders and savers). Where else is it going to come from? Unless you want to risk counterfeiting. Only the US government can create new money. I’m talking from a macroeconomic POV.

Those countries were destroyed by socialism not by tight money

They are being destroyed by tight money. No sales, no jobs. No jobs, no income. No income, no spending. No spending, no sales. Repeat.
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Yeah, I agree that the Ukrainians are nuts to want to join the EU. And look who is pushing them to do it. Someone is salivating after their oil resources.

Just some further thoughts on current sheets and their interactions from solar to planetary and interstellar to solar.
Astrophysisits think that the interstellar wind, in the solar neighborhood, has changed directions in the last 40 years. How accurate are our measurements of heliospheric current sheet tilt angles at 10-100 AU…?