I’m writing this after doing an exhaustive search to see what sort of solar activity has occurred lately, and I find there is little to report. With the exception of the briefly increased solar wind from a coronal hole, there is almost no significant solar activity.
The sun has gone quiet. Really quiet.
It is normal for our sun to have quiet periods between solar cycles, but we’ve seen months and months of next to nothing, and the start of Solar cycle 24 seems to have materialized (as first reported here) then abruptly disappeared. The reverse polarity sunspot that signaled the start of cycle 24 on January 4th, dissolved within two days after that.
Of course we’ve known that the sunspot cycle has gone low, which is also to be expected for this period of the cycle. Note that NOAA still has two undecided scenarios for cycle 24 Lower that normal, or higher than normal, as indicated on the graph below:
But the real news is just how quiet the suns magnetic field has been in the past couple of years. From the data provided by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) you can see just how little magnetic field activity there has been. I’ve graphed it below:
click for a larger image
What is most interesting about the Geomagnetic Average Planetary Index graph above is what happened around October 2005. Notice the sharp drop in the magnetic index and the continuance at low levels.
This looks much like a “step function” that I see on GISS surface temperature graphs when a station has been relocated to a cooler measurement environment. In the case of the sun, it appears this indicates that something abruptly “switched off” in the inner workings of the solar dynamo. Note that in the prior months, the magnetic index was ramping up a bit with more activity, then it simply dropped and stayed mostly flat.
We saw a single reversed polarity high latitude sunspot on January 4th, 2008, which would signal the start of a new cycle 24, which was originally predicted to have started last March and expected to peak in 2012. So far the sun doesn’t seem to have restarted its normal upwards climb.
If you have ever studied how the magnetic dynamo of the sun is so incredibly full of entropy, yet has cycles, you’ll understand how it can change states. The sun’s magnetic field is a like a series of twisted and looped rubber bands, mostly because the sun is a fluid gas, which rotates at different rates between the poles and the equator. Since the suns magnetic field is pulled along with the gas, all these twists, bumps, and burps occur in the process as the magnetic field lines get twisted like taffy. You can see more about it in the Babcock model.
I’ve alway’s likened a sunspot to what happens with a rubber band on a toy balsa wood plane. You keep twisting the propeller beyond the normal tightness to get that extra second of thrust and you see the rubber band start to pop out knots. Those knots are like sunspots bursting out of twisted magnetic field lines.
The Babcock model says that the differential rotation of the Sun winds up the magnetic fields of it’s layers during a solar cycle. The magnetic fields will then eventually tangle up to such a degree that they will eventually cause a magnetic break down and the fields will have to struggle to reorganize themselves by bursting up from the surface layers of the Sun. This will cause magnetic North-South pair boundaries (spots) in the photosphere trapping gaseous material that will cool slightly. Thus, when we see sunspots, we are seeing these areas of magnetic field breakdown.
Sunspots are cross connected eruptions of the magnetic field lines, shown in red above. Sometimes they break, spewing tremendous amounts of gas and particles into space. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME’s) are some examples of this process. Sometimes they snap back like rubber bands. The number of sunspots at solar max is a direct indicator of the activity level of the solar dynamo.
Given the current quietness of the sun and it’s magnetic field, combined with the late start to cycle 24 with even possibly a false start, it appears that the sun has slowed it’s internal dynamo to a similar level such as was seen during the Dalton Minimum. One of the things about the Dalton Minimum was that it started with a skipped solar cycle, which also coincided with a very long solar cycle 4 from 1784-1799. The longer our current cycle 23 lasts before we see a true ramp up of cycle 24, the greater chance it seems then that cycle 24 will be a low one.
No wonder there is so much talk recently about global cooling. I certainly hope that’s wrong, because a Dalton type solar minimum would be very bad for our world economy and agriculture. NASA GISS published a release back in 2003 that agrees with the commonly accepted idea that long period trends in solar activity do affect our climate by changing the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI).
Some say it is no coincidence that 2008 has seen a drop in global temperature as indicated by several respected temperature indexes compared to 2007, and that our sun is also quiet and still not kick starting its internal magentic dynamo.
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Hey guys — did you notice the new sunspot earlier this week?
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/soho/sunspot_20080923.html
This image provided by NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) shows a new sunspot, upper right, which after many weeks of a blank sun with no sunspots and very few sunspots this entire year, emerged Sept. 23, 2008. This new spot has both the magnetic orientation and the high-latitude position of a sunspot belonging to the new solar cycle, Cycle 24. (AP Photo/NASA/ESA)
I’m not real up on these things, but I have a question. Katrina hit Aug 29, 2005, less than a month before the magnetic drop off of the sun, according to the graph.
Is there a relationship? Like the moon affects the tides?
Thanks
Reply – No. – Dee Norris
Where is this subspot now? why NASA keeps euforic about that little sunspot which they anounced as the beginning of this stormy cycle 24? Cycle 24 will be very little. Why no-one admits that no-one don’t know nothing about our sun and nature…
New details emerge about Neolithic age in Alps.
Scientists say some of the prehistoric finds made in the Swiss Alps over the past few years are 1,000 years older than Austria’s sensational “Ötzi the Iceman”.
Archaeologists said in Bern on Thursday that the oldest of the organic materials uncovered on the Schnidejoch pass date back to 4,500 BC.
Key to climate change
What fascinates scientists about the age of the finds is that they correspond to times when climate specialists have already calculated the Earth was going through an especially warm period, caused by fluctuations in the orbital pattern of the Earth in relation to the Sun.
At these times, historians now speculate, the high mountain regions became accessible to humans.
Archaeologists needed time to investigate the area
For Martin Grosjean, a climatologist at Berne University, the Schnidejoch has become a mine of information on changes in the Earth’s climate.
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/front/New_details_emerge_about_Neolithic_age_in_Alps.html?siteSect=105&sid=9580826&cKey=1219841028000&ty=st
SO THE PAST WARMING WAS NATURAL AND HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE SUN.
Rob
So how do we get this on the front page of the MSM media?
“So how do we get this on the front page of the MSM media?”
Mainstream Media media??
Interesting comments. So, we now have a good excuse to keep on burning coal, using petroleum, cutting forests? Folks, all of these resources are finite in the long run and whether it is hot or cold, we are still going to have to come up with some other fuel sources. If we get a reprieve from global warning because of a “lttle ice age” we are just going to have to work that much harder to come up with survival strategies. Crowing about how Scientists will be fired, shot, etc. sure doesn’t help solve the potential of mass starvation due to crop failure if we are indeed entering a minimum. The data is so contradictory that frankly, no one can predict what will happen. We indeed live in the sun’s climate zone (I like that concept-makes us humble), but I know that the rest of humanity simply cannot live at the standard consumption rate of most of the people on this blog. So before you fire up that SUV or take that jet trip, just know that you are probably the last generation that can do so without limitation. Enjoy! (Kinda sucks for your kids/grandkids though).
Unfortunately, we seem to be on the verge of an ominous development. Those sunspots that were recorded from 10/12 to 10/18 were anemic in relation to a normal episode of sunspot activity. Since then the sun’s surface has been a tranquil sea.
The limited trend history that we must rely on cannot reveal a reasonable probability of anything. But consensus suggests that if activity does not begin to accelrate in the coming weeks and months, cycle 24 is not likely to fall in the norm.
Any experts willing to speculate here? I know this is guess work. But I am wondering what parameters of time and activity would allow one to form a scheme of possible scenarios.
Jon Linam (21:38:00) :
cycle 24 is not likely to fall in the norm.
There are several predictions of a low cycle 24, e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf
http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Predictions%20SHINE%202006.pdf
and this one
Thank you, Leif. Those articles were very informative.
A few hours after I posted, Sunspot 1007 appeared. Something is better than nothing.
Some talk about Human contributions of CO2.
Yet all the cattle in the world contribute how much CO2 ????
Who has derived a sampling variogram for this set and define its lag in months? Where can I find the data set?
Engineer said:
But when Canadian winter wheat fails, the rice crop in India fails, and sundry other crops express their displeasure at gloomy, damp weather, surplus land will not help.
Please don’t be so insular in your outlook. China, to mention one big consumer, has very little extra crop land. Ditto Europe with out major land reform.
end quote
While this is true, it’s a transitory effect (unless ice sheets…). Farmers are familiar with adapting to temperature and weather changes. It does often take a failure or two for them to get with the program, but the techniques are well known. (I grew up in farm country…)
Examples? Buckwheat is often grown as a ‘catch crop’ when the main crop fails due to cold or rain issues. There are lots of ‘catch crops’. When the failures persist for a couple of years, the ‘catch crop’ becomes the first and dominant crop. Barley grows in colder climates than does wheat, so you shift to Barley (less bread, more beer!!!). Cotton takes forever to grow and high heat, so we swap some cotton land for other crops that need less heat and grow faster. (Lentils can be very fast! I had some mature in about 40 days…)
There will always be the marginal edge where barley was grown and now what do you do? But most of the crop areas just start growing what was grown about 100 miles more north last season. Even if it’s an “1800 and froze to death” you can cope. Fava beans and Peas in summer instead of Pintos. Kale and Cabbages instead of Tomatoes and Squash. Potatoes instead of Wheat (done in Europe during the Dalton Minimum, except in France where they decided to have a revolution rather than give up bread…)
Kale, for example, can grow with light snow. And why do you think they are called “Snow Peas”? Maybe not full snow, but resistant to cold compared to other legumes.
Yeah, it would be hell to pay, but not the end of humanity. Biggest losers would be the cows, chickens, and pigs since we would eat them and then eat what would have been used for their feed. I don’t look forward to the idea of a potatoes, cabbage, and peas diet, but frankly my ancestors did fine on it. It takes 10 pounds of grain to get one pound of beef. Instead of a 1 lb / day of beef even if we had a 10:1 reduction of grain production you would get 1 lb of grain. Ever try to eat a pound of barley? Cooked it’s about 4 lbs and very filling…
The biggest issue would be seed availability on a sudden demand basis. That’s why I have a few glass jars of cold weather seeds in my freezer. (Seeds, in a glass jar and frozen, will keep for many years to decades. I’ve grown out 16 year old lentils and decade old corn.)
The places that will have issues will be those like China where they are already using all the tricks of short cycle plants and pushing weather limits with crop selections, and don’t eat much meat. The only real hope for them is that some hot dry areas might become cool / wet enough to grow crops.
Does anyone have any information on solar minima and reversals of deserts? We hear a lot about the cold in Europe but was there a hot spot that became nicer? Did N. Africa grow more wheat during the prior minima?
Given that we still are very low sunspots, my prior slightly paranoid seed saving program is starting to look more like a prudent garden program…
“And now you have a cooling …. [But] NASA scientist James Hansen [is] trying to say ‘well, warming will resume soon”… the head of the U.N. [IPCC] Rajendra Pachauri came out recently and said we have to investigate this apparent temperature plateau,” Morano notes.
So dramatic cooling is a plateau? Sheesh.
BTW, no sunspots again today. Maybe in December…
Liz said: What bothers me most about those who do not believe in global warming is that there is this attitude that it is okay to continue to destroy the earth, it’s okay to pollute it, run amok with its resources.
end quote.
Um, no. Many of us are more from the Lundborg style. I am a past member of or supporter of Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, and Greenpeace. My support ended when they became rabid political hacks rather than reasonable stewards. I am of Amish extraction (2 generations back) and still hold to the love of land and sanctity of the Earth. I just think that destroying our economy and technology base to support the power grab of a deceitful minority who are busy using deliberate lies is a bad thing.
So no, Liz, I do not support any attempt to run amok with resources, especially the attempt by Gore et. al. to steal the wealth of the world for their own political agenda.
From the TMI bucket: I recycle and shop at Whole Foods with reusable bags. I drive a 1980 car (reduce, reuse, …) on biodiesel. I prefer to eat organic. I grow many of my own vegetables. I preserve heirloom seeds against the genetic damage that GMOs represent. My dream lifestyle would be a small (10 acre?) farm in a benign climate area that was completely self sufficient. I want to retire to an Earthship. I support rapid expansion of solar, wind, and alternative energy strategies (i.e. biomass and coal to liquids) but don’t think we ought to kill the coal and oil companies BEFORE we have the alternatives built. I am not a Republican (reg. Independent). I’ve used several recreational drugs in the past (California child of the ’60s-’70s… fond memories…) and my idea of a good time is minimal impact camping in the redwoods with a camera.
Hardly an earth destroying monster. (Though I do use a computer – but it’s a Mac!)
The fact is that the AGW theory is a religious mythology and is going to do great damage to the poor and disadvantaged of the world. THAT is why I’m against it. No stereotypes need apply…
From Chris Nerland (19:32:44) :
… So, we now have a good excuse to keep on burning coal, using petroleum, cutting forests? Folks, all of these resources are finite in the long run and whether it is hot or cold, we are still going to have to come up with some other fuel sources…. I know that the rest of humanity simply cannot live at the standard consumption rate of most of the people on this blog. So before you fire up that SUV or take that jet trip, just know that you are probably the last generation that can do so without limitation.
End quote.
Um, no. Forests are sustainable and there is no energy shortage. There never has been and there never will be. There is a shortage of dirt cheap motor fuel, that’s all. Energy can be used to fix most other ‘shortages’ so having unlimited energy means everyone can have a decent lifestyle. In Japan, they have demonstrated a polymer extraction of Uranium at economical prices from sea water. The quantity needed to run the whole planet is less than erodes into the ocean each year. We run out of energy when we run out of planet. Don’t like nukes? The U.S. can be powered by a roughly 100 x 100 mile chunk of solar, or wind, etc. as well. They just are not economical when oil is at $40/bbl. All invented already. All shown to work. Demonstrated profitable at about $80/bbl oil.
There need not be any water shortage either. Google “Earthship” for my favorite example. Also look at the number of desalinization plants being built world wide and in California (a new energy recovery device was invented that makes it cheaper to desalinize than put a dam in the mountains here…) We run out of fresh water when we run out of ocean.
With water and power I can grow much more food than I need in a green house (again, see an Earthship for examples of water / waste recycle).
Please put the coolaid down and realize the the best thing we can do for our planet is to put out a helping, technological, hand to everyone and raise them to our standard of living. That leads to fewer births and less environmental stress. Poverty results in environmental destruction via desperation (see Africa, many examples.)
The best way to have that helping hand is to preserve and advance our society and economy and THAT is what the AGW religion is trying to destroy.
I can only hope that the again zero sunspots means we get cold THIS cycle and don’t have to wait another dozen years to block the AGW agenda.
I don’t know… turning China into a billion person heavy footprint, versus the bicycle riding rural/agricultural giant they once were definitely adds to the degradation of the planet. If this global modernization can be done while also encouraging greatly recycling, organic growing of food… the impact would be significantly reduced.
As for the sunspots, looks like it could be a much smaller cycle than normal. Time will tell. Already, much of the US has had much below normal temperatures for much of 2008.
What is “normal”? As for growing my own food (A very good idea), like to know how I can do that in a rented apartment.
Well said E.M.Smith. Unfortunately, reason has left the debate.
WHM (05:01:06) :
I don’t know… turning China into a billion person heavy footprint, versus the bicycle riding rural/agricultural giant they once were definitely adds to the degradation of the planet.
“History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes” China will not follow a US model, it will be a China model. Probably more like Europe. Lots of high rise buildings with good electric public transport (trains). This degrades the planet less, not more. (A billion people with a good sewage system living in a dense urban area is better than that same billion emptying chamber pots over the countryside …)
As a side note: People are one of the worst ways to turn sunlight into motion available. Take the soybeans that person has to eat to pedal the bike and extract the oil. Put it in a small (1/4 hp?) diesel on that bike. You now use LESS land to drive the bike and get to work 4 times as fast… Use wind, solar, or even nuclear electric to charge an electric bike and you use even LESS land and resources… Economics is full of such non-intuitive effects. What *looks* green is often not the best solution.
As agricultural intensity increases, less land is needed and more can be set aside for parks. That’s not a projecting, it’s the history of what HAS happened every time it’s been done. Using a nuke for lighting and heat means you are not chopping down every scrap of wood for cooking (as is done in Africa, Madagascar, and parts of Asia including parts of China). The degree of destruction of habitat in that “agricultural giant they once were” is so astounding as to make one want to cry. The nostalgic rural dream is not really very pretty under the surface.
If this global modernization can be done while also encouraging greatly recycling, organic growing of food… the impact would be significantly reduced.
Organic, or not, is orthogonal to the benefit. While I like organic, the fact is that putting synthetic nitrate on a crop is no different than using horse pee. Hydroponic / aeroponic / grow rooms have less impact on the planet than an open land organic farm planted on what was a rain forest last month…
Recycle is a natural function of the relative costs of new production vs recycle and it always increases as costs to mine or harvest increase. It’s essentially implied in high growth for China. But realize that nothing mined goes away. All the copper we’ve ever mined and used is still on the planet. At some point we may want to go mine the old landfills, but we don’t need to now. It just doesn’t matter yet.
Basically, it doesn’t matter if I use “night soil” to fertilize or sewage plant sludge, as long as both are free of diseases and heavy metals / synthetic toxics. (“night soil” is common in China. They empty the chamber pot on the place where they plant next months lunch… but it’s “organic”. It also is far more of a health risk than treated pig poo from a pig grow room.)
Pat (03:10:01) :
As for growing my own food (A very good idea), like to know how I can do that in a rented apartment.
Not everyone needs to do growing in the home. If you want to you can, but in a limited way and with some money / resources bought. Mostly I was talking about us as a society. A commercial greenhouse for your food.
At present, there are several resorts where many of the vegetables are grown with hydroponics in greenhouses (in some cases due to weather, in others due to being a desert island and needing to maximize use of water and soil). An easily seen version of this is at Disney World in Florida. You can take a back room tour of the hydroponics dome. The vegetables (and fish from the aquaculture exhibit) are served at the Disney resorts…
If you want a small scale at home, you can buy an herb garden from Bed Bath & Beyond that is, I think, aeroponic in nature. I’ve grown other things, including tomatoes and, um, er, herbals 😉 under lights indoors or on an apartment patio. Dirt really helps for home gardening, though.
The major point is not you as an individual being self sufficient, it is that for many folks the lettuce they have as a salad and the pork roast or chicken cordon bleu with it was likely grown in a greenhouse or grow room, not on open dirt. Hydroponic salad greens are far more common than most folks realize. Ditto tomatoes. We are already moving away from dirt as a limiting resource. The same thing can be done with wheat, corn, even palm trees (yes, Disney has hydroponic palm trees. Stunning.)
We, as a technological society, are not limited by the available acreage of the planet and, most importantly, we do not need to chop down rain forests to eat. In 3rd world countries in poverty (with organic farming…) they do.
Well said E.M.Smith. Unfortunately, reason has left the debate.
Thanks. I like to hope that reason can be cultured as well 😉
A great eye opening page guys. Will oil run out? Sure it will (eventually). Is dependence on foreign oil a real national security threat? Absolutely. Does that mean we should immediately istitute a crippling tax on fossil fuels in an futile attempt to magically develop ‘alternative’, ‘renewable’ (what’s renewable about solar or wind anyway? How do we ‘renew’ it exactly?) energy sources that are simply not ready and won’t be for decades? The short sightedness of these GW alarmists is itself alarming. But the real problem is that the hysteria has become so all pervasive that REAL problems like say a prolonged sunspot minimum with a possible attendant little ice age, or the nauseating state of our lakes, rivers, streams and oceans or maybe a massive honey bee die off goes unnoticed amid the ‘do something, anything now’ screaming about GW. Sadly when both candidates for president are GW nutters, it seems there is no hope…maybe I’ll start building my bunker. Thanks for the excellent info guys…hopefully somebody in power will read it.
May I humbly submit the name “Algore Minimum”, for the coming Deep Freeze?
ok where is the middle of this road?
to say we effect climate none is just as stupid as saying we are the only thing affecting it. think about it its simple we may not be the only cause but to say we are too small to do that is just as dumb. i guess all those fish we have taken from the sea are just dying off by them selves? no we ate them. see there is a giant system we screwed up. just remember one simple thing every thing everyone does effects something. remove a negative or positive integer from any balanced equation and its no longer balanced no matter how small it is. you can call me a nutter all you want just remember in the short time we have been growing we have killed off just as many animals as an ice age.
and look at the lakes and streams like mark said we did that.
according to some we did the bees in too (or just made it worse like we do very often.)
let me get my fire suit and extiguisher ready for the following flames that are sure to come.
I think we are due for another Mass Extinction, not of animals either. Rather, population reduction of us. I suspect that this occurs at certain intervals on earth. Cycles, like 2012 and pole reversals, only with solar storms that will radiate earth with particles that will kill most of the planet. At least, it is my gut feeling, and is Never wrong.
[…] ten years so rather than admitting that the earths temperature goes in cycles just like the sun (which coincidentally has had the lowest period of magnetic activity and sunspots) they instead just change the doom-and-gloom chant so they can keep riding the gravy […]
I have just arrived at this discussion ‘table’. I am a converted biologist/palaeontologist and now disbelieving the ‘Warmists’ as do some of my associates. I have been very impressed with many of the serious and erudite contributions and I am so glad that there are some ‘brains’ out there! The sun’s activity issue is convincing me that the ‘Warmists’ are wrong. Like me, in the past, they seem not to have considered that the sun’s influence on the planet’s climate is a most important factor- has this been a mental block or am I [and them] just being ‘thick’? I have always been very wary of the importance placed on ‘man’s’ contribution towards global warming [now climate change!] on the grounds that experiment after experiment have shown that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the main limiting factor in the process of photosynthesis on which the planet’s [our] food sources depend. Increase in carbon dioxide = increase in photosynthesis [carbon fixation] = increase in plant growth = increase in food production/growth in green plants = less starvation [if food production is handled correctly!]. Simplistic-yes! However,to be brief: Why are we being bombarded with Government perpetrated Warmist disinformation? Perhaps it is something to do with energy source conservation? There are limitations on the longevity of fossil fuels and their increased usage, so perhaps the vehicle being used to conserve fossil fuel sources is raising the false spectre of the dangers of global warming-the bandwagon progresses and can be stopped only when the real truth emerges. Keep up the good work!