Calling cycle 24, calling cycle 24……where are you?
Image from SOHO, inset added by the author
The SIDC in Belgium just issed an end to their “all quiet alert”
:Issued: 2008 Feb 26 1255 UTC
:Product: documentation at http://www.sidc.be/products/quieta
#——————————————————————–#
# From the SIDC (RWC-Belgium): “ALL QUIET” ALERT #
#——————————————————————–#
END OF ALL QUIET ALERT
………………….
The SIDC – RWC Belgium expects solar or geomagnetic activity to
increase. This may end quiet Space Weather conditions.
The first new sunspot in weeks has emerged today. The spot that has emerged is small and on the equator, so it appears that it is a cycle 23 spot rather than one from the cycle 24 that is gave one spot on January 8th, signaling a start of cycle 24, but has given no cycle 24 type spots since.
Based on what we know about the sun, a cycle 24 spot would be reverse polarity to cycle 23 spots and high latitude. The longer cycle 24 continues to delay producing its spots heightens the concern that we may be in for a longer inactive period on the sun, such as a Dalton type minimum.
A thought occurred to me. Given that all of the sunspots seen recently during our solar minimum are very small, I wonder if they could be resolved at all with the primitive equipment available during periods like the Maunder Minimum? Today we have satellites and advanced solar telescopes with hydrogen spectra filters that are available to amateurs, so catching any sunspot, even if small, is now easy. In fact this sunspot was was first noted by an amateur observer, Howard Eskildsen, in Ocala, FL, showing that amateurs still have a role in science.
It makes me wonder if an extended minimum really isn’t an absence of sunspots altogether, but just an absence of larger easily observable sunspots. It is possible that primitive equipment of the period could not easily resolve smaller sunspots.
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Thanks to “The Day After Tomorrow”, we can anticipate flash freezing being attributed to GW as well. Remember – there’s NOTHING it can’t do.
I agree, Evan. Let’s leave putting out the sun to the “No-Nukes” crowd. As soon as they realize that it’s a runaway nuclear reaction they’ll lobby to have it put out!
🙂
Ah, one of those “generational” things. Yes, Fred Gwynne and Joe E. Ross played officers Muldoon and Toody in “Car 54, Where Are You?” Last year, my son emailed me a joke that mentioned Dr’s “Howard, Fine, and Fine” and I corrected it to “Howard, Howard, and Fine” (The Three Stooges). Either way, he didn’t know why it was supposed to be funny.
I doubt that much of the world is any more prepared to deal with an LIA-like cooling now than they were when the last one hit. Cooling periods tend to be civilization altering (if not ending) events while warm periods are times of growth and prosperity.
How did Rome fall? A sea level rise drove coastal people inland during a relatively cool period. (Note that the Warmist claim that sea level has been stable for a couple thousand years).
One feature of the LIA was that witches were blamed for bad weather and, if you boiled your clothes before a bad storm, you could be accused of “weather cooking.” Today, if you release CO2, you are accused of “killing the planet.” The cases are remarkably similar to me.
Where is the reference to massive instant glaciation?
I believe I have read in the past that ice ages have come on rather sudden
As in Spoerer Minimum? (Kiss your crops goodbye.)
Modernity will protect us from the disasters of the LIA (esp. regarding food). But we may have to stop paying farmers NOT to grow the stuff.
we can anticipate flash freezing being attributed to GW as well. Remember – there’s NOTHING it can’t do.
Don’t forget the AGW GCM!
X = Global Warming.
Everything = X
Anything = Everything
X (Anything and Everything) = X (Global Warming)
Therefore: Shut up and go away.
As soon as they realize that it’s a runaway nuclear reaction they’ll lobby to have it put out!
I hear there’s danger of a meltdown.
I doubt that much of the world is any more prepared to deal with an LIA-like cooling now than they were when the last one
Fortunately the UDCs are already in the warmer areas of the globe, and the DCs are much better equipped to handle it. Nonetheless, a serious cooling would be a damn lot worse than a serious warming, and we’d probably “lose” a lot more useable land to ice than what we’d lose to the sea in the case of serious warming.
How did Rome fall
Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Scythians, Franks, and Huns, oh my?
(Not saying that weather had nothing to do with it, but one tends to overlook the Barbarian in the room.)
I thought it was “Paging Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard.”
Actually, doesn’t this new sun spot signal the start of Cycle 25? (Cycle 24 being extremely short… ;^)
“overlook the Barbarian in the room”
Yes, of course. I’m not overlooking the Barbarian; he plays a key role in the “civilization changing” event. Nothing much happens if weather makes life harder in unpopulated lands.
I’ve read that in the mid-1800’s, a quarter of the population of Sweden emigrated to the US due to the LIA. People have to go somewhere they can live when the weather turns bad and stays bad. That’s a big reason the US received a massive influx of immigrants in the 1800’s. If weather heads south, people head south, too. How prepared are the DC’s for a population shift southwards, if this is the beginning of the next solar minimum?
And if ice sheets started advancing down from the pole, how long would the US-Mexican border stay inviolate? Hopefully, we are not close to that. If AGW were real, we should be ensuring warming; it’s better than cooling.
> It makes me wonder if an extended minimum really isn’t an absence of
> sunspots altogether, but just an absence of larger easily observable sunspots.
> It is possible that primitive equipment of the period could not easily resolve
> smaller sunspots.
No need to wonder, you can look this up, it’s been written up in relation to the Scottish observations that first defined the sunspot cycle.
There are a number of articles documenting the number of observing days lost during the ‘little ice age’ due to bad weather, and the fact that ground based observers at the time were unable to see small sunspots because of high dust from volcanos. And the eruptions that had occurred weren’t known about at the time (because they happened on the other side of the world).
Rapid glaciation on large scale (continental) can’t happen. It takes ice accumulation over millenia. What may occur is rapid cooling or warming.
There is a general assumption on both sides of the debate that climate change happens slowly. Even in the warmist rhetoric, when they talk about rapid warming they mean decades.
Well, we don’t know how fast climate can warm or cool over 1 or 2 years. Exstrapolate the cooling of the last few months out a couple of years and you will get a truly alarming number with unimaginably catastrophic consequences.
This isn’t rhetorical excess: I think the collective failure of the media, government, scientists, etc to recognize and plan for this eventuality will be viewed by future generations as an appalling crime.
Philip_B (20:25:43) :
” Rapid glaciation on large scale (continental) can’t happen. It takes ice accumulation over millenia. What may occur is rapid cooling or warming. ”
I beg to differ…… 50 years+slight warming trend=268 feet of ice…….
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/aerospace/archives/115992.asp
And of this current winter the rate of accumulation in Greenland is accelerating.
” Well, we don’t know how fast climate can warm or cool over 1 or 2 years. Exstrapolate the cooling of the last few months out a couple of years and you will get a truly alarming number with unimaginably catastrophic consequences. ”
Actually we do, and from the recent geological past, and from which the areas affected have yet to recover……
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/fit/chapter1.asp
I would speculate here that the time frame involed is a couple of hours and it was replicated in the Southern Hemisphere at the same time.
So the P38 crashed in 1942 and fifty years later it was covered with 268 feet of ice.
That is 5 feet of ice per year or about 60 inches of water equivalent.
Mountain zones in the temperate regions can get 200 inches or more of water equivalent, but 30-60 is a good number most years.
Here are the current Cal numbers.
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/misc/RealPrecip.html
Glaciers in Canada advanced 2-4 Meters/year during the LIA in this study.
http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/2/149
Some more discussions of geological and geographic effects:
http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/ice/lec19/holocene.htm
Here is an interresting article, suggesting that sunspot cycle 24 has not started yet:
http://solarscience.auditblogs.com/2008/02/04/solar-cycle-24-false-starts/
Philip_B: “Rapid glaciation on large scale (continental) can’t happen. It takes ice accumulation over millenia.”
I agree. Massive migration from Scandinavia from glaciers is BS even if we have a new Maunder Minimum. But a cooling occasion like that will be very influential on many people’s life, and in poor countries it will mean a large catastrophe!
Also glaciers expand at the occasions of little ice ages. The slow path to a new ice age, within maybe 15000 years, has to consists of lots of small ice ages during some centuries and intermediate warmer periods.
(The fast climate change is the eding of a large ice age, when tremendous amounts of ice is melting very rapidly for only a few thousands of years.)
The CO2 fixation and dogma I think can be tremendously harmful, since main stream media refuse to report facts about the sun. They’re not even report this delay for SSC-24. No politician seems to be interrested either, and maybe a harmful thing is that no preparation for large famines is made? (Politics for biofuel has btw already wiped out lots of rain forest without a media storm.)
Sunspot 942 was on 22nd Feb last year. We have just had sunspot 983 – so in around 12 months we’ve had approx. 40 sunspots – on average 1 every 9 or so days – no wonder the world is cooling. If you look at the last 6 months we’ve had around 14 sunspots (sunspot 969 on 25th August 07) – or one every 13 days.
Solar flux back under 70 again. Check out Erl Happ’s latest on the Svalgaard #3 thread at CA.
The sun is very sultry and we must avoid its ultry-violet rays.
H/t Noel Coward.
===========
Though the English are effete,
They’re quite impervious to heat
You may be up to something about those small sunspots.
Today 2007-03-02 a very small sunspot was reported on http://solarcycle24.com/
It is in the middle of the sundisk and is so small that it probably wont even get a number.
Is it associated with the dying cycle or with #24?
End to Global Warming? Return of An Ice Age?
Last week, articles began to surface discussing how the US National Climatic Data Center was reporting that January’s temperature was 0.3F BELOW the average temperature from 1901-2000. Additionally, the Arctic sea ice, that the Global Warming Fana…
About sunspot observations: you are quite right about observations of sun spots during the Maunder minimum. Observations were done without instruments by looking at the sun early in the morning through morning fog. That’s how the discovery was made in the first place (by monks undoubtedly, who had to get up early; observations are also known from China). But you can only see the largest ones. However, the varying solar activity leaves its marks in C14 deposited in trees and other radiotopes as well, i.p. Berillium. These are used as proxies to reconstruct the solar activity in the past and go back a few thousand years.
The risk a colder period will soon arrive is for my feelings much greater than an increase in global temperature. The effects of a decrease in global temperature will certainly destroy an important part of the agriculture production followed by an decrease in economic activity and general global impoverishment. Anyhow, In Europe they are still going to spend billions an billions of Euro’s to fight a coming warmer period in stead of using that money to be prepared for colder temperatures.
Did anybody hear about a reconstruction of Galileo’s telescope so we can compare actual sunspot observations with that old telescope and with modern instruments and satellites? Then we can have an idea about the translation of sunspot activity in old and modern days.
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