This is a quick post since I’m caught up in a lot of work this weekend. Moderation will be slow so don’t be worried if your posts don’t show for several hours.
Last month I wrote:
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From this story on space.com where they talk about the opposing views solar scientists have for cycle 24 they offer some opinions. NOAA Space Environment Center scientist Douglas Biesecker, who chaired the panel, said in a statement:
[…] despite the panel’s division on the Sun cycle’s intensity, all members have a high confidence that the season will begin in March 2008.
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We are halfway through March, and the sun has been very quiet, Ap magnetic index remains low, sunspots are zilch, all we have is a bit of solar wind from the occasional coronal hole.
The forecast from SWPC is flatness for the 10.7cm band:
This is the one that worries me though, as I’ve pointed out before, we have that step function (or discontinuity) in 2005 (see red arrows) which gives the impression that something just “switched off” in the solar magnetic dynamo:
Additionally, the sunspot forecast from SWPC calls for sunspot numbers to be very low for the remainder of 2008, which seems to put a kibosh on the consensus formed by NASA’s convened solar scientist panel which made that prediction of “…the season will begin in March 2008” uttered by panel chair Biesecker quoted above.
We live in interesting times.
I just noticed that the period at the end of the link I provided changed the actual location it sends you. Sorry for the confusion. I was trying to point here:
http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/archives/17
This weekend I overheard Al Gore saying: “I rememmmmber a friend telllll me, that if the Sun looooooses its ability to make sun-spots, that is a suuuuure sign of global warming. Our CO2 emmmmissions are killing the Sun. It has a cold and we neeeeeeed to do something about it…”.
Anyone up for doing some Fourier Transforms on these waveforms?
This may be of interest:
IS OUR CLIMATE CHANGING? A STUDY OF LONG-TIME TEMPERATURE TRENDS
http://www.mediafire.com/?mmdzl0uwrdj
Someone else sent me that, not sure where it originated.
Earl Koskie: Astute post.
Ok, I have a couple of dumb questions. Do we measure all the sunspots, or just the ones visible from earth? In other words, are there sunspots that appear and disappear on the other side of the sun before we can ever view them?
REPLY: Only what can be observed earthside. This should give you some insight:
http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/sunspotnumber.html
The 2005 anomaly might be an indication of something, but at that point, wouldn’t the sun be coming down from a higher point to a lower point in its cycle? So having it plateau near the bottom may not be surprising.
Speaking of plateauing, this months SSN seems to be repeating February’s. Still no further cycle 24 spots.
There was a very small spot yesterday, that has all but disappeared. It looked to be on the equator, meaning it was a cycle 23 spot. There have been no cycle 24 spots since the one small, short lived reversed high-latitude one in January. The magnetic flux has flatlined at 70. The recent trend seems to be occasional very small, short lived spots still associated with cycle 23. No sign of #24 picking up anytime soon.
Significant note of Dave Archibald at warwickHughes:
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=150#comment-16787
Cloudiness, and albedo, may not be implicated in Maunder.
[…] Watts over at Watts Up With That? continues his vigilance and analysis of sunspot activity and what that could mean for our global weather. Complete with graphs and whatnot, the short story […]
What an excellent scientific site you have here!
The graph which shows the noticeable drop in solar activity is very, very troubling !!
The pure global warming heads have it wrong, the sub obviously has an impact on global climate. Anyone care to look at worldwide temperature readings since that week or so in 2005 when the sun
“downshifted” . One of the warminghead sites was showing that most of 2008 so far is about 1.8 F degrees BELOW AVERAGES.
NOT GOOD, NOT GOOD. When global food production is stressed to the limit, now we have potentially a shorter growing season WORLDWIDE…..Even the global warmheads are sheepishly admitting that WARMING IS DELAYED AT LEAST A DECADE due to
occurrences on the sun and elsewhere that over rule human actions.
What worried me as an enviromentalist is that the REAL PROBLEMS ARE BEING IGNORED DUE TO THE GLOBAL WARMING REVIVAL MEETING SPIRIT.
REAL SCIENCE IS SHOWING A DANGEROUS LOWERING OF OCEAN PH, WHICH IS SHOWING UP IN THE ANIMALS THAT BUILD SHELLS OUT OF CALCIUM. The PH is getting low enough that in certain areas, the shellfish aren’t really shellfish anymore. The change in the ocean PH is the really scarry thing. Protecting food sources
from mankinds activity should be a high priority. It food is not available from the normal sources, then people are encouraged by self preservation to clear cut,(think Indonesia, Brazil, African continent),to grow what they can. Unfortunately , these tracts are very marginal for food production and last a few years before they can grow nothing, then more land is cleared and the process repeats itself.
MY BIG CONCERN IS THAT GLOBAL WARMING HAS BEEN OVER SOLD, WHEN THIS IS PROVEN , THEN THERE WILL BE A BACKLASH AGAINST ANY REAL ENVIROMENTAL SCIENCE.
Hey, Al , you can take that Nobel Prize and put it where it will keep any methane gas from escaping into the atmosphere…If YOU ARE REALLY Concerned about the earth and not just wanting to hear yourself talk…….
10xcsn, the name says it all. No sun spot activity. Decreased solar magnetic activity.
ice age, more or less