New solar cycle 24 goalpost established

@MattN or Riv Werme
There’s no denying the existence solar oscillation cycles, and there’s enough data supporting their effects on earth climate. Cycles aren’t chaotic, and thus allow possibility to make future predictions. This aint astrology.
Can you confirm his prediction of an extended period of low sunspot activity to start at about now, and to cause another little Ice Age in a couple of decades?
Or did I get that all mixed up?

Terry,
You certainly aren’t the only person in this position. My friends simply do not want to hear ANYTHING about this. They don’t even rely on RealClimate and are adopting a “I don’t care how many graphs/studies you show me THERE IS GLOBAL WARMING and CO2/people are to blame”. Anything that shows the contrary is obviously a right wing/big oil plot to frustrate the good fight to save the planet. I still get the ‘95% of all scientists believe CO2/People are to blame and the few that don’t are in the pay of big oil’. They have no basis for making this claim but believe it fervently. Very sad to me.

Basil:
You will find the aa index data here:
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/GEOMAGNETIC_DATA/AASTAR/

For the next cycle to rise as steeply as depicted, there would have to be a highly abnormal behavior pattern. Of course, as noted, the seeming change to a new mode back in 2005 is in and of itself abnormal, so I suppose a steep rise cannot be ruled out. But I would be somewhat surprised if it happened.

Chaotic Systems
I have only a rudimetary knowledge of Solar Physics, Fluid Dynamics and Chaotic Systems. However the sun is a magnetohydrodynamic system, and at such should be considered chaotic. For example in fluid dynamics(hydrodynamics) the transition from laminar to turbulent is chaotic, and cannot be predicted with a set of linear equations. For a simple interesting exercise, one can google the Lorentz Attractor (a set of three coupled differential equations)– the butterfly. This system is mostly periodic, but the an instablity, can cause it to jump from one approximate periodic system to another approximate periodic system (two wings of the butterfly) !
REPLY: Well said. The sun is a rotating ball of superheated fluid plasma, so the application of fluid dynamics surely applies. MAgnetic field lines get bent due to variances between rotation rates at the poles versus the solar equator.

Astrology and Landscheit
Sir Isaac Newton in his spare time dabbled in Alchemy.

Regarding Landscheidt, I have only recently began studying his work in some depth, and we it is true that he studied Astrology. We shouldn’t dismiss that. But having said that, if someone says “he studied Astrology, and therefore his work is not science” then I think that’s a little over the top. First of all, Astrology has both a scienitific and a religious component to it. I am Christian, and would never consider dabbling in the religious nature of it. But that is different from studying and understanding the paths/movements of celestial objects and the science that underlies it.
All this aside, in my study of his work, I do not see Astrology. I see science. If it isn’t science, somebody please let me know, because I am dumber than I thought if that’s the case.
Landscheidt’s theory is that the sun revolves around the center of mass of the solar system as our SS traverses its path around the galaxy. The distance of the sun from the center of mass changes as planetary alignment changes, changing the curvature of the revolution, which affects torque and angular momentum. This then impacts solar activity. The helix-type path gets traced every 179 years, and then doubles back so the entire path is about 360 years. Based on his studies, the reasons for changes in solar activity seem to make a lot more sense to me than other explanations I’ve read.
And yes, he is anticipating a Grand Minimum around 230, thanks to a rare event in 1990 that precedes solar reduction. That reduction typically starts on an 8 year lag historically, and seems to correspond with the start of flattening/cooling in 1998.

I have looked in to Landscheidt’s work.
His theory of the Sun’s barycentric solar motional oscillations and the variations this creates in the rotational force of the Sun’s plasma makes a lot of sense to me.
Correlation with theory and observation is very good both at the current time and when one look at historical data.
Of course, this type of correlation between observation and theory is completely absent in the AGW theory and it is not very good either in the predictions for the coming solar cycle 24 that have been made by most established academical researchers.
To me it’s not surprising that someone who have been interested in astrology and is used to look at planetary motions and events also might be interested in planetary motions and changes in the climate.
Whatever one thinks of astrology, consider this. There exist far more astrologers who have a good knowledge of the motions of the planets of the solar system than there exist solar physicists. And of those solar physicists only a few of them are interested in the Sun’s connection to the Earth’s climate.
I think more people should look in to his theory and work.
I favor a theory if it makes sense and there is a good correlation between theory and observations regardless of the background of the person that came up with that theory.
And his work has nothing more to do with astrology than Newton’s work on gravity had to do with astrology. Although both, I believe, worked as astrologers.
I wish his work is wrong, because we in for some cold times.

One more note about Landscheidt: he was a judge in Germany, and all of his solar works he did when he was retired. This means that he was financially and socially independed from the mainstream science. Everything that he found in his researches was purely based on good scientific curiosity. If you look in the history of science you will see that most of the great discoveries are made exactly by people like this. Contemporary science is heavily professionalized that leads to vulnerability to political influence. Most of that happens with the climatology today is because of this political influence upon the science.

Landscheidt I am sure would have been really interested in all the controversy that he has aroused, after all creating interest in a theory, and the debates that follow is what proving science is all about. I think that to much attention is being paid to the ‘astrology’ aspect of his studies. My wife is a psychiatrist and as a relaxant /hobby she owns and rides and maintains a Harley Davidson. But she is not, I can assure you a ‘Hells Angel’ ( some might say that she is a little eccentric, but Hells Angel never.) Well don’t just stand there get a rag and clean !

For sunspot numbers, http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/solar/ftpsunspotnumber,html wil give a daily readout from 1818 to Feb. this year, monthly numbers from 1700 to now and even sunspot observations as far back as 165 BC. It makes for some very interesting charts. I’m still looking for temperature charts for comparison.