Here today, gone tomorrow.
Sunspot 993, the first cycle 24 spot of the southern hemisphere, appeared late Saturday, and by Monday morning, the Tiny Tim spot was gone. Which is what happened to the last cycle 24 spot, which was a Tiny Tim and also quickly disappeared.
Galileo, Wolf, and other solar observers of the past would likely never have seen it. So with these Tiny Tims coming and going so quickly, that begs the question; was the Maunder Minimum, Dalton Minimum and other minimums not simply a period of Tiny Tim sunspots that nobody could detect witht he observing equipment of the time?
With SOHO we can see everything. Even backyard astonomers can pull out Tiny Tim sunspots with their equipment.
John A
You’re being overly pessimistic.
Have a couple of beers…
Sometimes when it comes to cooling I get the feeling we have sceptics who are as alarmist as the AGW folks. I’m originally from Vermont – and cold aint all bad.
And the temperchure onamolies aint bean that bad.
@Jean Meeus
Are you the Jean Meeus I think you are?
http://www.willbell.com/math/mc1.HTM
Fantastic work!
I used the theories in your book to simulate the solar orbit, which really has an interesting and very complex behaviour. I wonder if the cyclic behaviour could explain solar activity….
Screenshots of computed orbits
http://arnholm.org/astro/sun/sc24/sim1
@ur momisugly Pierre Gosselin
“Some Norwegian reader here made the comment somewhere that these small sunspots would have been impossible to detect with the primitive instruments available during the Maunnder Minimum. Of course he’s right. The puny spots we’ve been seeing occasionally are insignificant. It’s like seeing one tiny bubble in a pot you’re waiting to see start boil. Cycle 24 has not started in my view.”
Definition of solar minimum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_minimum
“The date of the minimum is described by a smoothed average over 12 months of sunspot activity, so identifying the date of the solar minimum usually can only happen 6 months after the minimum takes place.”
If we apply a “Maunder minimum technology sunspot count adjustment” to the present Cycle 24 spot, to make the current counts consistent with that time, then most likely the total SC24 sunspot count so far would be zero.
I think it is quite likely that solar minimum is still months into the future.
And today, NASA’s Science News article is on…a giant solar flare! (The Carrington Flare, in 1859) Interesting stuff…
Does anyone know if RSS does anything to adjust for the lack of data between -70 and -82.5? That area is known to have a cooling trend, while the +70 to +82.5 area is known to be warming.
I’m not claiming any cooking of books. My understanding is that the missing data simply doesn’t exist. But regardless of WHY it’s missing, the fact that it IS missing, introduces a known warm bias.
Another concern I have is the difference between temperature, and heat content. Tropical air contains considerably more water, and therefore more energy per degree, than polar air. It seems to me that joules/cubic meter, or something similar, would be a much more useful metric than temperature. I sincerely have no idea how that would alter the global “averages.” But at least the numbers would be more meaningful.
REPLY: See this previous post I made on the subject
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/putting-a-myth-about-uah-and-rss-satellite-data-to-rest/
Pierre, there’s no fun to be had in global cooling: http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/ice/lec19/holocene.htm
Just to say many thanks for the explanation re the origins of the Tiny Tim expression! Also, can anyone recommend a good book about the sun? I’m currently reading The Sun: A Biography by David Whitehouse, would like another one to start after I’ve finished that.
Thanks again!
Anyone want to take a crack at plotting cosmic ray data from about 1958 to December 07? It is available in tabulated form:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/ftpcosmicrays.html
By eyeballing the tables, it is clear that from one monitor to the next, there are cycles measured by each (which is to be expected). It is also interesting that measurements are different depending on location (like why are Bejing’s numbers so much smaller?), but the cycles are still there. We know that when minimum occurs, we get blasted with cosmic rays, which in theory, can create the process needed for water droplets and clouds to occur. Right now, the sun is deeply asleep with a magnetic number of 66. The length of the minimum is getting quite long, extending the amount of time we are not being protected by the magnetic shield of the sun.
Here is the one-two punch:
If cold ocean water kicks up moisture into the air (and for those readers who are warmers, also slows the increase of CO2 into the atmosphere), AND cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, in essence seeding it, and cloud cover cools the planet…?
I really enjoy your site and applaud your search for the truth. This may be of interest to you and your readers. I recently conducted an informal study of peaking sunspot observations using an autocorrelative market timing algorithm. The results suggest that Tom DeMark’s Sequential and Combo studies may be useful in identifying peaks in sunspot cycles. Here is the link:
rjb
It appears that cycle 23 is still hanging on. I would imagine this flare area near the equator will send predictions again further into the future for the cycle 24 change over. I do know this, Pendleton, Oregon and Lewiston, Idaho are unusually cold for this time of year, and the private weather station in Joseph, Oregon indicates that the current temps for Wallowa County, Oregon are 23 degrees lower than this same time last year. I also saw the large rainbow like ice-crystal ring around the sun today.
brrrrrr