Interesting article at the Arizona Daily Star (Tucson, home to Kitt Peak and other observatories). (h/t to Ric Werme)
Picture for illustration only – not from article
Sunspot cycle more dud than radiation flood
By Dan Sorenson
arizona daily star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 05.19.2008
Many solar scientists expected the new sunspot cycle to be a whopper, a prolonged solar tantrum that could fry satellites and raise hell with earthly communications, the power grid and modern electronics.
But there’s scant proof Sunspot Cycle 24 is even here, let alone the debut of big trouble.
So far there have been just a couple minor zits on the face of the sun to suggest the old cycle is over and the new one is coming.
The roughly 11-year cycle of sunspot activity should have bottomed out last year, the end of Cycle 23 and the beginning of Cycle 24. That would have put the peak in new sunspot activity around 2012.
But a dud sunspot cycle would not necessarily make it a boring period, especially for two solar scientists with the Tucson-based National Solar Observatory.
Two years ago, William Livingston and Matt Penn wrote a paper for the journal Science predicting that this could not only be a dud sunspot cycle, but the start of another extended down period in solar activity. It was based on their analysis of weakening sunspot intensity and said sunspots might vanish by 2015.
The paper, rejected in peer review, was never published by Science. Livingston said he’s OK with the rejection.
“I accept what the reviewers said,” Livingston said. “‘If you are going to make such statement, you had better have strong evidence.’ ”
Livingston said their projections were based on observations of a trend in decreasingly powerful sunspots but reviewers felt it was merely a statistical argument.
Read the entire article here at this link
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If a paper is rejected in peer review what do the authors normally do to publish their ideas?
I believe Doug Hoyt referred to this study at WarwickHughes’ site last year. The researchers response to peer-review, that they understand not getting in ‘Science’, is equable but they had more than enough to get published somewhere.
The idea, I gather, is that the radiation emitted from within the sunspots’ perimeters has fallen off, such that if the rate of decrease continues, by 2015 they will as well. Anthony has been suspecting something similar with his ‘sunspeck’ posts re: Maunder minimum.
“This paper does not comform to the prevailing opinion and therefore is rejected.” Geesh.
In 2001, NASA/GISS modeled the Little Ice Age. Their conclusion: The sun did it. Their climate model conclusion was that global temperatures went down -0.4 degrC, but diminished transmeriodonal & interzonal thermal transport resulted in far-harsher winters in continental interiors. In particular the decrease of troposphere-heating ultraviolet bands lead to a general moderate cooling effect.
In the scenario of CO2- & aerosol-driven warming this might lead to global un-warming. If CO2-driven warming isn’t as great as the AGWers believe then this would truly bring back skating on the Thames.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/2001/200112065794.html
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20011207iceage.html
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2006/Shindell_etal_4.html
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/19990408/
And to think Al Gore invested in all that Alaska real estate (no, not really…).
Of course, if it is a low cycle, and we see significant cooling, the AGW proponents, just as they said in this cycle, will say the sun is “offsetting” the human-caused warming and that naturally that period would be much colder. They will probably continue pushing carbon-taxes etc. because they will claim after the quiet solar period ends, global warming will re-instate itself with a vengeance. There will probably be predictions of a new, huge solar cycle afterwards that will accelerate warming back into 5th gear.
I don’t think a low solar cycle and extended cooling will be the end of the global warming alarmism.
Sorry, I meant “just as they said in this article”
Amplitude modulation / some sort of beat frequency is blindingly obvious. So, unless there is some sort of random noise even or strange burst of whatever the 2nd frequency is, we are going to be in a world of hurt.
REPLY: That 2nd frequency may be a 66 year cycle, as Basil Copeland and I previously discussed on this blog.
Interesting that it was rejected because it was “statistical” in nature and provided no mechanism for the effect. Sounds familiar, eh? Bet they’d publish one of Hansen’s efforts on “global temperature” without a peep . . . .
Leif Svalgaard has stated at CA, attributing climate change to the sun is akin to “scientific fraud”.
REPLY: Hmmm. Quite a statement. I searched for it on CA but could not locate it. Can you provide a specific reference?
re: DR’s comment
he (or someone, probably the Real Climate Cool Kids Club) said it a couple times in one or the other MONSTER solar threads Steve’s got going there.
Leif Svalgaard annoys me because he obfuscates the difference between TSI and Solar Energy reaching the earth.
There is a lot of data that more solar energy has reached the earths surface (especially in the NH) since the early 1990’s.
Svalgaard keeps claiming TSI hasn’t changed. But TSI is NOT the amount of energy hitting the ocean and the ground.
I don’t have the references for Leif’s statements at CA either, but my recollection is that he does not think it is unwise to attribute climate change to the sun, he just says it’s hard to predict what the suns behvavior will actually do to the climate at this point. i.e. Will longer solar cycles cool or warm or do neither to the planet, etc.
DR, Bruce and A.L.:
“they will claim after the quiet solar period ends, global warming will re-instate itself with a vengeance.”
Svalgaard, in words very like them, provided an AGW interviewer fuel about 6 mos. back that he weakly defended at CA as ‘out of context'(in response to critcism initiated by Dave Archibald if searching the threads).
I could not agree with Bruce’s point more.
Solanki was the source of the ‘Sun correlation with global temps has fallen off’ meme in the AGW sphere, but with 4000 papers to his credit, I can hardly blame him for a careless sentence here and there. Svalgaard is making a concerted attempt, whatever his motivation.
Apparently, climate models that focus on data associated with GHG’s rather than the sun are something more than a mere statistical analysis?
I’m always amused by the constant studies that are published that ‘disprove’ the Sun’s influence on climate based on changes in irradiance alone.
I’m a big proponent of Svensmark’s GCR (specifically muon generated CCN by GCR ) cloud generation theories (that the sun’s magnetic field/solar wind affects the number of GCR penetrating earth’s atmosphere and that affects cloud cover – periods of low solar activity have more GCR and more clouds, periods of high solar activity have fewer GCR and fewer clouds) and believe this is the ‘driving’ force behind the sun’s influence on the climate. The recent study that claims to have proven that that a rise in CO2 levels did not end the last Ice Age, decreased clouds cover did (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070927154905.htm) seems to lend a good deal of credibility to Dr Svensmark’s theory. I think more support will be generated when the ‘CLOUD’ study at the LHC is completed in 2012.
Yet I see story after story (and have had some of my AGW leaning friends trumpet them to me) that claim to ‘disprove’ Svensmark because the changes in irradiance aren’t great enough to have a substantial effect.
Kent “If a paper is rejected in peer review what do the authors normally do to publish their ideas?”
They should put it on the physics/geophysics preprint archive website lanl.arXiv.org
I bet ‘Science’ rejected the paper because it wasn’t based on ‘Global Climate Models’. You don’t need a mega-dollar grants to do desktop analysis of available data. They can justify a rejection by stating they did not apply the underlying physics. However, I don’t see why it couldn’t be published elsewhere. Again, AGW is about money, not science.
Now just a dang minute! When has “evidence” ever been necessary for getting climate papers published?
I think this is Leif’s comment on the Livingston, Penn paper. Sounds like their idea might have some merit.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3052#comment-249051
They rejected it because it was “merely a statistical argument”.
Hmmm. Should have run it through a GCM. They are more accurate than mere “statistics”.
Interesting article about a new book…
http://www.thespec.com/Opinions/article/371688
A 66-year lull in solar cycle amplitude makes sense. Already the solar cycle in 2022 has also been predicted to be a half-amplitude cycle: http://www.physorg.com/news66581392.html
What do I know? I’m just a layperson, but it *looks* like a trend to me!!
Take their trend analysis with the observed slower sunspot group motion and Jan Janssen’s ever-climbing spotless days trend & it’d be be truly surprising if this were just an anomalous perturbation.
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html#Evolution
Janssens is fastidious with his data, but I’d almost wish his sunspot data were also normalized against the limits of optical telescopy so the trend lines could be compared against both 19th C and 17th C observations (Galileo wasn’t counting these Tiny Tim sun specks that are being counted now).
There are levels of solar variability and looking at Janssens’ trend analysis, this transit between SC23 & 24 already appears to go outside the standard error for 20th C solar cycles. I somehow doubt the sun would just hiccup for just one or two solar cycles, the Little Ice Age was comprised by three separate minima.
You’d think this was truly big news. It’s interesting to google around and find how few people are sensibly discussing it. The evidence is screaming to be looked at. Just like great stories, signs and portents abound but are discounted by the priests.
Drew Shindell’s study (mentioned above) was done 7 years ago, so it lacked parameterization of GCR affects and other updates in climate modeling. I wonder what Shindell thinks of the situation now….. 😉
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/2001/200112065794.html
I get the impression that most astrophysicists don’t want to take sides in the AGW debate. Can’t say I blame them, actually, either way I figure they’d get dirty.
I am amazed at so many people trying to find the one thing that will magically give us all the answers about climate. Our climate is like a stew. A whole lot of stuff goes into it to make it a stew. One person may say “it’s carrots that make a stew” another may say ” it’s the onions”, another may say something else. The truth is it takes all of that to make a stew. On the other hand, since all of our life giving energy originates from the Sun, how can anyone doubt that changes in the Sun don’t effect us? Some changes may cause very small changes, some greater changes, but it is from the Sun where it all starts. The only reason there is evolved life on our planet is because our planet’s orbit around the Sun is within the zone that allows evolved life to exsist. (And the fact that we live in a rather quiet neighborhood of the galaxy.)
In that case, it seems odd that noone has managed to measure anything more direct than SSN to correlate with temperature. See also http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3052#comment-248584 for a slightly different take on historical SSN, in contrast with the graph at the top of this article.
Pielke takes another route to potentially falsify ipcc projections, er whatever, measuring the heat accumulating in the climate system.