From the “I hope to God they are flat wrong department”, here is the abstract of a short paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson. It was sent to me by reader Mike Ward.
I previously highlighted a news story on this paper on May 21st, but didn’t have the actual paper until now. If anyone has an update to this paper, which uses data up to 2005, please use the comment form to advise.
Here is the complete paper, and below are some excerpts:
Abstract: We have observed spectroscopic changes in temperature sensitive molecular lines, in the magnetic splitting of an Fe I line, and in the continuum brightness of over 1000 sunspot umbrae from 1990-2005. All three measurements show consistent trends in which the darkest parts of the sunspot umbra have become warmer (45K per year) and their magnetic field strengths have decreased (77 Gauss per year), independently of the normal 11-year sunspot cycle. A linear extrapolation of these trends suggests that few sunspots will be visible after 2015.
Figure – 1. Sample sunspot spectra from the data set. The dashed line is from a sunspot observed in June 1991, and the solid line was observed in January 2002. These provide examples of the trends seen in the data, where the OH molecular lines decrease in strength over time, and the magnetic splitting of the Fe line decreases over time. A magnetic splitting pattern for the January 2002 Fe line of 2466 Gauss is shown, while the June 1991 spectrum shows splitting from a 3183 Gauss field
Figure 2. – The line depth of OH 1565.3 nm for individual spots. The upper trace is the smoothed sunspot number showing the past and current sunspot cycles; the OH line depth change seems to smoothly decrease independently of the sunspot cycle.
Figure 3. – A linear fit to observed magnetic fields extrapolated to the minimum value observed for umbral magnetic fields; below a field strength of 1500G as measured with the Fe I 1564.8nm line no photospheric darkening is observed.
Figure 4 – A linear fit to the observed umbral contrast values, extrapolated to show that by 2014 the average umbrae would have the same brightness as the quiet Sun.
They write: Sunspot umbral magnetic fields also show systematic temporal changes during the observing period as demonstrated by the sample spectra in Figure 1. The infrared Fe 1564.8 nm is a favorable field diagnostic since the line strength changes less than a factor of two between the photosphere and spot umbra and the magnetic Zeeman splitting is fully resolved for all sunspot umbrae. In a histogram plot of the distribution of the umbral magnetic fields that we observe, 1500 Gauss is the smallest value measured. Below this value photospheric magnetic fields do not produce perceptible darkening. Figure 3 presents the magnetic fields smoothed by a 12 point running mean from 1998 to 2005. The ordinate is chosen so that 1500 G is the minimum. A linear fit to the changing magnetic field produces a slope of 77 Gauss per year, and intercepts the abscissa at 2015. If the present trend continues, this date is when sunspots will disappear from the solar surface.
Let us all hope that they are wrong, for a solar epoch period like the Maunder Minimum inducing a Little Ice Age will be a worldwide catastrophe economically, socially, environmentally, and morally.
I’m still very much concerned about the apparent step change in 2005 to a lower plateau of the Geomagnetic Average Planetary (Ap) index, that I’ve plotted below. This is something that does not appear in the previous cycle:
click for a larger image
What is most interesting about the Geomagnetic Average Planetary Index graph above is what happened around October 2005. Notice the sharp drop in the magnetic index and the continuance at low levels, almost as if something “switched off”.
terry,
One difference is that we know the sun is capable of going without sunspots for an extended length of time.
The world of today is vastly different from the world of the 1400s.
You have to remember that in much of the developed world, we are currently paying farmers not to grow crops. Additionally, there are large swaths of land in places like New England that used to be farmed, but were abandoned when the mid-west was opened up. They couldn’t compete economically.
All of that land could be brought back into production.
I don’t remember what percentage of our food is used for raising cattle, pigs, chickens, etc. But it is fairly large. By eating more grains and less meat, we could free up large amounts of food.
The green revolution (especially genetic engineering) is not through yet. I’m willing to bet that when food starts getting scarce, much of the resistance to the introduction of GE crops will disappear.
Our food supplies are much more diverse than they were at the start of the LIA.
I do not share the pessimism of many here regarding food supplies during a new LIA. While prices will rise, and variation will decrease, there will be no mass starvation.
Just a few thoughts …
Ric Werme: Your limericks are wonderful. Anyone who has ever tried to drive a car in Boston can really appreciate the latter (we use the “T” whenever we’re in town … after a few difficult attempts to go from “here” to “there” by car, frequently not possible).
William: I believe we’re in substantial agreement regarding extrapolation. The technique can be a powerful impulse for additional research. Risky for forecasting. Very risky for politicians to act upon.
This is one of the finest “blogs” I’ve come upon. The discussion is civil and much useful material can be learned by those with a strong interest that greatly exceeds their background in this particular area (I count myself among those).
Regards to all!
pobept (22:33:24) :
“No New News here!! Every Amateur Radio Operator can tell you that a solar cycle is about 11 years long. We are at or near bottom of this cycle. That means that some where around 2018 we will bottom out again. That simply means fewer sun spots! Have these guy’s been sleeping and missed the past 2 or 3 solar cycles??”
The good Hams will tell you that solar cycles are usually a year or two shorter than 11 years, or a year or two longer. Surprisingly few are 11.
Please read the paper – its pretty easy reading. If you can read a RF schematic you can understand the paper. The point is that for more than the last cycle the magnetic field associated with sunspots is weakening. That leads to less contrast. If the sunspots disappear in 2015, there will still be the magnetic manifestation and radio effects, they’ll just be weaker than at the same point in a normal solar cycle.
Those guys have not been sleeping – they’ve been pay a lot more attention for a lot more cycles than some posters here.
Paradigm shifts are like blemishes in the beginning. They form pimples on the side of the current paradigm bubble. The one that grows due to increasing evidence/observations/experiments, while the old paradigm suffers from lack of such evidence, eventually becomes the new paradigm while the old one dries up and falls off the new bubble.
I suspected Leif had a robot that searched for his name in postings. Such a rapid response! 😉
Leif,
“Even if the trend should ‘flatten’ a bit and 2015 becomes 2020 or more, it is quite possible that a Maunder-type minimum is in the offing. This does not , IMHO, automatically mean that we are entering another LIA, as it has not been demonstrated [at least to my satisfaction – the rest of you can believe what you wish, I’m not trying to convert anybody] that the LIA was due to the Sun.”
Fair enough, correlation does not necessarily mean a causal link. Could be spurious, could be dependent on chaotic dynamics which might or might not show a correlation next time.
But we are pattern recognition animals. If not the sun directly ( it must always be there indirectly, as it is our energy source), what hypothesis would you posit for the LIA?
In Tsonis et al ,http://www.uwm.edu/%7Ekravtsov/downloads/GRL-Tsonis.pdf ( it is published in http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL030288.shtml) they use a neural network to see the time evolution of temperature having as input the ocean circulation .
They do get a climate simulation and predict a cooling and then a rising of the temperatures.
Would you consider something like that, that would include musch more couplings, cloud cover etc to come out with “beats” that would generate a LIA?
leebert: or maybe the Sun has little to do with the LIA. My reason for saying so is that the solar parameters may not have been a lot smaller during Grand Minima. So, we have two possibilities:
1: the sun has nothing to do with the climate on time scales of centuries
2: the climate is hypersensitive to even the slightest solar changes
The latter carries the threat of a run-away, which may be hard to recover from, so perhaps it never happened. But, personally, I could go either way. Recent reconstructions [although still controversial] of solar activity, the interplanetary magnetic field, and geomagnetic activity point to the strong possibility that solar activity during the 18th and 19th centuries was not any less that during the 20th and 21st. In my opinion [which you are welcome not to share] this pretty much rules out the sun as the primary climate driver which would be setting the background stage upon which volcanoes, aerosols, CO2, whatever, play.
anna and others: suppose the were no Maunder or Spoerer Minima, would you still ascribe the LIA to the Sun? If so, I have no more to say. If not, it is a question of magnitude. If the solar variation were huge [say 20% in TSI] there would be no doubt. If the solar variation were minuscule [say 0.1%] we could ignore it. So, it only comes down to how much we trust the solar reconstructions and the size of the variations inferred. Several people in the past have put the cart before the horse and posited that the Sun must have changed in order to account for the LIA. This argument is not invalid per se if we have no other information, but today we do have a rather long list of indications that the solar changes were very slight. [And I do know all the papers that proclaim that the Sun is now the most active in centuries, millennia, 11000 years, etc. – I’m willing to discuss these, but this is a lengthy and technical subject – my website http://www.leif.org/research has some pointers and papers on that].
Hello Dr. Svalgarrd,
Thank you for participating on this forum. One thing that has always bothered me is that there seems to be a dependence on TSI trends (or lack thereof) as the proof against a strongly coupled sun-earth climate variation link.
I look at it differently. Given my background in electronics, I tend to think of solar irradiance and earth’s atmospheric system as a transistor, specifically a field effect transistor.
In an FET, it takes a very small signal change on the input to modulate a much larger change of the output. While TSI may not be the source signal to effect such a modulation, there are other candidates related to the solar interaction that could be. There’s been much talk of a butterfly effect (Lorenz) in the blogosphere lately, who’s to say a small change in other signal(s) from the sun don’t have a similar effect on earth’s climate system?
My view is that we haven’t fully explored these other signal candidates, but mostly ignore them in favor of TSI as being the main driver. It is, obviously, mostly steady, but it may not be the key modulator.
Speaking metaphorically, focusing solely on TSI as the big elephant in the room might very well ignore the small mouse that startles the elephant and drives it to thrashing about.
“You have to remember that in much of the developed world, we are currently paying farmers not to grow crops. ”
That was true while most of us were growing up but the days of huge grain surpluses are gone. There is practically no surplus in the US anymore. Land has been taken out of wheat and soy production and put into corn for ethanol. North American pet food companies buy their wheat-based ingredients from China now.
What I think we are likely to see is a huge spike in food prices and more starvation in the third world and possibly frantic government calls for people to put off having additional children. I think the US midwest is likely to see a lot more rain and terrific storms as the greater contrast in temperatures between colder air from the North meets war Gulf air over the plains. The first indication is likely to be flooding and hail damage before we see killing frosts and temperatures too cool for optimum growth along with an increase in fungal diseases on food crops.
Mr Watts: I’m not focusing on TSI except as a handy proxy for solar activity in general. What we are finding is that all other solar and interplanetary indices also indicate a Sun that is less variable than thought [and I have stressed repeatedly that this is an emerging consensus and not accepted by everybody]. To my knowledge, there is no climate models that incorporate any other solar parameters [except the sunspot number which is a good proxy for TSI] , so attention tends to be centered on TSI. The reason for not using other variables is that their possible influences have not been quantified and no physical processes are known that can be modeled. The trigger effect could well be there, but unless you tell me what triggers what, when, and why, I and nobody else for that matter cannot act upon or use the effect and we have not made any progress. What I’m ‘railing’ against is the use of ‘solar’ as a sort of dumping ground for what we don’t otherwise know.
Another source of food would be backyard gardens. Very few people have them now, but if food started becoming scarce, they will come back.
Leif – “suppose the were no Maunder or Spoerer Minima, would you still ascribe the LIA to the Sun?” Leif, you are a truly brilliant guy, but come on! This is a straw man. The problem that I and others have (and I am not a solar physicist – I’m an engineer with a penchant for stats) is that there was a Maunder min, and that there are correlated colder temperatures. Now, we understand that long term ice age conditions may be due to many factors, including orientation of the planet. But we have in the last thousand years historical knowledge of fairly large temperature swings. The last time this happened, there was an observable lack of sunspots. Now, the Mann team claim that such a little ice age event didn’t occur – but this contradicts historical records. So how did it happen? IT could have been volcanic, but as far as I know, there are no events that geologists have pointed to that indicate the little ice age was volcanically produced. (And please do correct me if I’m wrong!) So we have a problem. The known correlated events, swings of temperatures that are recorded historically (such as the roman warm period) and no man made CO2 causation. So some of us have drawn some conclusions. We’ll could be proven wrong within a few years, or even a few months. Or not. SInce this isn’t a peer reviewed journal, and we have little influence on the tide of public opinion, it probably won’t matter much… 😛
Anthony, we may soon (hopefully before /if we get global cooling) find out from CERN if the CRF theory holds water:
http://aps.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0804/0804.1938v1.pdf
Unlike skeptics usual lack of funding–it appears as though this has high visibility and funding.
I just hope we don’t find out the gate of the MOSFET is analogous to CRF and cloud cover and by 2015 we are in a world of hurt.
Brendan re: Clilverd, et. al., 2004.
I would call this a study of solar cycles employing spectrum analysis, not statistics which Leif uses extensively. Many researchers have speculated on the repetitive nature of features in the sunspot cycles using wavelet analysis, I.R.G. Wilson used carrier amplitude modulation, etc.
Heliophysicists like Dr. Svalgaard are more interested in characterizing the sunspot cycle in terms of an underlying solar dynamo which he was instrumental in pioneering in the 70’s and regard the cycle studies with a benign neglect.
That the cycles recur coincident with certain planetary positions, and solar system positions, is beyond argument, the problem is no physical cause on this account has been forthcoming, so it has not fostered Heliophysic investigation.
“To the carpenter possessing only a hammer, all the world appears as a nail”.
I am convinced that the next LIA, to be known as the Landscheidt Minimum will be upon us soon: New Little Ice Age Instead of Global Warming?
I only hope mankind will come to his senses sooner, rather than later, on this whole AGW pseudoscientific nonsense.
There’s a man with a gun over there,
Tellin’ me, I got to beware.
Must be Al. AGW, believe it, OR ELSE!
Hey Leif !
Yeh, well just between you, me & the here fence posts, I ain’t quotin’ nobody.
On the LIA side of the discussion there’s Don Easterbrook & Tim Patterson who – in their respective fields of ice core & mud core research – are seeing large correlations between temperatures, historical Be10, C14 and ocean productivity with both long-term and regular solar cycles.
OK, correlation ‘s causation. And cooling the talk about global cooling might be a good idea. I’m not anticipating a LIA and I think talk of one is surely premature. Abatement in a warming trend? I think that’s within the range of reasonable speculation.
But seriously, w/out big flares & regular faculae, mainstream climate researchers are saying just the drop in UV warming the upper troposphere will have some effect, the question is “how much?”
I think people just like the idea of skating on the Thames in 2050.
Gary and Bruce: Cycle studies, or as my good friend Ken Schattern calls it “cyclomania”, have not been accepted, because they have never shown to be useful in real prediction, i.e. well ahead of time. One reason is that are just too many cycles: 11, 12, 20, 22, 35, 55, 88, 100, 400, 1500, 2400 years and others. With enough cycles you can fit anything. With no physics behind them we are nowhere. Now, I don’t need physics if the cycles just worked, but, alas they don’t. I would bet my life savings that quantum mechanics can predict the wavelength of a particular atomic transition, but not many I know would do that on predicting the occurrence of a solar flare on the basis of the positions of the planets. Strangely enough, any blog discussion of solar activity eventually ends up with astrology being promoted. This is a sad truth that I do not see any chance of changing and I’m not going to try. Carl Sagan called it our “demon-haunted world”.
Dr. Svalgaard, I take exception to your comment: “Strangely enough, any blog discussion of solar activity eventually ends up with astrology being promoted.”
If you’ll do a word search on this blog, using the search box in upper right, you’ll find it to be non-existent in my posts. There have been some comments (15 total using the word) and most simply mentioning Landschiedt and the fact that he dabbled in astrology, but certainly there’s been no active promotion of the craft.
The best comment was from Jeff Alberts who wrote: “Unfortunately Astrology isn’t about the science of anything, and has no place in scientific circles.” I agree.
I’ve done a several dozen posts about solar activity, none of which have descended into the “demon-haunted world” as far as I can see. – Anthony
Anthony: I did not intend to implicate your blog. You run a tight ship and that is good. I was relating my own experience on several other ones and message boards. The line is quite fine and one has to be vigilant. Perhaps it is my own fault that I speak up when I see the discussion drifting into that territory [“That the cycles recur coincident with certain planetary positions, and solar system positions, is beyond argument” – nothing is beyond argument], but so be it. As you may know I have been running a solar commentary at CA and a good fraction of the comments over there has been concerned with fighting off the demons.
REPLY: Thank you, now excuse me while I look at some tea leaves 😉
Anthony: tea leaves work for me too. And other weeds. 🙂
Ah, but for the lack of an eye of newt, I’d conjure a jinn to bedevil thee!
Heh. Bleeding edge science, except it stands to reason the sun isn’t too variable considering the mostly moderate climes here on Earth.
As someone else on these fora has commented, humans like correlations, we jump on them. I tend to follow studies by experts who I might think have demonstrated a way to reify the correlation into something more tangible.
I see how it’s arguably better to let a mystery stand than to prop up a facile effigy that makes for a rough fit. In this politicized environment it’s hard to resist saying “Ahah!” to what looks at first flush to be some very seductive information. But then we skeptics feel we are speculating no less than anyone else about climactic effects & future events.
What is then a good litmus for statistical correlations? Even seemingly good evidence can be misleading and still be functionally speculative, no matter the correlation or past trend match.
If the new research you cite in fact leaves everyone, as you say, with a lack of evidence to demonstrate why, then we’re mired in a quandary. It’s ironic, too, b/c we object to the AGWers abusing the distinction between correlation and causation in much the same way.
Admittedly it’s hard for self-described agnostics to not play the devil’s advocate. Hypocrites give the best advice.
Gee, sounds like Tony’s hit a solar nerve.
🙂
I have to agree with Dr. Svalgaard. We always see the astrologers say “the planets are going to be lined up, something that happens only once every 50 million years” or whatever, and that major devastation will occur on earth because of the forces exerted. Well, very few of the planets inhabit exactly the same plane in their orbits. The moon has some minor effect because it’s so close, but the person standing next to you has more gravitational effect on you than all the planets put together. I think this is because gravity, like magnetism, falls off rapidly as distance increases.
So while people aren’t saying the word “astrology”, they’re attributing effects on the sun from planetary alignment which have no basis. I think that’s what he means.