The sun today. There appears to be an emerging Cycle 23 spot
at the left, but still no new Cycle 24 spots. Click for large image
That’s never a good sign. Below is an excerpt from an article in Science Daily that ponders the question:
Excerpt: The sun has been laying low for the past couple of years, producing no sunspots and giving a break to satellites. That’s good news for people who scramble when space weather interferes with their technology, but it became a point of discussion for the scientists who attended an international solar conference at Montana State University. Approximately 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered June 1-6 to talk about “Solar Variability, Earth’s Climate and the Space Environment.”
The scientists said periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, but this period has gone on longer than usual. “It continues to be dead,” said Saku Tsuneta with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, program manager for the Hinode solar mission. […] The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. Today’s sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago, and scientists aren’t sure why. “It’s a dead face,” Tsuneta said of the sun’s appearance.
Tsuneta said solar physicists aren’t like weather forecasters; They can’t predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period, from approximately 1650 to 1700, occurred during the middle of a little ice age on Earth that lasted from as early as the mid-15th century to as late as the mid-19th century.
I’m never encouraged when a solar scientist describes the face of the sun as “dead”.
Here’s a little something that you may find slightly interesting. Our organisation conducted an online survey regarding the climate change views of the Finnish citizens and the Finnish MPs. Not too surprisingly, there are some major differences between them. The people remain considerably sceptical but the elected officials are almost unanimous in their support for the warmist agenda. See the press release in English here. Unfortunately the full 45 page survey report is only available in Finnish.
Tim
Just as coincidence of CO2 levels and temp does not constitute proof either. There is, however, ‘coincidence’ of cold temps and other solar minumums as well (Dalton), which tends to lend some strength to the casual hypothesis.
Well, if the Sun is indeed dead, we can safely assume it died of natural causes.
RIP.
I get up each morning and dust off my wits
Open the paper and read the obits
If I’m not there I know I’m not dead
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.
Pete Seeger
The current obsessive interest on the part of academics in the Scwabe cycle is related to its comparative brevity; successful preditions can influence the bottom line before the pipeline runs dry.
On average, we see the current behavior every 180 years; that part is not baffling.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar/action?sys=-Sf
The problem is making a model sufficiently predictive and accurate in those forecasts that we can generate a revenue stream. Like Al’s? Well, they ‘re allowed to dream, aren’t they.
Question:
Why is there such a large difference between the Total Solar Irradiance values from PMOD and those from SORCE?
Well, if the Sun is indeed dead, we can safely assume it died of natural causes.
No no it’s not dead, it’s, it’s restin’! Remarkable star, our G2V is, idn’it, ay? Beautiful corona!
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
As this is a Cycle 23 spot it is clear sign that solar minimum is still very much undefined, and it means cycle 23 is now more than 12 years old. Observe that long cycles are correlated with low solar activity in the follwing cycle, so the probability of a very quiet cycle 24 is increasing.
It is interesting that the NOAA cycle 24 prediction panel has gone quiet as well, nothing new since April 2007…?
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/SC24/PressRelease.html
If the hypothesis of solar barycentric motion has any value, it actually predicts that we are entering into a period of disordered solar orbital motion, similar to what we had during the Maunder and Dalton minima…
Solar flux at 65. Lowest I’ve ever seen.
Bill: I was under the impression the lag was around 5 years, though I have nothing to back that up with in hand. I’ve also read a few studies where it’s up in the range of multiple decades for SST and could be measured in centuries to millennia for OHC. Doesn’t sound like a point about which anyone has a close grasp.
Bill Illis: A while back I spliced annual ACRIM and PMOD TSI data onto the end of Lean et al 2000. You have to go way back in order for there to be lower TSI values than the one PMOD is presently showing, which is one of the major problems with it.
http://i30.tinypic.com/17ppa9.jpg
Re: Carsten Arnholm’s comment:
Charvatova wrote this in 1999, predicting quieter future cycles, and conditions similar to Maunder and Dalton minima for the 1985-2040 period.
http://www.ann-geophys.net/18/399/2000/angeo-18-399-2000.pdf
Is there a coorelation between the sunspots and the oceans’ warm and cold cycles? It seems oddly coincidental that the PDO and the AMO have turned negative just about the time the sunspot cycle became spotless. I’m thinking the oceans are huge solar cells and store more or less energy depending upon the sunspot cycles.
If the solar diameter has not changed, a change in solar irradiation now must reflect something that happened about 100,000 years ago inside the sun as to the best of my knowledge, that is about how long it takes photons from the sun’s core to reach the surface.
What I am curious about but don’t have either the knowledge or the resources with the information handy is if magnetic observations at the surface and beyond reflect current activity inside the sun or also experience a “propagation delay” of the same sort that radiation does.
By this I mean to recall the drop that Anthony noted in 2005 in a graph of some solar magnetic activity and if it may or may not correlate to observed reduction in solar radiation in the link given in the comments above or if they are simply coincidence.
A change in solar diameter, though, could result (I think) in a change in brightness without a change in the total number of photons. You would simply see more or less photons per area of solar surface. Solar diameter would be a function of radiation pressure from the core pushing against gravity. Since we know that the sun is somewhat variable, I would expect the diameter to be somewhat variable as well.
So, did something happen 100,000 years ago inside the sun that we are just now seeing? Does magnetic “information” propagate quickly or does it also take a while to work its way out?
About 15 years ago I found what appeared to be a relationship between the solar cycle and the opposition and conjunction cycle of Jupiter and Saturn. Using the 300 years of available spot data (see link below) it appeared to me that the two cycles ran in phase for about 100 years (7 to 9 cycles) after which two long solar cycles would place the two cycles back in phase. Based on the data it appeared that a long cycle was due and could be expected soon. If this association is real we could expect a maximum around 2014-15 followed by another long cycle with a peak near 2027-28.
data available at:
http://www.graystonelabs.com/SolarCycle.html
TimPoser: Look up Drew Shindell’s 2001 NASA/GISS study of the Little Ice Age. Although the variable reduction in TSI of the Maunder Minimum may be contested Shindell shows a demonstrable link between a lack of sunspots and the Little Ice Age. The question is how much less air-heating UV (yes, ultraviolet) radiation hits the atmosphere from sunspot faculae. IAC, Sindell’s old study showed that a modest decrease in global temperatures would have caused intense regional effects in the relatively pristine atmosphere of the 17th Century, a -0.3 to -0.4 degrC drop in avg. global temperatures lead to decreased intermeridional and interzonal ocean air currents that warmed continental interiors during winter.
So either you can anticipate a modest trimming of an ongoing warm period or mitigation of future warming, depending on your beliefs. Do I anticipate a severe cooling trend? No. A moderate one? Yes, enough to offset half of the global warming of the past 150 years.
Bill Illis: I’ve read elsewhere the average TSI has fallen 0.33 w/m-2 (-0.1 degr. Celsius) since the early 1990’s. Even Lief’s colleagues anticipate another -0.2 degr. C.).
That brings us just below a -1.0 w/m-2 drop in TSI by 2020.
Richard
I agree and that’s why you cannot find a correlation between TSI ect with temps. Increased irradiance absorbed by oceans but affected by circulation, wind etc over 10’s, 100 or 1000’s of years (absolute guess) then heat released anywhere.. poles equator whatever. To say that solar activity has no effect on climate is a bit ludicrous as some top notch scientist’s still hang on to
I find this paragraph from the NOAA prediction article especially interesting:
“One disagreement among the current panel members centers on the importance of magnetic fields around the Sun’s poles as the previous cycle decays. End-cycle polar fields are the bedrock of the approach predicting a weak Cycle 24. The strong-cycle forecasters place more importance on other precursors extending over a several-cycle history. Another clue will be whether Cycle 24 sunspots appear by mid 2008. If not, the strong-cycle group might change their forecast.”
So, March 2008 was obviously way to early. But here it is mid-2008…and there have been 3 Cycle 24 spots, albeit all very small. With minima likely still months away, is the strong-cycle group still holding strong?
“Why is there such a large difference between the Total Solar Irradiance values from PMOD and those from SORCE?”
Leif Svalgaard, in a thread at climateaudit said it was due to differences in instrumentation. The TSI values don’t match, but the change in value for both is quite precise. IOW, the change in TSI value is what counts, not the absolute.
It is of no significance at this stage that cycle 23 sunspots continue. What is important is that cycle 24 sunspots have gone AWOL.
Each day that passes without more cycle 24 sunspots makes a Maunder or Dalton minimum more likely. And this is by no means the worst case scenario. It is entirely possible that absent sunspots over multiple solar cycles is what sends us into an ice age.
Crosspatch: there is evidence that the sun rotated more slowly during the Maunder minimum: (Vaquero J.M., Sánchez-bajo F., Gallego M.C. (2002). “A Measure of the Solar Rotation During the Maunder Minimum”. Solar Physics 207 (2): 219. doi:10.1023/A:1016262813525).
The only reasonable explanation for this is that the sun expanded.
[…] I know this will have limited interest out there, but when someone says that the sun “continues to be dead,” it tends to catch my eye! Hat tip to Anthony Watts of the “Watts Up WIth That?” blog, who does a good job of reporting on stuff like this. Here’s his post with the explanation of what in the world I am talking about: “Scientists not sure why Sun ‘continues to be dead’“. […]
“As for the Little Ice Age, coincidence with low sunspot numbers is not proof. Weren’t there some earthly events such as volcano activity that could account for the LIA?”
Another interesting theory for the start of the Little Ice Age, which started in 1350, is that it was caused by the Black Death in Europe. Between 1347 and 1352, between 1/3 and 1/2 of the population was wiped out (over 25,000,000 souls). Less people working the land meant much of the farmland became reforested with a consequent reduction in atmospheric CO2 as the carbon was ‘locked’ into all this new timber.
As I said, interesting little theory…
Mike K,
Interesting theory, but doesn’t CO2 follow temperature by ~400 years, not lead it?
In his book; ‘The Great Famine’ Prof. William Chester Jordan says the the Little Ice Age started in 1315 with a terrible cold and wet summer that crashed W. Europe’s agriculture which stayed crashed as the next six summers were equally cold and wet. Halfway through, many of the draft animals died. That is why 1315 to 1322 is called the ‘Great Famine” by commentators of that time who were familiar with famine. The winters were also much colder than previously which made clear that clothes and houses were inadequate for the new climate. That Anthropogenic Global Cooling from the Black Death needs to go in the ‘Dust Bin of History’ next to AGW and honest Marxist Socialism.
Mike K-
Interesting…but that’s a big reach.
First of all, CO2 wouldn’t suddenly be drastically reduced because millions died. It would take many years for the land to become “reforested”…and I highly doubt there is even solid proof of how that happened. Assuming it did happen, though, the affects of regrowth and subsequent CO2 loss, and then subsequent cooling (theoretically) would take decades at the very least. But the world, or at least Europe, had already been cooling by that time.
And all that is assuming that there was enough farmland going unworked to become reforested, enough to make a huge dent on CO2…considering we are just talking about Europe and the population was much lower back then anyway, I highly doubt the effects would be so great.
There is actually more evidence that the plague may have been linked to the cooling, rather than the other way around.
I’m just waiting for Al Gore and James Hansen to blame the dead sun on global warming.