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”.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“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 it would only be a net CO2 sponge while the forest was becoming established. Once that is complete, the forest becomes CO2 neutral with about as much new biomass growing in a year as dies and decays, releasing the CO2 back into the air. A fully mature old growth forest is in balance and is not a net CO2 absorber.
“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.”
From my recent reading it went something like this:
A colder, wetter climate resulted in wheat crop failures and increase in the consumption of rye. The weather also caused a greater incidence of ergot in the rye which both rodents and people ate. The ergot caused depression of the immune system and deaths of its own along with various mass hysterias which compounded the problem already facing them by famine but the link to ergot wouldn’t be discovered until centuries later. With the people’s immune systems hammered by the ergot and the rodents dying from it, the fleas were forced to find a new host.
The casualty rate for Black Death is in direct proportion to the conditions that cause ergot … cold/wet. Warmer, dryer areas didn’t get hit by the epidemic and people who didn’t eat rye had lower death rates.
http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wong/BOT135/LECT12.HTM
Bruce, this AGW is an ex AGW.
===================
Has anyone thought to blame man-made greenhouse gases?
I’m waiting for Al Gore to start selling magnetic credits and telling us we must give up all electromagnetic equipment so that the sun will once again produce sunspots.
We shouldn’t be all triumphant over a cooling Sun. It could easily change tomorrow.
And “cooling” should be thought of as in up to 0.5C drop in the average temp on Earth as in not very much. Because that would be enough to affect crop and food production which needs to increase at 1.5% to 2.0% per year to keep up with population increases (which it has since the LIA ended except for the 1930s and the mid-1970s).
But what it will signify is that the Sun is not a never-changing-monolith and it does have longer than 11 or 22 year cycles and more variation over time. Solar changes could, thus, explain much of the temperature changes over the recent past and, hence, CO2 is not the main driver of the climate as the global climate model developers have forced down our throats.
But we don’t want any Dalton and Maunder Minimums. The TSI data shown above, however, hints that we might be heading that way if the Sun doesn’t wake up soon.
I can explain why the sun might have no spots using the anthropic principle. Ya see, if the sun did not behave as the sun behaves then intelligent life might not be possible here and thus we would not be here to observe that the sun does not behave as the sun behaves. Thus the sun might have no spots because we are here to observe that the sun has no spots.
Or in summary, we is because we be.
sorry
TSI is a problem
Sun spot is another problem.
There is no reasonable explanation for variation of TSI
There is no reasonable explanation for variation in sunspot. (activity e number)
TSI = f (sunspot) ???????….( not yet)
climatology undoubtedly influence ….. no mechanism acceptable.
correction: they isn’t cause we be.
Are the glaciers growing again … yet? Or will they begin to return soon?
I don’t care if climate change is man-influenced or not, particularly, but I sure hope it doesn’t change for the worse.
Bill Illis:
TSI has decreased since the early 1990’s by -0.33 w/m-2 (-0.1 degrC). The various metrics of solar magnetism & sunspot group movement are all down. Historically the sun hasn’t “dimmed” to this degree in the past 180 years. So when astrophysicists start predicting a long-term dimming cycle they have reason to do so. I’d be surprised that it could perk right back up when the sunspot group motion indicates a very low cycle in 2020.
Astrophysicists are reasonably predicting another -0.1 degrC to -0.2 degrC effect by 2020 — if -0.2 degrC that’d come to nearly -1.0 w/m-2 since 1995. Who knows? The seas may already be showing an effect in missing heat, drawing the famous comment from Kevin Trenberth of NCAR.
Fernando:
See above comment re: the LIttle Ice Age study by Drew Shindell @ur momisugly NASA/GISS in 2001. A causal link was established between the Maunder Minimum and the LIA. The cause is the change in air-warming ultraviolet radiation from the lack of sunspot faculae.
Please everyone, I don’t wanna sound like a broken record. The data & studies are there & are solid & they’ll help debunk a great many alarmist arguments.
TimPosser:
The glaciers have been growing in Antarctica.
The ice loss in the Arctic has been mostly due to soot, nearly 90% of it. see my blog
http://www.scientificblogging.com/blog/258
“Are the glaciers growing again … yet?”
The left and right arms of the Mount St. Helens glacier have finally touched for the first time since it erupted.
This is from 30 May. You can see the large glacier on the right and the smaller arm on the left just starting to touch. You can see a lot more pictures by going to pnsn.org and hit the Mt. St. Helens Volcanic Advisory link and then follow the “Current Photos … ” link.
oops, I must have messed up that link to the picture but you can find it by following the breadcrumbs I mentioned in the previous posting. It is in the “Crater Glacier” group of photos.
It’s only the last couple years, but it seems that glaciers in parts of the Rockies and Cascades in the western U.S. are starting to make a comeback.
Man can no more drastically change global climate than the Sun can change its spots.
leebert:
The statement of 90% of Arctic sea ice loss being due to accidental soot pollution from such low latitudes as India and China is absurd. Arctic sea ice change is due to solar cycles, ocean temperatures and currents, wind patterns (Arctic Oscillation), and changes in cloud cover. Soot pollution used to be outrageous decades ago in the U.S., Europe, and Russia, latitudes more able to affect Arctic conditions, but they have since subsided. Look at these pages:
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=19130
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070809172126.htm
I do not dispute the physics of the albedo affect, or the appearance of soot in the Arctic (although photographic evidence is weak), and I support your postition for the control of real pollution, but be careful what you state from assumptions and words of two scientists who (I am not criticizing them) work for alarmist SCRIPPS who say the same B.S. as James Hansen in their climate studies.
leebert:
Your assumption that 90% of the Arctic sea ice loss is due to accidental soot pollution from India and China is absurd. I support your position of controlling REAL pollution, but sea ice is controlled by solar cycles, ocean temperatures and currents, wind patterns, and changes in cloud cover. The fact that sea ice in the Arctic is declining but the sea ice in the Antarctic is increasing is due to soot and haze differences does not have solid scientific evidence to lean on. Sea ice anomalies in the Arctic were postive in the early 80s but negative in the Antarctic at the same time. The Northern Hemisphere always see more dramatic climate changes than the Southern Hemisphere because it has more land. Temperatures in the early 1900s were very cold and soot was very high in the Arcitc according to ScienceDaily. I do not deny the physics of the albedo effect.
Crosspatch: While ergotism was certainly a serious problem during the Middle ages, the information about the Black Death on your link is nonsensical. Norther Norway and Sweden not affected? A third (at least) of the population died! It is true that children were specially hard hit by the Black Death, but this mostly applied to the later outbreaks (e. g. in 1360 and 1370), when most adults had already lived through the “big one” and so were fairly resistant. That the population did not recover until the 1500’s is not surprising since plague came back periodically all through the 1300’s and 1400’s.
[Tsuneta said solar physicists aren’t like weather forecasters; They can’t predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however….]
LOL….. Do I detect a mischievous sarcasm from Tsuneta?……
So, who said scientist don’t have a sense of humour?
Good info on Sun. More on allied subject will be interesting
I hope we ARE entering a new ice age. Modern humans are far better equipped to deal with cold temperatures that the people in the last ice ages. Commerce and technology are more adaptable to an ice age than to the economy-wrecking diktats of the global warming nutocracy.
What is interesting about sea ice and high latitude glaciers is that Artic and Antartic inland ice has been thickening, while sea ice has not. Could this have more to do with SSTs than anything else? The interior of Greenland hasn’t seen any significant melt, nor the interior of the Antartic.
As far as deaths go during the LIA, The Great Famine of 1318-1321 was caused by an unusually strong belt of Westerlies coming off the North Atlantic. Imagine one cyclone hitting Normandy and Brittany every 24-30 hours for five straight months. The baroclinicity between Iceland and the Azores must have been intense to support such a synoptic pattern – something like the Pacific Firehose except positioned over the Atlantic. According to farmers diaries in France and the Benelux, by June most of the wheat and barley crop sat in flooded burrows. Those plants that did mature eventually became moldy. There was hardly enough crop to provide seeds for the next planting season. By the time the skies did clear in Spetember, much of Europe then suffered through an unusually early frost.
tty
Crosspatch: While ergotism was certainly a serious problem during the Middle ages, the information about the Black Death on your link is nonsensical. Norther Norway and Sweden not affected? A third (at least) of the population died!
According to the reference below (norwegian research site in norwegian language), at least 60 percent of the Norwegian population died in the short period between 1348 – 1350
http://www.forskning.no/Artikler/2004/juli/1090833676.68
Could be due to “solar warming!” 😉