From SIDC (Solar Influences Data analysis Center): http://sidc.oma.be/products/quieta/
START OF ALL QUIET ALERT ………………….. The SIDC – RWC
Belgium expects quiet Space Weather conditions for the next 48 hours or until further notice. This implies that: * the solar X-ray output is expected to remain below C-class level, * the K_p index is expected to remain below 5, * the high-energy proton fluxes are expected to remain below the event threshold.
They should have also added…”Have a nice weekend!”
The monthly sunspot numbers are low, really low:
200801 2008.041 3.4 * 4.2 * 200802 2008.123 2.1 * 200803 2008.205 9.3 * 200804 2008.287 2.9 * 200805 2008.372 2.9 * 200806 2008.454 3.1 * 200807 2008.539 0.5 *
And the 10.7CM radio flux is holding below 67.
h/t to Barry Hearn
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leebert,
you do not make clear it over what time frame did the+0.135 degree CO2 caused heating took place. You quoted TSI of -0.1 since 1992 My guess is – correct me if I am wrong, – that you covered the same time period. This works out 0.085 degree/ decade, or 0.85 degree/century. I have no problem with this number It could hardly be called catastrophic and certainly will not justify the drastic steps proposed. It will keep the climate nice and toasty – it is my preference anyway – and it will not cause significant sea level rise. As a side benefit it would delay or eliminate the threat of the next Ice Age. The problem with this scenario that it will not shut up the AGW crowd and they may be able to go ahead with their disastrous agenda. However, it is Pollyannish to think that the decrease of solar activity will save our society from making some bad decisions. If we do not want the AGW agenda to be implemented, we should use the tools at our disposal of which there are many. This website is doing an excellent job of scientific education, which is very important, but by no means the only tool that we should be using.
Anthony,
I didn’t know how to get this link to you, so I’m posting it here.
Perhaps you can start another thread dealing with the economic impacts we are already seeing from the CO2 hysteria.
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20080712/ASPENWEEKLY/262228381&parentprofile=search
I was up in Vail earlier this week when I ran across the above story in the print edition of the Aspen Weekly.
Now we have coal plant cancellations based on the premise the CO2 must be stopped at all costs. This is going to start having some big economic impacts on everyone as electricity costs go up.
Regards,
Jack
Jack Simmons,
You can contact Anthony at info (at) surfacestations.org
Anthony wrote:
“87 days from now would be May 6th, 2008, so I’m confused where the 87 day figure comes from. – Anthony”
Remember there was a tiny, tiny SC24 spot on May 4. So that may be the same one. I imaged that spot from my backyard:
http://arnholm.org/astro/sun/sc24/sc24_spot_20080504_1010ut.jpg
Brauer et al. An abrupt wind shift in western Europe at the onset of the Younger Dryas cold period. Nature Geoscience, 2008; 1 (8): 520 DOI: 10.1038/ngeo263
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080801152137.htm
One excerpt:
“At the same time, these new results show that the climate system is still not well understood, and that especially the mechanisms of short-term change and the time of occurrence still hold many puzzles.”
The arctic will soon be ice free:
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg19926673.400-arctic-ice-continues-to-thin.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news1_head_mg19926673.400
And the climate system is still not yet well understoond:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080801152137.htm
Tom Klein:
Ahhh, yes. It was midnight typing that did it…
Right, I get -0.0625/decade or there abouts for the solar dimming component. Ramanathan & Carmichael cite roughly a -0.07/decade for aerosols (longterm – without air-heating tropospheric soot). The two offsets come to -0.133/decade or -1.33/century. If temperatures remain steady then the CO2 signal might be the inverse sign of that figure.
Which, as you said, would hardly be catastrophic.
Seeing how the seas & air are *both* in a slight cooling trend – and *NOT* the case where the seas warm from sponging up heat from the air – while the sun has been slacking, I’d say it might even be a correlation worth considering. 🙂
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Hansen’s “smoking gun” of an oceanic “pipeline” (also, “heat bucket”) was smoking in 1998. But was it from GHG or the sun? The ’98 el Nino would have reflected well-described 10-year lag of sea temperatures behind solar activity Prior to the ’98 el Nino the sun was at its most brilliant in millenia during the period of 1965 – 1990.
Although Lief suggests the solar flux during that period may not have been as great relative to the previous period (derived from proxy data), even his historical TSI shows the latter half of the 20th century as having higher TSI than before (see: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-LEIF.pdf ), and with the seas & air cooling what this suggests is a more sensitive climate overall.
It has been quiet for months to maybe a year!
papertiger: the Sun’s orbit around the solar system’s center of gravity, and makes a case for it being in direct control of Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
Should we be compensating the flux value for that wiggle also?
No, as the wiggle is purely fictive. It is not the Sun that moves, but the center of gravity that moves as the planets move around. So the distance between the Sun and the Earth stays what it is no matter where the other planets are [to very high precision – there are very, very tiny gravitational perturbations]. The easiest way to observationally [because I have found that many people cannot or won’t understand the theory] verify that is simply to measure the distance. The relative changes in TSI can be measured with amazing precision [0.007 W/m2 against a TSI value of 1361 W/m2 – that is 1 in 200,000], and measurements of TSI by SORCE shows that the observed values of TSI vary just as they should as if the distance between the Sun and the Earth stays what it is no matter where the other planets are. Here is a plot of the observed variation of TSI [black line] and what TSI should have been according to the barycenter people [e.g. here]. And here is their Figure 10 showing some predicted values of TSI if the Sun wiggled around. The red dots on the previous Figure show their predicted values. They do not match at all.
Cold as stone, no contact known
You’re feeling it too, as thoughts decay.
The summer’s gone, the colour’s gone,
The sun has gone away
The low value 66.1 is just because we are close to the Sun right now and is not intrinsic to solar activity,
I’m hooked on aphelion.
Leebert, the argument that the global warming is happening but being countered by natural cooling perturbations works both ways.
I can just as well state that the warming we have seen is a natural phenomenon.
Anthony: yes, I understand that ‘adjusted’ has acquired a bad ring, but in this case, the adjustment is for the better – actually necessary IMO, and is rational and not at the whim of anybody’s selection bias.
Given the connotation of ‘adjusted’ here, I suggest using something like ‘normalized’ to make the point that the values have been adjusted due to the varying distances.
Robert Wood:
> I can just as well state that the warming we have seen is a
> natural phenomenon.
That’s completely true. I’d state it as a choice, so people can see: Here’s a case for a moderate CO2 signal, now here’s a case for a solar/ocean dominated signal. For me the jury’s still out either way, but the reason I cite the aerosol/TSI effect only is to demonstrate a far-less scary GHG-driven scenario.
see:
http://www.tinyurl.com/co2trend
and
http://www.tinyurl.com/co2trend2
I like to pose some what if’s here as well. The AGWers like to discount the GCR theory. But this would be an interesting what if: What if GCR flux really would contribute -3 watts/m-2 (about -0.75 degrC), but the temperature trendline only decreases by half that? It neither exculpates CO2 nor confirms the current AGWer belief that CGR effect is negligible.
Or how about the post-Pinatubo ozone layer damage, where the stratosphere cooled by almost -0.6 degrees Celsius (due to sulfates reacting with CFC’s)? That’s letting in 2 w/m-2 more UV-b than before – penetrating into the lower atmosphere – which will form both more surface ozone as well as driving extra warming of surface ozone. Large clouds of surface ozone (from human sources) notably accumulate in the Arctic: Wouldn’t it cause an enhanced warming effect in the springtime as when the seasonal hole in the ozone layer is greatest? Combined with sootfall in the Arctic, the two combined already exceed the effect from GHG. There are recent studies looking into surface ozone’s effect in the Arctic, but a post-Pinatubo UV-b increase effect hasn’t, AFAIK, been studied.
This is where the science should be more equivocal, IMO. There’s more at play than just CO2 although it’s certainly more persistent than other warming agents. But the hockey stick predictions have been premised on simplified models that just happened to match the accelerated warming of the 1990’s. It wasn’t like the alarmists modeled a system based on proven science that left the extra warming unexplained, they leapt right up to filling in the “unknown” with CO2.
Filtering out contributing variables via hiearchical linear regression modeling makes the most sense to me. Proxy the effect by the degree of correlation (sun, PDO, AMO, GHG), assign it a reasonable strength parameter, subtract the effects of the extraneous sources and look at the remaining signal.
Leif Svalgaard:
“No, as the wiggle is purely fictive. It is not the Sun that moves, but the center of gravity that moves as the planets move around.”
Can you clarify this please. I think this is wrong, byt there might be something I have missed.
If the solar system was alone in the universe, the solar system centre of mass would move in a straight line. The sun would wiggle around that. This is one of the methods of detecting extrasolar planets (using astrometry).
http://www.novacelestia.com/space_art_extrasolar_planets/detect_extrasolar_planets.html
The sun clearly wiggles….
I once thought a very weak Cycle 24, like a hybrid between Cycle 5 and Cycle 14 would be a slam dunk, but now I am very skeptical. I think the sun has had a very weak month for solar activity, and it did it too soon. If you look at the cycles before the three minimums of the last 250 years (Cycle 4, Cycle 11, Cycle 13), they all had unusuallly long downturn periods and unusual shapes. This cycle just isn’t having that, although it is flattening out in an extended way. The Cycle 23 spots have gone AWOL, and if they don’t get cranked up again this month and last for the rest of the year, the minimum may not hit the 12 year mark, or even go past the 11 years and 9 months mark. To cap it off, there is a large Cycle 24 plage region in the Northern Hemisphere now, no spot, yet…. 11 years and 8 months is long, but that is not long enough to bring a strong minimum. There is only little question in my mind that this cycle will be lower than Cycle 23 by at least 20-30 spots, but lower than that is something I am not banking on. Until then, the prediction I made in April remains: smoothed minimum August 2008 (12 years 3 months) maximum of 65 spots (5 extra spots is due to advanced tech) in mid-2013 and minimum in July 2020, giving total length of 11 years and 11 months.
Would any of the sunspots over the last year have been detected by the tools used during the 17th century? Has anyone tried replicating those tools to determine what intensity of a sunspot it would have taken for detection during that period?
For those wanting to dig in further, see:
SORCE’s Past, Present, and Future Role in Earth Science Research
2008 Science Meeting
Some interesting items:
Beisecker gives an interesting review: “Predictions of the Solar Cycle, Past and Present”
Downward trend of the TSI by 0.02% from last cycle minimum
Mark Miesch discussed “Processes that Cause Solar Irradiance Variability” Wednesday.
David Hathaway in “Estimating the Next Solar Cycle” Wednesday:
<•Rise is cubic in time
•Decay is exponential in time
Sami Solanki (Invited), Solar Irradiance and Activity Reconstructions on Timescales up to Millennia
See: Preliminary: irradiance over11 kyr slide 14
Ok, so the sun has been quiet going on 3 years, and yet we just broke the longest number of days record for continuous daily highs over 90 degrees in Colorado. It seems to me that once scientists really believe that the tacholine solar region has come to a crawl and there are very weak solar cycles to come, that they would try to make some models to tell us the heat latency of the earth’s oceans and atmosphere so we could plan for when things will get cooler. I have heard the earth’s climate will reflect what the sun is doing after 3 years. Another source said 5 years, and another said 10 years. Is this really the state of our knowledge right now?
Yes…and no.
At 2008 Science meeting See: Dave Young on CLARREO Overview
Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory
Especially slides 20-23 on the challenge of reducing Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty in the Climate Feedback System.
I feel like stepping in it. Since photons (which have no mass) are “deflected” by mass then as Einstein said space itself is warped by mass. Thus a mass moving through the “warped” space would be unaware of that effect except for tidal effects which could be explained by the differing curvature of that space between the objects.
Anyone care to correct my thinking?
I just read about the CLARREO satelite, and I approve of the approach. I was quite impressed when I read David Archibald’s “Solar Cycle 24: Implications for the United States” article. On page 21 he shows a graph showing the projected global temperature profile to 2030. It seems to me now that he may have used too linear of an approach. However, it may be broadly true.
I know why the IPCCs predictions on AGW are wrong, but during a hot day like today, all logic goes ot the window. I think I’ll wait till January to sell my friends on global cooling.
On the other hand, I’ve always said that people have the tendency to focus on a single event rather than understand the processes. And, oh, I see that science is just at the point of gathering the data to try to answer my question on when we cool down. Anybody intuitive enough to guess at what some canaries in a cage we may look for?
Carsten Arnholm: When one says that something moves one must also say in relation to what. As the question was if the radio flux would have to be adjusted because of the Sun’s ‘movement’, the reference point was clearly the Earth. I gave an observational test that shows that the Earth also moves such that the distance between the Sun and the Earth is that corresponding to no other planets present [the Sun and the Earth moving around ‘their’ center of mass – to high precision, if we take the barycenter to be the arbitrary reference point], hence no ‘jerking around’ of the Sun by the other planets. Did you take the trouble to go check the Figures? Or the SORCE TSI? So, just as TSI is observed not to be influenced by the wiggle, so is the f10.7 flux also not affected, as that was the answer I gave. It is utterly amazing that people still don’t get this.
Ron Horwath: yes, because we adjust [there is that word again 🙂 ] the count such as being compatible with the old instruments. Well, maybe not quite back to the 17th century, but to the 18th and 19th for sure. But, there is still some doubt as whether that adjustment is correct. This is being researched. See f.ex. here.
David Hagen: Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) composites indicate a ~0.02% decline since the last minimum in 1996
This claim is mainly from the PMOD composite. If you compare PMOD with SORCE [e.g. here] you’ll find that assuming [as I do because of its good calibration] that SORCE is correct, that it is PMOD that has been drifting and that there very likely is no decrease since last minimum [or any minimum for that matter].
The Krivova et al. reconstruction of TSI is based on an assumed doubling of the solar open magnetic flux [its ‘background field’ – if you will] between 1900 and 1985]. This doubling did not happen and hence there is no increase of the minimum values of TSI, or put differently: the Maunder minimum was not 1 W/m2 lover than recent minima. Admittedly, this result is still controversial: people don’t like to retract old conclusions that are past their ‘sell by data’.
statePoet1775: you are correct on the first part. The tidal effect is muddled. The tides are due to the gravitational field [‘curvature’] being different on either side of the body, not between the bodies. Take the Moon as an example; the gravitational force at the point on the Earth’s surface that is just ‘under’ the Moon is larger [being closer] than the force at the opposite point on the Earth’s surface [facing away from the Moon]. But, I’ll tell you that I have tried many, many times to explain that the Sun [and the Earth] do not feel any forces going around in their orbits [they are in ‘free fall’], but it has absolutely no effect. I cannot remember a single person responding with “oh, I see now that there are no barycentric effects, thank you”. Not a single one.