The sun on 08/12/2008 just before midnight UTC – spotless
As many of you know, the sun has been very quiet, especially in the last month. In a NASA news release article titled What’s Wrong with the Sun? (Nothing) solar physicist David Hathaway goes on record as saying:
“It does seem like it’s taking a long time,” allows Hathaway, “but I think we’re just forgetting how long a solar minimum can last.”
No argument there. But it does seem to me that the purpose of Hathaway’s July 11th article was to smooth over the missed solar forecasts he’s made. Here is a comparison of early and more recent forecasts from Hathway:
Click for a larger image
He also seems intent on making sure that when compared to a grand minima, such as the Maunder Minimum, this current spotless spell is a mere blip.
The quiet of 2008 is not the second coming of the Maunder Minimum, believes Hathaway. “We have already observed a few sunspots from the next solar cycle,” he says. (See Solar Cycle 24 Begins.) “This suggests the solar cycle is progressing normally.”
What’s next? Hathaway anticipates more spotless days1, maybe even hundreds, followed by a return to Solar Max conditions in the years around 2012.
I would hope that Hathaway’s newest prediction, that this is “not the
second coming of the Maunder Minimum” or even a Dalton Minimum for that matter, holds true.
1Another way to examine the length and depth of a solar minimum is by counting spotless days. A “spotless day” is a day with no sunspots. Spotless days never happen during Solar Max but they are the “meat and potatoes” of solar minima.
Adding up every daily blank sun for the past three years, we find that the current solar minimum has had 362 spotless days (as of June 30, 2008).Compare that value to the total spotless days of the previous ten solar minima: 309, 273, 272, 227, 446, 269, 568, 534, ~1019 and ~931. The current count of 362 spotless days is not even close to the longest.
Though, Livingston and Penn seem to think we are entering into a grand minima via their recent paper.
As mentioned in “What’s next?”, we are now adding to the total of spotless days in this minima, and since the last update in that article, June 30th, 2008 where they mention this, we have added very few days with sunspots, perhaps 3 or 4.
Adding up every daily blank sun for the past three years, we find that the current solar minimum has had 362 spotless days (as of June 30, 2008).
So it would seem, that as of August 12th, 2008, we would likely have reached a total of 400 spotless days. The next milestone for recent solar minimas is 446 spotless days, not far off. It will be interesting to see where this current minima ends up.
h/t to Werner Weber
An observation from software project management: If, after the original planned (but missed) delivery date, every month (or time T) the estimated completion date from the developers slips by another month (or time T), the project will never complete. Draw your own analogy…
I recall Hathaway’s assertion, and I think Lief’s as well, that Cycle 19, one of the strongest on record followed the last really long cycle. However, I was reading some article somewhere (I know that’s real definative .. but hey ..I’m a novice) that was talking about the magnetic gradient between the poles and the equator (or something like that). Apparently it is at an all time low. Contrast that to the conditions prior to Cycle 19 … it was very high! I think this works against any possibility that Cycle24 is going to be a gangbuster! Based on all I’ve read, IMO, the Sun just doesn’t have the energy stored up to make that prediction come true.
Following the Solar Flux on solarcycle24.com, his trend graph pretty much shows the current condition.
The Sun has “Flatlined” at 65-66.
I don’t really fault Dr. Hathaway for his predictions or the subsequent changes to them, or recent assertions that this is all normal for solar minimum.
As Leif Svalgaard has said, Hathaway’s forecast is an official “product,” and he’s expected to stand behind it.
His forecast has been something of a “moving target,” as someone has pointed out graphically with an animated GIF of Hathaway’s forecasts over time
http://i283.photobucket.com/albums/kk316/MichaelRonayne/Hathaway_Predict.gif
In any case, compare the behavior of Dr. Hathaway as a government scientist, with that of Hansen, and Dr. Hathaway is an absolute paragon of virtue by comparison.
I don’t believe anyone knows what the sun is doing, and none of the published forecasts adequately addresses current and recent solar behavior.
It’s only fairly recently that Ken Schatten has noted the frequent presence of low-latitude coronal holes – very unusual at solar minimum – and wondered if perhaps these allow magnetic flux to reconnect at low latitudes, and through the coronal holes, “escape” into interplanetary space with the solar wind, leaving the sun “drained” of magnetic energy.
There was also quite a bit of post-maximum activity, right up through 2005, most notably the “Halloween Storms” of 2003. YOU try producing an X-28 solar flare, and see how much energy you have left!
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Flares/Powerflare.html
On June 27 the NOAA/NASA solar prediction panel reaffirmed its official prediction(s) – “The panel expects solar minimum to occur in March, 2008. The panel expects the solar cycle to reach a peak sunspot number of 140 in October, 2011 or a peak of 90 in August, 2012.”
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/SC24/index.html
As it becomes increasingly clear that the prediction(s) will not verify, the panel will have to reconvene and address the issue – which ought to be interesting, since no one has a satisfactory explanation for why the sun has not behaved as predicted.
Anthony
Good posting. I have stated earlier on other blogs that my own estimate of the ramp up of the next solar cycle # 24 is more like the end of JUNE 2009.[ not jan/2008 as per NASA]] The weather for the next 12 months will likely be similar to that which existed at the end of other long solar cycles.The problem with many of the recent missed NASA forecasts is that they try to give you the impression that they know exactly what is happening based on regression type of analysis of the past when in fact they seem not to know as much as as they proclaim.. New solar conditions exist where old theories or patterns do not apply as before. The sun is changing and with it our own weather is changing also.
Excuse my ignorance, but was the last time we had a very long ‘spotless days’ period during the 1930s then? If so, didn’t a period of global cooling follow? Looking at the John Daly site on graphed Arctic-area station data, that appears to be the case. Temps then were higher than now.
Steve Berry:
Jan Janssens maintains an excellent record on his “Spotless Days” page
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html
It’s interesting to note that the most recent very deep solar minimum, similar to the one we’re in now, was 1954, and that minimum preceded the largest solar cycle on record, #19.
However, as Leif Svalgaard has shown in work by the Babcocks
http://www.leif.org/research/
the strength of the magnetic field at the solar poles was much stronger then (hence, more magnetic energy available to produce sunspots, according to basic solar dynamo theory).
However, the solar polar fields have been directly observed since the mid-1970s, and they are now the weakest ever in that time period.
http://wso.stanford.edu/gifs/Polar.gif
I agree with John X, Dr Hathaway at least has the courage to come back and say well the empirical data says that I missed on my projection and now must make a new one. That he is willing to do this is IMO a very large + for him and raises the level of faith I have in him. I may not always agree with him but I have faith that he will admit when there is a problem with his findings and do his best to correct them. This is in contrast to some others that are working at NASA in the climate field. I don’t think that he has fudged on the numbers to base his studies.
I give a hats off to Dr Hathaway for his willingness to correct to meet the observed data and not the other way around.
Bill Derryberry
Also note that, according to Hathaway himself, the sun’s “Great Conveyor Belt,” which transports magnetic energy from low solar latitudes to the poles at the surface, and back to the equator at depth, has “slowed to a record crawl.” “It’s off the bottom of the charts… We’ve never seen speeds so slow.”
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10may_longrange.htm
But in Hathaway’s view, the current activity really belongs to the next cycle, so while he stands by his forecast for Cycle 24, he sees the following cycle, #25 as being “one of the weakest in centuries.”
He asserts confidently that the current inactivity is “not the second coming of the Maunder Minimum.”
But according to his theory of the solar cycle, the next one will be.
On the number of days without sunspots:
“309, 273, 272, 227, 446, 269, 568, 534, ~1019 and ~931.”
This appears to be a skewed distribution transitioning between short periods bunched together and longer ones spread more apart.
Compare Leif Svalgaard’s “Most Recent IMF, SW, and Solar Data.pdf “, especially
“Accumulated number of days with SSN=0” on page 6 (and comparisons of cycle minimum on page 4.)
This suggests the new cycle 24 may be swinging past the median into the longer period group.
“We have already observed a few sunspots from the next solar cycle,” he says. (See Solar Cycle 24 Begins.) “This suggests the solar cycle is progressing normally.”
All settled!
Leif Svalgaard has proposed a correction factor to sunspot numbers based on changes in observers.
Sunspot Number Calibration by the Magnetic Needle Makes Sense
more info here . . .
http://tinyurl.com/6m5tfp
Was it Yogi Berra who said, “Predicting the future ain’t what it used to be”?
John x
I agree with you about the next solar cycle # 24. In my judgement it will be larger [closer to 200 ] and peak later [late 2012] than currently forecasted by NASA or the expert panel.
Another cross link http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/archives/17
Hope the reality doesn’t fit the prediction. David Archibald says that we need to be pumping CO2 into the atmosphere to double the concentration. This will help the plants.
If Hathaway was replaced by Hansen, we’d have “adjusted” sunspot numbers and be well into SC24. Scientists can interpret data any way they like, as long as they reliably report the data in the first place.
One question: Some of the sunspots from the last year were really small. I noted that the longest spotless minima were all from the late 19th/early 20th century. Were things that are counted as sunspots today counted as sunspots in 1890?
Guys I found this old link:
Earth’s orbital eccentricity and the rhythm of the Pleistocene ice
ages: the concealed pacemaker
It’s a bit over my head but maybe some of you guys not so math challenged
as myself could give it a read.
P.S. moderator if this is a garbage link don’t post it, But I think it’s valid research paper your call.
http://www.geosci.unc.edu/faculty/rial/GPCiceages.pdf
John X,
Leon pointed out the animated graphic.
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/arizona-state-climate-models-missing-important-aersols/#comments
The peak of SC24 has now been postponed about 2 years. This points squarely to the fact that there are a lot of things the wiz kids at NASA still don’t understand. Why else would they have missed the barn on this one?
It just goes to show that predícting nature, let alone the climate, with any degree of certainty is no easy or certain thing.
Models, even for the short term, have proven to be hardly better than rubbish.
Bill in Vigo
“I give a hats off to Dr Hathaway for his willingness to correct to meet the observed data”
He doesn’t have a choice. The whole world is watching the sun.
Steve Berry,
That’s the hypothesis. Low sunspot activity means a weak solar magnetic field, which doesn’t keep the cloud-seeding cosmic rays from reaching the earth’s troposphere. The correlation between solar activity and global temperatures is awfully good.
matt v,
Like I said, there’s a lot the wiz kids at NASA don’t understand.
Let me say again:
1) a deep solar minimum [low sunspot number, low f10.7 flux] is not a predictor of a low cycle following. The deep minimum in 1954 was followed by the largest cycle [#19] ever observed.
2) a long solar cycle is not a predictor of a low cycle following. The long cycle 20 was followed by the second largest cycle [#21] ever observed.
The slow start of cycle 24 may predict a low cycle following as strong cycles start out with vigor. The solar polar fields [right now the weakest ever observed] are a good predictor of a low cycle following. This is the basis for my prediction of ~75 for the coming cycle.
I do agree that with john-X that the panel needs to reconvene and update the ‘official’ prediction. There seems to little chance of that happening, unless people write in and suggest such.
I hope Hathaway is correct that the Maunder Minimum isn’t coming. Heaven help us if we do experience another Maunder Minimum because there will be a real catastrophe unlike the scaremongering the AGW crowd is predicting from a warming earth. We can survive a warming earth but not a freezing earth.
The following is a rhetorical question.
‘How well funded is research in solar and solar-terrestrial physics as compared to GHG-induced ‘climate change’?
Three guesses, last two don’t count.
How far back does the sunspot data go? Can we look at a trend over say 50 years? A hundred? How would that even be possible given the technology at the time? Just something I know little about but am becoming increasingly more interested in.
As we cautiously watch the sun, Hathaway’s points are valid as points of keeping things in the proper perspective. So, if the sun started producing spots today, the current minimum ranks flat in the middle of the most recent 11 cycles as far as spotless days. This would turn our “what’s wrong with the sun?” worries to nothing, if the next cycle would heat up as the previous cycles did.
However, just as it is important to keep perspective before declaring the next Grand Minimum is on its way, it is also important to acknowledge that the sun’s recent activity is at its lowest point in nearly 60 years, and it isn’t over yet. So, we are in the median position right now, and it will take some time to ove past that, but we just need to wait. There are reasons to believe on both an observational basis and a theoretical basis (studies of cyclical variations) that a change is underway. We shouldn’t panic, but it is fair to note it and track what is happening with an eye towards that potential, always keeping in mind the historical perspective that we aren’t yet to the point where we can definitively say that this is something new and dire.
My personal feeling, having little qualified experience to call it anything more than a gut feel, is that times have changed. And we will be feeling the effects of it for some time.
I wish I knew. Lambeau Field could be a colder place to visit in January, and I may need some new boots.
I hope someone is following up on that Livingston and Penn paper. It seems like they’re on to something huge, and I’d love to see if their findings can be replicated/confirmed.
Dan: I hope someone is following up on that Livingston and Penn paper. It seems like they’re on to something huge, and I’d love to see if their findings can be replicated/confirmed.
Replication is hard as the observations stretch over a decade or more. Confirmation is not needed in the sense of the observations not being good enough. Livingston is one of the best observers we have, using one of the best instruments in existence. So, the data obtained so far are the best anybody can do. What is needed is to see if the trend continues. I have been in recent contact will Bill Livingston and the trend has held up to and including even the few and tiny spots of late.
The AGW crowd would have us panic and take all sorts of drastic measures in the event that the planet is warming, but there’s been very little words of warning on what could turn out to be worse than warming. The last time we had a solar minimum there were roughly five billion less people on the planet than now. Granted, we have had major improvements in agricultural production since then, but has anyone looked at whether we can support the present population under anything even approaching the conditions of the last minimum?
I am torn on the possibility that we’re entering a minimum, but shouldn’t the scenario at least be studied. After all, a decent size volcanic eruption could produce similar results.
The one trend not discussed is that this cycle has set a record for the number of 20+ consecutive 0 sunspot days. Currently in the 5th such cycle (the 4th in June/July and the 4th and 5th were separated by a 3 day period of 10 sunspot count). The most 20+ spotless days in any other cycle was 3 in 1954.
I have no idea what significance this has, but it is interesting.
John Miller — You are right. We should at least be looking into and studying what is the most vulnerable of humans support systems. Food production has increasingly relied on the “farm as factory” concept where yields and mechanisation are king. The crops have been genetically changed to less resistance to weather changes, and more focused on increasing yeilds per acre in warmer climates. The agricultural changes have taken place over the last 30 years or so. A year without summer would be a catastrophe for the humans on Earth — There wouldn’t be much anyone could do about large scale crop failures due to cold weather.
Meanwhile, we dance with the AGW hoax ….
If only we as a species were smarter, and didn’t just play smart on TV.
Thought I’d throw this in here…
Decade has had fewest 90-degree days since 1930
Chicago Tribune, United States – 10 hours ago
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-tom-skilling-explainer-13aug13,0,918946.story
Leif,
Are these relationships (“may predict”, “are a good predictor”) based upon experimental oberservations (i.e. correlating prevoius trends) or are there derived physical mechanisms that can account for this?
As a physics HET grad student, I’ve been trying to learn solar physics on the side. However most of the articles I find that make predictions about solar activity and trends are based upon correlation methods and not defining causal mechanisms. Does this sound right?
Leif, has this Livingston and Penn graph showing the extrapolation to 2015 been updated anywhere to include data since 2006?
http://www.astroengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/mag1.png
David Archibald reckons that a weak Solar Cycle 24, followed by a weak #25, will result in such a global cooling that it will cut two weeks off the growing season – at each end
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/ArchibaldMarch2008.pdf
I don’t know where the two-weeks figure comes from, and I would like to see some documentation of it.
I wholeheartedly agree with the concerns expressed by John Miller, above.
I do not believe our food production and distribution system is ready to handle the load in adverse climate conditions.
Even if the sun were to start showing definite signs that cycle 24 was definitely starting, there would still be quite a few spotless to go during this minima.
By comparing the current count, only part way through the minima to previous counts of entire minimas, Dr. Hathaway is doing a disservice to his readers.
Has anyone, anywhere (England?) Ever kept track of “Cloudy” Days? If so, has anyone, anywhere, ever found a correlation between incidence of cloudy days, and sunspots?
Clark,
You wrote
“One question: Some of the sunspots from the last year were really small. I noted that the longest spotless minima were all from the late 19th/early 20th century. Were things that are counted as sunspots today counted as sunspots in 1890?”
My understanding of the situation is that “official” sunspots must conform to the same criteria as were first used by Wolf in the mid-19th century in terms of the type of telescope and area of the spot. So yes, things that are counted as sunspots today were counted as sunspots in 1890. This does not necessarily apply to sunspot data prior to the mid-19th century and and a number of researchers think that sunspot numbers for a number of early cycles needs to be increased 10 percent at least to compensate. This would mean that sunspot numbers for the Dalton minimum would be close to what Dr. Svalgaard is predicting for cycle 24.
August snow expected in the Rockies Friday –
Here’s what the National Weather Service forecasters in Boulder had to say this morning
“MODEL SNOW ALGORITHMS PUT OUT SOME IMPRESSIVE NUMBERS FOR AUGUST THAT MIGHT EVEN REQUIRE A RARE AUGUST HOISTING…THE GFS FOR INSTANCE A SWATH OF OVER 8 INCHES UP AND DOWN THE FRONT RANGE AT HIGHER ELEVATIONS. AT THIS POINT WILL SETTLE FOR MENTIONING SNOW BUT IF THE UPPER LOW REALLY SETTLES IN AS FORECAST COULD SEE TRAIL RIDGE ROAD OR MOUNT EVANS ROAD HAVING TO TEMPORARILY SHUT DOWN OVER THE HIGHER AREAS ON FRIDAY.”
It looks like this year the world with have the largest wheat harvest ever. It’s something of a misconception that agriculture is temperature limited. It is in some places like northern Europe, but in most places it’s precipitation limited. More rain = bigger harvests. No one seems to measure global precipitation, perhaps it’s too hard, but increasing wheat production does suggest the world got wetter in the last year. Which would fit with Svensmark’s theory.
@kum dollison (11:12:51) :
Has anyone, anywhere (England?) Ever kept track of “Cloudy” Days? If so, has anyone, anywhere, ever found a correlation between incidence of cloudy days, and sunspots?
I don’t have any hard numbers to show, but being an amateur astronomer in Southern norway for the last 8 years or so, I can say that the last 2 years have been significantly more cloudy (at least during evening times) than the years before. I can see it from the frequency of captured images. I need several hours of clear skies to do deep sky imaging, but the last couple of years have brought very unstable weather and lots of clouds. My impression is that similar effects are observed by others at least in Europe.
I know this is not very scientific, but perhaps it could pass as “anecdotal”.
@kum dollison (11:12:51) :
“…ever found a correlation between incidence of cloudy days, and sunspots?”
Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center has been working in the field of Cosmoclimatology for at least 10 years.
http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/research/sun-climate/isac/wp_103.pdf
It’s pretty clear that periods of low solar activity, which allow more GCR (Galactic Cosmic Radiation) to reach the earth, correlate very well with increased low cloud cover, which would cool the climate by increasing albedo (reflecting more solar energy back into space).
“will cut two weeks off the growing season – at each end”
If I remember correctly, Archibald’s study was for the middle to northern parts of the country, so it might be safe to say the growing season, on average in the Northern Hemisphere will be decreased by four weeks. I’ve been a control systems engineer for twenty years, so 4-H is a long time in the past, but let’s just assume that growing season length and crop yields are directly proportional after the plants get up enough to start producing. And again, let’s assume a twenty four week growing season. If we decrease that by 4 weeks, based upon our rough assumptions, we could be looking at a 15% reduction in crop yield. Even if I am wrong by a factor of 2 and we could quickly mobilize to double the amount of land in production, we’re looking at a potential 3.75% reduction in world wide food supplies.
Am I the only one who sees the possibility of this as a cause of concern?
What happened to sun cycle 24 starting in 2007 and that it was supposed to wreek havic on gps systemsand cell phones and that it could be the strongest ever?I guess when you are bias toward global warming you make up the rules ,or in this case pedictions, as you go that way you are never wrong.Now I see how this works.
I check out the Solar link at the right of this site every day. The Sun still looks like an egg yolk in a frying pan, without a mark on it.
.PREV DISCUSSION… /ISSUED 340 AM CDT WED AUG 13 2008/
A MAJOR CHANGE IN THE NOAM UPPER FLOW PATTERN IS BEGINNING. NOT SURE
IF THIS IS AN EARLY FALL TRANSITION OR A DROUGHT BUSTER…BUT THE
CHANGE SHOULD BE WELCOMED.
FOR TODAY AND THURSDAY…NORTH TEXAS WILL BE UNDER WEAKENING
NORTHWEST FLOW ALOFT WITH LITTLE CHANCE OF RAINFALL AS TEMPERATURES
REMAIN NEAR NORMAL.
There are four possibilities, but only three have been mentioned.
1. Super Cycle.
2. Normal/Long
3. Maunder Type Event
And the fourth:
4. Younger Dryas Type Event
Dan (09:20:46) :
“I hope someone is following up on that Livingston and Penn paper. It seems like they’re on to something huge, and I’d love to see if their findings can be replicated/confirmed.”
[Warning – my facts may be wrong, read with care.] I agree, except that the paper was never published in a “proper” journal. It was submitted and rejected (don’t know why, possibly to speculative or needing more data). When it came to light, it took Livingston a few days to find the finished paper, he had only an early draft to send me.
So there’s little reason for people to be doing a follow up, and until the paper showed up recently, I think few people knew about it. On top of it all, to continue the study you need sunspots to measure, and those are in short supply. I figure Hathaway will finally announce that SC24 is underway (the +/- 6 month rule means that it can’t be before next February, and then the sunspots will fade away like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat before solar max occurs. All that will be left is a grin in the magnetic field.
And a lot of people wondering “What next?”
John-X (12:43:54) :
“http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/research/sun-climate/isac/wp_103.pdf
It’s pretty clear that periods of low solar activity, which allow more GCR (Galactic Cosmic Radiation) to reach the earth, correlate very well with increased low cloud cover, which would cool the climate by increasing albedo (reflecting more solar energy back into space).”
Yes, but doesn’t that only apply to clean air devoid of condensation nuclei? That implies low level (high levels have more radiation-induced nuclei) and maritime regions (after rain washes out particulates). The net effect is just a couple percent in the affected area, I suspect most things we’d notice are more due to changes in wind circulation patterns.
Austin (13:12:21) :
“There are four possibilities, but only three have been mentioned.”
A number of sources suggest something like the Dalton Minimum which was only a couple cycles long. Some people don’t want to hazard a prediction beyond SC25, so those are sort of predictions for either Dalton or Maunder.
Like New England weather, we may have to wait until it’s over to explain it.
> Austin (13:12:21) :
> 4. Younger Dryas Type Event
The latest theory is that Younger-Dryas was the “nuclear winter” aftermath of a small asteroid, definitely smaller than the one behind the KT event 65 million years ago. See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070924172959.htm which comments on a “black mat” layer found in various places throughout North America. The “black mat” layer is associated with high levels of iridium (Hello!) and isiotopes of Helium that are not common on earth.
Thanks, John; that link was very informative.
The energy of the solar wind seems to be much affected by coronal hole activity. Wouldn’t this also affect the cosmic rays, and thus the formation of low clouds?
Ted, you beat me to it. I was just wondering what coronal holes were doing during these other minimums. The coronal hole is letting loose with cosmic ray particles and the wind stream picks up more from galactic space and literally throws us a fast ball that lands on the batter. When the Sun is geomagnetically strong, there may still be coronal holes but the Sun’s magnetic field protects our Earth from cosmic ray influence and the “fast ball” of particles sails right by us. I wonder if the combination of low magnetic field protection with coronal hole streams could historically tell us something about our climate.
We just got through getting hit with quite a bit of cosmic “stuff” according to monitors. It is quieting down again. The rise coincided with the coronal hole that swings into Earth view as it rotates around. I also noted a large area of ozone that is quite thin over Hawaii and on and off again thin in central to southern California and Nevada. I just checked today and these states seem to be recovering a bit. The area above Hawaii is still very large. Cosmic rays destroy ozone.
In earlier posts there appeared to be some people taken aback by the idea of snow in Australia. Well, as I write this, the weather channel says that 18 inches of snow have fallen over the last few days in parts of the Snowy Mountain ski areas, so come on down folks and enjoy yourselves!
At the superficial level, AGW is the bogeyman. At the level of deep, animal instincts, cooling is the bogeyman. The human tendency is to be in denial of any possibility of the latter. Because, if the latter were to occur, an incredibly sad epoch would commence. Sadder than anything in centuries.
EDT (10:45:38) :
Are these relationships (”may predict”, “are a good predictor”) based upon experimental observations (i.e. correlating prevoius trends) or are there derived physical mechanisms that can account for this?
These two papers discuss the model on which my own [low] prediction is based. You can there find references to other papers:
http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf
http://www.leif.org/research/Percolation%20and%20the%20Solar%20Dynamo.pdf
Bob B (10:54:47) :
Leif, has this Livingston and Penn graph showing the extrapolation to 2015 been updated anywhere to include data since 2006?
Yes, Livingston’s data now goes up to 14 April 2008, with the trend still intact.
Most folks in the north side of the hemisphere would get that Aussie’s are donning winter clothing since it is winter down under. What is catching our interest is that once again we are hearing the refrain: Damn its colder [insert country name] this winter than in the last [insert amount of time] years. South America is also experiencing its coldest winter in a loooonng time. Snow and cold weather is fun…for a season or two. Then it gets really old and really costly.
Just clipped this from Weatherzone:
Winter far from finished
Tom Saunders, Wednesday August 13, 2008 – 20:14 EST
This August is rapidly turning into one of the coldest on record for Australia with temperatures averaging as much as five degrees below normal.
Some of the more notable extremes on Wednesday included minimums of minus nine at Glen Innes, minus seven at Inverell and minus five in Tamworth.
Frost has even spread to central Queensland with Clermont recording five consecutive mornings below two for the first time in August in over 45 years. Daytime has brought little relief with Orange shivering through six consecutive days below seven degrees for the first time in August in over 30 years.
The prolonged cold spell is the result of a persistent southerly airstream, a pattern likely to continue over most of the country for the next 10 days.
The cold weather is a blessing for ski resorts which are welcoming fresh snowfalls almost daily. Mt Hotham has recorded 38 subzero days in a row.
– Weatherzone
© Weatherzone 2008
Dr Svalgaard,
Per you statement: Yes, Livingston’s data now goes up to 14 April 2008, with the trend still intact.
Is there a link available to the latest updated trendline?
Thank you,
Wyatt A
Regarding Dr. Hathaway: ‘…the sun’s contribution is small compared to volcanoes, El Nino and greenhouse gases, Hathaway notes.
Even if there were another Maunder minimum, he says, we would still suffer the effects of greenhouse gases and the Earth’s climate would remain warm. “It doesn’t overpower them at all,” Hathaway said.’
From here: http://solarscience.auditblogs.com/2008/06/12/hathaway-suns-contribution-is-small-compared-to-volcanoes-el-nino-and-greenhouse-gases/
If there’s a grand minimum underway, I suspect there’ll be egg-facials all around.
I think Dr. Hathaway is doing a fine job so far. Scientists are not infallible; they can be {and have been} wrong before. Should all the forecasts miss the mark, I expect that Dr. Hathaway will give the equivalent response of, “Back to the drawing board.” Should this present trend continue longer than expected with SC24 coming in far weaker than expected, I think the solar scientists will be looking hard and long at their ideas to find what it is that may have fundamentally changed that they may have missed. If this does happen, I think that in the long run the science will come out all that more stronger.
Pamela Gray, I can just see Kevin Rudd, PM of Australia, cursing his bold initiative to ruin the economy to prevent global warming. In fact, on seconds thoughts, he could just claim victory and retire the policy initiative.
Wyatt A (16:14:17) :
Is there a link available to the latest updated trendline?
No, this is a private communication [somewhat confidential], but you can trust Bill L. [I do].
David Corcoran (16:38:11) :
Regarding Dr. Hathaway: ‘…the sun’s contribution is small compared to volcanoes, El Nino and greenhouse gases, Hathaway notes.
I agree with Hathaway. The solar contribution would be of the order of 0.1 degree or smaller [as it was during the last Grand Minimum, when average TSI was 0.5 W/m2 smaller than now]. Archibald’s 2 degrees has no solid justification.
Leon Brozyna (16:41:51) :
Should […] SC24 come in far weaker than expected, I think the solar scientists will be looking hard and long at their ideas to find what it is that may have fundamentally changed that they may have missed.
Not all solar scientists expect a large SC24. Some [incl. me] have long predicted a small cycle [“the smallest in a hundred years”], so we will not have missed anything.
““It doesn’t overpower them at all,” Hathaway said.’”
Based on his own scientific work? I seriously doubt it. My apologies to Lief here, but it really torques me to see a scientist who is recongnized in one field giving pronouncements in another field, and as long as he is pro warmie, it is reported as God’s writ, but if he is skeptical, it contains all kinds of disclaimers. I would like to see a phrase like “Of course Hathaway is not a climatologist and is in no way qualified to comment on this matter.”
Why not quote Lubos Motl? He is a certified scientist. It would of course never happen. Steve Mc is highly qualified in his field, and if you ever read his resume you would be suitably impressed, but he is dismissed as “a blogger” Steve’s comments on this matter should, by rights, carry far more weight than Hathaway’s who is just quoting the IPCC IMHO.
Thing is though that the warmies poll numbers are dropping faster than Obama’s They need to start answering these questions openly and honestly, and they simply won’t.
Leif, you can say that the difference was .5 W/m2 or whatever as a solar scientist and be well within your discipline, and we have to agree that your numbers are the best we have.
What you can’t say that you know is what the effect of that difference will be on the climate. It is outside your field of specialty.
Look at this story for example:
http://dukenews.duke.edu/2005/09/sunwarm.html
or this
Cyclic Variation and Solar Forcing of Holocene Climate in the Alaskan Subarctic
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/301/5641/1890
There are lots of studies that show unexpectedly (if you trust the models completely) large climate responses to small changes in TSI, this has nothing to do with our knowledge of the Sun and everything to do with our knowledge of the climate.
The people who predicted a weak minimum, years ago, are the wavelet people like Clilverd, and possibly the coronal green line people like Badalyan. It therefore follows that there will be a lot of interest in wavelet analysis from here, whole conferences on it, just as at the moment there are whole conferences on the fairy floss of GCMs.
I believe that Clilverd operates out of the British Antarctic Survey, a hotbed of warmer activity. There was a study of Fenno-Scandinavian tree rings which predicted a weak Solar Cycle 25. Generally, the wavelet people are saying weak (not Dr Svalgaard’s weak – I mean properly weak) Solar Cycles 24 and 25 and then back to normal mid-century. But they are also saying a Maunder-type minimum from the end of the century.
There should also be proper modelling of the agricultural impacts. I recently came across a 1971 map of Canada showing the reduction in growing area due to a 1 degree C decline in temperature. It cut it by a third. I am predicting a 2.2 degree decline, with the potential to be larger. It is not only the length of the growing season that is important. Frosts can wipe out your seedlings.
In summary, the solar deniers are discredited elements, to borrow a term from Marxist dialectic. Only the wavelet people have the track record, and perhaps Badalyan if his work can be replicated.
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/sunspot.shtml
BOULDER—The next sunspot cycle will be 30-50% stronger than the last one and begin as much as a year late, according to a breakthrough forecast using a computer model of solar dynamics developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
The scientists have confidence in the forecast because, in a series of test runs, the newly developed model simulated the strength of the past eight solar cycles with more than 98% accuracy.
“Our model has demonstrated the necessary skill to be used as a forecasting tool,” says NCAR scientist Mausumi Dikpati, the leader of the forecast team at NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory that also includes Peter Gilman and Giuliana de Toma.
============================
Met O says very similar things about their “new and improved” climate models, ex post facto of course.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/07/sun-seen-to-repeat-dalton-minimum.html
Check out Luboš Motl he has a great site!
moptop (17:41:32) :
What you can’t say that you know is what the effect of that difference will be on the climate. It is outside your field of specialty.
First, I will object to the ‘outside of my field of specialty’. My specialty is ‘solar-terrestrial relations’. But let that slide. The important issue is ‘that difference’ and the TSI-experts disagree as to whether there was an increase in TSI. Other groups [e.g. Froehlich’s] claim a decrease [continuing to the present day]; still others [e.g. DeWitte] claim no change. And one of the foremost experts in this field, Judith Lean, said in her latest report at the SORCE meeting in 2008 in discussing variations of TSI on various time scales that ‘5-minute oscillations vary 0.003%, 27-day rotation gives a variation of 0.2%, the 11-year solar cycle yields 0.1%, and longer-term variations are not yet detectable‘. See her slide at http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-LEAN2008.png .
So with no longer-term variations detectable, no solar effect from such longer-term variations are detectable either.
The Scafetta result is not generally accepted and is based on using the occurrence of solar flares as a proxy for TSI although we don’t know the details of such a relationship, if any. Just piling on papers with various claims of solar-climate relations is not useful: there are thousands of them, most of poor quality and often mutually contradictory.
There is an emerging notion that perhaps the sun has varied a lot less than we thought, and it is for that reason that I maintain that any climate variation from such a much smaller solar variation is small. One can ‘rescue’ the solar-climate link by postulating hyper-sensitivity of the climate to even the tiniest solar changes. I personally don’t see any evidence for this [we would probably have had a run-away disaster long ago if such hyper-sensitivity existed – but that is outside of my field, so take that as a personal speculation that you can disagree with – if it falls with your specialty 🙂 ].
Leif Svalgaard (17:16:04)
You’re right of course. I should have said that I think some solar scientists will be looking hard and long at their ideas to find what it is that may have fundamentally changed that they may have missed.
I wonder sometimes, which is scarier, being wrong or being right?
David Archibald (17:42:46) :
The people who predicted a weak minimum, years ago, are the wavelet people like Clilverd, and possibly the coronal green line people like Badalyan. It therefore follows that there will be a lot of interest in wavelet analysis from here, whole conferences on it,
As usual, Archibald does not have his fact straight. Here is Clilverd’s paper:
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/SC24Clilverd.pdf on SC24. There is no mention of wavelets, neither in Badalyan’s paper: http://helios.izmiran.troitsk.ru/hellab/Obridko/69688393.pdf
but maybe Archibald has an inside line I [and everybody else] don’t know about?
There is enough misinformation about climate etc floating, so at least we should try to be as accurate as we can.
David,
I know that Leif will disagree but I think that CME and possibly X-type flares may have a large effect on the albedo. The CME’s emit protons that do get down to the troposphere (GEBV protons in think that is right will fix tomorrow if not since my data is at work and not at home, sorry). These protons when they impact cloud forming nuclei and prevent them from forming thus reducing the albedo. When at minimum they are not present and then albedo increases. Then also CRF “may” take effect and further increase, not sure since the jury is out. If you look at speed and intensity of CME’s there is a good correlation to temperature. Also the CME’s combined with the solar wind charge the angular momentum of the atmosphere namely the jet streams. This in turn changes the weather systems around the globe. Sorry if this is vauge but it is the best I can do at the moment.
Can someone tell me what day we are up to for spotless days – my reckoning is 25 (tiny tim sunspot on 18 July). The run before that was 26 days.
If we discounted the tiny tim we would be at 51 spotless day which would put us on 4th rank according to Janssens spotless days page
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html#Period
(btw the page is way out of date and needs to be updated for our last run of 26 days in July)
BTW, here in Adelaide Australia, the temp. anomoly for this time of year is -2.7 degree celsius for the max and -1.4 for the min.
http://www.eldersweather.com.au/dailysummary.jsp?lt=site&lc=23090
Sorry that is change the angular momentum not charge. LOL
Jim Arndt (18:59:23) :
Sorry that is change the angular momentum not charge. LOL
That’s ok, Jim, there are much worse errors than that. Sorry, couldn’t resist 🙂
Well, I have a couple of questions and a comment plus question.
Over what range of wavelengths is TSI measured?
If TSI is constant, how are coronal mass ejections and other events which shut down power lines and disrupt communications and other similar events accounted for?
I have been operating High Frequency radio since 1952. And, the previous solar cycle minima ~1995 was different (poor radio propagation) in terms of radio than any of the previous dating back to 1952, and this one is worse yet. Ionospheric conditions are supposed to be related to sunspot activity and solar flux, which is variable, even though TSI is not. Explain, please? And, what factor which affects the ionosphere is apparently unaccounted for?
This is one of those cases where it is what it is. But what it does draw into focus are the predictions made by various academics. I believe most of the predictions are more along the lines of the magnitude of the next cycle, not really the timing of it so much. But if cycle 14 turns out to be significantly different from what was forecast, it is going to raise questions about how well they really understand solar dynamics.
One thing that I have been particularly interested in was a statement Dr. Hathaway made about two years ago concerning a weakening of what he called a solar “magnetic conveyor belt” and predicted that solar cycle 25 would be the weakest in centuries.
I have heard no updates on the current state of this “conveyor belt” and I have written to Dr. Hathaway on the subject about a year ago but received no response, though I am unsure if he still reads that account (but it didn’t bounce).
The gist of the statement was that it seemed that magnetic activity was related to solar activity two cycles hence. But it certainly does seem to fit in with other data that appear to show a general quieting of solar activity.
George M (19:48:31) :
Well, I have a couple of questions and a comment plus question.
Over what range of wavelengths is TSI measured?
The ‘T’ means ‘Total’, so all wavelenghts.
If TSI is constant, how are coronal mass ejections and other events which shut down power lines and disrupt communications and other similar events accounted for?
TSI measures photons that reach us after 8 minutes at the speed of light [it is light, after all]. The CMEs [more generally – the solar wind] are particles that reach us after ~1 day or more. The total energy of these particles is very, very much smaller than that of TSI. That they can have any effect at all lies in the fact that the solar wind is magnetized and the interaction between the Earth’s magnetic field and the magnetic field of the solar wind results in a time-varying magnetic field near the Earth. When you have a changing magnetic field and a conductor [the ionosphere and higher atmosphere] you have a dynamo that produces currents by induction. These currents can run in millions of Amperes and the magnetic effects of those [varying] currents in turn induces currents in our transformers and power lines with attendant bad effects.
Leif wrote:
I’m a bit perplexed by this. Total TSI may be misleading. AFAICT the question needs to focus on which component spectra vary with sunspot activity, how much those vary, and their net effects.
One argument *for* AGW claims that TSI has decreased slightly since circa 1992, the equivalent of -0.1 degrees Celsius.
see:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/tsi_vs_temp.gif
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm
But what part of TSI has fallen? Or do we scratch this claim of decreased TSI?
Or would this implicate greater effects from facular UV, which may vary more with solar activity than total TSI? Is there data that tracks UV levels with sunspots & climate? Or are the UV data also subject to revision along these lines?
I keep thinking back to Drew Shindell’s 2001 study on the Little Ice Age. His focus was on the changes in facular UV having a net cooling effect from the loss of UV heating of the lower stratosphere, resulting in a cooler upper troposphere. So even if all net TSI doesn’t vary much, UV radiation still varies with sunspot faculae.
Seems to me this still leaves us with UV radiation & cosmic rays (not included in TSI) having an impact on climate. Even those studies critical of cosmic ray effects concede that there may be some effect, just not a dominant one.
But since both UV and cosmic ray radiation vary with overall solar activity, the climate may be more sensitive to them. Total net TSI doesn’t have to vary much for UV & cosmic rays to vary a great deal.
We’re itinerant & traveling, I’m typing this on a friend’s computer. I’d be very happy were someone to take the time & graph UV & cosmic ray levels against temperatures.
Paul Clark from WoodforTrees.org … could you add UV (c & b) & cosmic ray levels to your data sources?
There’s something I haven’t seen much discussion on and that is the effects of increased surface ozone coupled with the advent of stratospheric ozone loss. I don’t know what the state of the art is, but for instance: Since stratospheric ozone (SO) loss intensified since Pinatubo was there faster polar warming from increased UV coupled with greater surface ozone, especially in the Arctic during the ozone hole maxima in springtime?
The plots you show from ‘scepticalscience’ show nice ‘reconstructions’ of TSI before the measurements started in 1978 clearly matching the rise in temperature. I’ll argue here: http://www.leif.org/research/GC31B-0351-F2007.pdf that this rise did not happen and that TSI is effectively dead as a climate ‘regulator’. Similarly, as the UV-portion of TSI and cosmic rays and geomagnetic activity and the rest generally vary with TSI [or with that good proxy for TSI, the sunspot number], there is not much long-term variation there either. Since UV thus does not have any long-term drift, I wouldn’t worry about Ozone. It is instructive to remember that some of the earliest reconstructions of TSI [Hoyt&Schatten, Lean] that Shindell used in his study were constructed by the solar physicists explicitly to explain the LIA, in effect using climate as a proxy for solar activity.
[…] Spotless days: 400 and counting […]
TSI is effectively dead as a climate ‘regulator’
I’ve read most of your threads at Climate Audit and you have convinced me. Unfortunately, some people need to cling to TSI as the main climate driver as the alternative to CO2 and GHGs.
There are other alternatives to GHGs as climate drivers. I personally like things that affect phase changes of water, in particular change from gas to liquid (droplets).
To all you noted academics out there contributing to this discussion. Much appreciated by us novices.
Dr. Svalgaard,
Further up the page you say,
“…And one of the foremost experts in this field, Judith Lean, said in her latest report at the SORCE meeting in 2008 in discussing variations of TSI on various time scales that ‘5-minute oscillations vary 0.003%, 27-day rotation gives a variation of 0.2%, the 11-year solar cycle yields 0.1%, and longer-term variations are not yet detectable‘.”
Yet, when I look at current TSI, I see it is varying between 1360.75 and 1360.9 over the last three months (and obviously they must be giving us an adjusted value given the distance from the sun).
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/sorce_tsi_plot.html
If TSI at max is 1366, aren’t we already off the max by .3 percent, more than 3 times the amount that Judith Lean states is the variance between max and min in the typical 11 year cycle? Or is this just an artifact due to different measurements of TSI from different satellites?
Obviously linear trends need to be looked at suspiciously, but if the current trend does continue because we are entering a time with a less active sun, we will approach 1358 watts per square meter in roughly 40-50 months. This would put us 8 watts lower than max, or .5 percent. Looks like cycle 24 and perhaps cycle 25 will answer all kinds of questions about the sun and its impact on the earth’s climate.
The NWS has stated that for most of Oregon we have had brief warm spells and extended periods of below normal temperatures this summer. There is a hot spell coming but it could be our last one. Night time temps have been way below last year. It’s like we can’t hold the heat in. The early morning temps have been especially chilly. Just a short walk up a mountain trail and night time temps are in the freezing range. These kinds of temps this early in the fall indicate that a very cold winter is coming. Tell me again that CO2 is causing global warming and I am going to puke.
Some scientist out there, possibly a young or new scientist, will look at previously rejected theories with fresh eyes and find something that was overlooked that will become the no-brainer of the century.
http://sidc.oma.be/sunspot-index-graphics/sidc_graphics.php
Whenever I look at the these graphics of the recorded sunspot cycles, I find a relationship between how long a cycle lasts and the resultant maximum of the next cycle. i.e. – the longer sc23 drags this out, the flatter and smaller the maximum of sc24. It doesn’t even matter if the outgoing cycle reaches zero or not, it just takes life away from the incoming cycle by hanging around.
The cycle before the onset of MMinimum and DMinimum follow this pattern.
One little area today fizzled rapidly in the far northern latitudes.
This is clearly eating away at SC24.
Kim Mackey (22:16:28) :
If TSI at max is 1366, aren’t we already off the max by .3 percent, more than 3 times the amount that Judith Lean states is the variance between max and min in the typical 11 year cycle? Or is this just an artifact due to different measurements of TSI from different satellites?
You are correct on the artifact. Here is a comparison of all the satellites:
http://www.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/composite/SolarConstant
The TSI from SORCE/TIM is for unknown reasons 4.5 W/m2 lower than the ACRIM and PMOD values, so when you have to adjust for that.
The downward trend has now stopped. TSI is rock steady at 1360.8 [with a small rotational signal up and down of +/-0.1]. TSI has been steady like this for almost a year now and there are no indications of further decrease. The PMOD values are still decreasing. but that is due to a slow drift of the instrument. You can see how the difference between PMOD and SORCE/TIM here: http://www.leif.org/research/DiffTSI(PMOD-SORCE).png is slowly decreasing with time, i.e. PMOD decreasing. This is an artifact, as the SORCE/TIM has excellent calibration against a number of non-varying stars.
Since the failure of SC24 to take hold, the Western US has been locked into a stagnant weather pattern of Low in the Pacific and High in the 4 corners.
And it is about 10 degrees cooler here in far No. Ca. All the animals are coming out of the hills and looking for food, and it’s not even Sept. yet.
It will be a chilly winter, just like last winter.
somehow, the software louses up my link. I’ll try this way:
You can see how the difference between PMOD and SORCE/TIM : here is slowly decreasing with time. If this doesn’t work, you’ll have to copy/paste the complete URL yourself.
correction of typo: TSI is rock steady at 1360.9 +/-0.1 rotational signal. I estimate that when the rotational modulation finally stops, that TSI will sit at 1360.85 for a while before heading up again as SC24 takes off. This is, of course, pure speculation.
And here is a plot of SCORCE-TIM TSI since 2006. The green triangle marks the minimum value calculated from the quadratic fit [black curve]. Note how steady the curve is since the middle of 2007.
Dr Svalgaard has attempted to hammer flat the TSI, the aa Index and everything else that might show that the Sun is not the boring ball of his imagination. Try as he might, one thing that he can’t hammer flat is the Be 10 record which shows a good correlation with the temperature rise of the 20th century. The IMF and aa Index are now falling away to levels we haven’t seen for 50 years or more. The Sun had a burst of activity in the 20th century and is now having a well earned rest.
Our generation has known a warm, giving Sun, but the next will suffer a Sun that is less giving, and the Earth will be less fruitful.
Besides wavelet analysis, the other line of inquiry that will attract attention from here is the force that dare not speak its name. I am continuing to help in that field.
Confirmed: 100 straight days without a visible SC 24 sunspot. That is a new “record” for most consecutive days between SC 24 spots.
David Archibald (23:16:12) :
one thing that he can’t hammer flat is the Be 10 record which shows a good correlation with the temperature rise of the 20th century. The IMF and aa Index are now falling away to levels we haven’t seen for 50 years or more.
Actually they are back where they were 100 years ago, so the 10Be level [or rather the cosmic ray flux] should also have decreased over the last 50 years, to compensate for the increase during the first 50 years. Yet, the cosmic ray flux at each solar minimum has been rock steady ever since the measurements started in the 1950s as shown here. The slight difference between minima [“peaked” vs. “rounded”] is well-understood in terms of cosmic ray diffusion depending on the polarity of the solar general magnetic field]. It is evident that there has been no systematic change in the 10Be flux since 1950 and we don’t expect any in the years to come.
Pamela Gray (16:11:24) : For our Northern viewers, the degrees mentioned about a cold August in Australia are centigrade not fahrenheit! Also, I have lived in Brisbane for 30 years and have kept a daily diary in that time with temps in it. This August is the coldest on my record with everyday this month being ~2.5degrees (centigrade!) below the norm (which only goes back to Captain Cooks diary!)
for the sake of accuracy, the 10Be flux should have >i>increased over the first 50 and decreased over the last 50 years [I had it backwards, lured by David’s inaccurate statement that 10B shows good correlation with temperature – it is an anti-correlation – sloppiness is contagious 🙂 ]
gee: increased and 10Be, not 10B. Time to go to bed.
Matt Annecharico: “How far back does the sunspot data go? Can we look at a trend over say 50 years? A hundred?”
WFT has SIDC sunspot data back to 1750:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:132
Leibert: “…could you add UV (c & b) & cosmic ray levels to your data sources?”
Do you have a URL of a regularly updated data source? – I need monthly averaged data in some simple text format (and more free time ;-( )
[…] only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar […]
F Rasmin: One has only to observe conditions on the ground to see marked changes from a protracted and zeroed minima only 1 year + into it.
Cancel out the localized effect of High & Lows temp + pressure cells and we readily see & feel the effects of a Sun on extended Siesta.
I know it sounds too simple to be true, but there really is an observable end-result at the ground level…. terra firma.
Heck, even the public has noticed the strange effects, it’s that obvious.
As far as average joe knows, though, science hasn’t said anything about it, so it must be him.
Well, what about it? When is science going to tell the public?
Anybody?
I need some help with something – why do the sunspot numbers on solarcycle24.com disagree with the numbers we’re discussing?
When I look at days and days of a spotless sun in the SOHO archives and yet, when the chart (http://www.dxlc.com/solar/images/solar.gif) shows we had ten sports in mid July, I have to wonder what I’m missing.
LEIF
What are your thoughts about solar wind induced currents in our stratosphere producing heat by joule heating.
L.N.Makarova in his paper called PARAMETERIZATION OF THE HEATING IN THE MIDDLE STRATOSPHERE DUE TO SOLAR WIND INDUCED ELECTRIC CURRENTS concluded as follows
Numerical estimations presented in this study show that the energy of the solar wind could be transferred into the Earth atmosphere through the electric fields induced by the solar wind disturbances. This process could be effective up to stratospheric altitudes 20-25 km where the ionized layer produced by the galactic cosmic rays and by some other sources exists. The electric currents induced by the electric fields are able to heat the atmosphere at altitude ~25 km up to 5.10-2 K/hour (1-2 K/day). It means that the stratospheric warming could be produced not only by dynamical factors but also by a local heating of the atmosphere by electric current.
http://www.pmodwrc.ch/eugene1560/sowa/data.phtml
LEIF
In L.N. Makarova’s second paper called A NEW APPROACH TO THE GLOBAL ELECTRIC CIRCUIT CONCEPTION , he states
The increasing of temperature of middle atmosphere is a result of atmosphere
heating by elecrtric current. Our preliminary numerical estimations show that under
typical atmospheric conditions the Joule heating of the stratosphere by the current is
comparable with rate of heating by the Sun ultra violet radiation in the ozone layer.
He also says in his paper that described their field tests in the Antarctica
In all presented
cases the stratospheric temperatures (altitudes 20-28 km) increases with approaching
of magnetopause more closely to the Earth.
We attract your attention to strong coupling between the magnetopause position
and the magnitudes of atmospheric electric field measured by the atmospheric
balloons above South Pole Station in Antarctica.
http://www.sgo.fi/SPECIAL/Contributions/Makarova.pdf
I am currently attempting to verify these findings with my own research .
“as a personal speculation that you can disagree with – if it falls with your specialty 🙂 ”
I don’t have any problem with people giving opinions outside of their specialties, I strongly object to the assignment of credibility to one side and denial to the other in accounts of those opinions.
I think that making statements, such as Hathaway does, that are based on models, as if they were simple facts is misleading and just creates skepticism. Nice thing is that there is an experiment going on right now. The answer will be known within a decade, I think. And before we go off half cocked on a “great leap forward” on energy, perhaps we ought to actually get our facts straight, not pretend that we have them straight.
Leif
Re: “variations of TSI on various time scales that ‘5-minute oscillations vary 0.003%, 27-day rotation gives a variation of 0.2%, the 11-year solar cycle yields 0.1%,” . . .”The Scafetta result is not generally accepted and is based on using the occurrence of solar flares as a proxy for TSI”
Scafetta and West mention four separate solar-temperature correlations summarized in Is climate sensitive to solar variability?.
Matching TSI Variability
“We maintain that the variations in Earth’s temperature are not noise, but contain substantial information about the source of variability, in particular the variations in TSI. Establishing this direct connection between the complex dynamics of the Sun and Earth requires a new kind of linking—one associated with the transfer of information between complex networks, even when the linking is extremely weak, as it is in the Sun–Earth network.”
“. . .both the fluctuations in TSI, using the solar flare time series as a surrogate, and Earth’s average temperature time series are observed
to have inverse power-law statistical distributions.”
Complexity Matching
“the Sun’s influence on Earth’s temperature is subtle because it is not
just an energy transport process but also an information transfer. . .The complexity-matching effect in the Sun–Earth network is evident in the equality of the inverse power-law indices.”
Solar Cycles
“the average global temperature record presents secular patterns of 22-and 11-year cycles and a short timescale fluctuation signature (with apparent inverse power-law statistics), both of which appear to be induced by solar dynamics.”
Could you comment on which if any have been confirmed, or explicitly countered? It would appear that researchers would first have to be skilled in the mathematics and complexity physics that Scafett and West apply.
The MRF is still showing a Fall signal for NA. The forecasted cut-off low in the Central Plains will be followed by a sharp trough on the 23rd with lows in the low 50s for the upper plains and as far south as the OK panhandle. The Arctic is projected to be below 32 degrees for several days.
This looks more like late Sept than Late August.
Pamela,
“These kinds of temps this early in the fall ”
From my understanding, autumn (fall to you vocabulary challenged North Americans) doesn’t start until September in the NH. So what you are describing is a fairly cold ending to the last fortnight or so of the NH summer. Looking forward to winter?? 🙂
I think the weather in the land of Oz is returning to that of the previous negative PDO period up to the mid to late 70s. I suspect you are getting some of the same. When I was a kid in Sydney we sometimes had layers of ice on containers of water outside overnight in Winter. But the positive PDO cancelled that out for 30+ years. So negative PDO plus negative “whatever” from the Sun sounds like “throw another dog on the fire” weather for quite some time to come.
I put a temperature gauge in my oven yesterday because I kept burning my dinner when I set the oven for 350. Turns out the oven is hotter by 50 degrees. But what continues to fascinate me is that while my oven or stove element is red hot in a matter of seconds, it takes a while to burn food. The other thing that intrigues me is that with just a few degrees of change in heat, candy comes out soft and chewy or hard enough to break teeth.
I think it is very possible that stable measures of the Sun (like cosmic rays or TSI) are like the elements in my oven or on my stove. It takes a while to fry the basketball we call Earth. The Sun doesn’t change by much, but the constant beating or cooling of its many different rays changes the Earth’s temperature. Else why do I find my fanny freezing at 5:00 AM in the summer time when just 6 hours earlier I was kicking covers off? And why am I fretting about cutting enough wood in time for old man winter when the Sun’s rays hit me with only a fleeting glance instead of straight on?
How can anyone say with a straight face that the Sun has no real effect on temperature? If it has such a dramatic affect on cyclic cosmic rays, poles versus equatorial heat, Summer versus Winter, wheat versus no wheat, two cuttings versus three cuttings of alfalfa hay, grapes versus no grapes, and CO2 measures, why is it then summarily disregarded as a main climate driver?
You disregard it because you don’t understand the mechanism? That would be like me standing in front of my oven or stove clueless as to why my food is burning, staring at a dial that eludes me as to its purpose, thinking IT’S MY FAULT! Or thinking that my caramels turned into hard candy because I was BREATHING TOO MUCH!
Look, I don’t know exactly why turning the dial on my oven changes the temperature of the element thus keeping me from buring the roast, or that watching the candy thermometer like a hawk leads to chewy caramels instead of rock candy, I just know that it does.
I don’t need to know or understand the mechanism to state that a constant temperature eventually changes the state of food.
Paul Clark:
“Do you have a URL of a regularly updated data source? ”
For cosmic ray data I look at this Russian site:
http://cr0.izmiran.rssi.ru/mosc/main.htm
If you click on the [Monthly] button you get a good graph over several SS cycles. Haven’t looked for raw data availability though. Interestingly, Lief has mentioned that every second sunspot cycle usually gives a sharp peak due to magnetic polarity cf earths own polarity. And one was due for this cycle changeover. However the peak has stayed very flat at high levels for the last two+ years – coincident with the observed downturn in global temps. As for the reason why? Correlates well with the extended SS minimum in my mind (old an feeble as it is 🙂
I’ve got it! This is how the AGW pantomime can bow out gracefully… “New evidence is appearing that the Sun is likely to go through a prolonged quiet phase now, and temperatures may even start to fall a little. Although of course, CO2 does unquestionably cause global warming, this is clearly of less significance if the sun is quiet and the earth cools again, as seems likely to be the case for at least the next ten years… It is clear that we can revise the current IPCC predictions owing to this new change of solar activity… clearly there is no longer the urgency for which IPCC was originally convened…”
John Miller (05:03:23) :
why do the sunspot numbers on solarcycle24.com disagree with the numbers we’re discussing?
The ‘American’ sunspot number, Ra, used by solarcycle24.com is available in real time, while the ‘International’ sunspot number, Ri, is only available at the end of the month. Typically Ra is 50% larger than Ri.
When I look at days and days of a spotless sun in the SOHO archives and yet, when the chart (http://www.dxlc.com/solar/images/solar.gif) shows we had ten spots in mid July, I have to wonder what I’m missing.
You are missing that the sunspot number is defined as R = 10*G + S, where G is the number of ‘groups’ of spots, and S is the number of spots. So if there was only one spot on the Sun, G would be 1 and S would be 1, and thus R = 10*1 + 1 = 11. If we had two spots close to each other, G would [likely] be 1, S = 2, and R = 10*1 + 2 = 12. If the two spots were far apart, G would be 2 and R = 10*2 + 2 = 22.
matt v. (05:57:12) :
In L.N. Makarova’s second paper called A NEW APPROACH TO THE GLOBAL ELECTRIC CIRCUIT CONCEPTION , he states
The increasing of temperature of middle atmosphere is a result of atmosphere heating by elecrtric current. Our preliminary numerical estimations show that under typical atmospheric conditions the Joule heating of the stratosphere by the current is comparable with rate of heating by the Sun ultra violet radiation in the ozone layer.
I think that she overstates her case as there are not enough ions to carry such a current, but I would be interested in what you find out.
moptop (06:00:56) :
I don’t have any problem with people giving opinions outside of their specialties, I strongly object to the assignment of credibility to one side and denial to the other in accounts of those opinions.
Credibility is always in the eye of the beholder and cannot be assigned.
David L. Hagen (07:11:43) :
Complexity Matching
“the Sun’s influence on Earth’s temperature is subtle because it is not
just an energy transport process but also an information transfer. . .The complexity-matching effect in the Sun–Earth network is evident in the equality of the inverse power-law indices.”
In my book, the mere equality of such indices does not constitute cause.
Solar Cycles
“the average global temperature record presents secular patterns of 22-and 11-year cycles and a short timescale fluctuation signature (with apparent inverse power-law statistics), both of which appear to be induced by solar dynamics.”
‘appear to be induced’ ? is a weak case. Induced by what mechanism? Scafetta and West’s paper does not stand out over the thousands of other papers that claim a solar-climate relation. Their paper has not been confirmed AFAIK nor explicitly countered. The latter presumably because, as I said, the are thousands of such papers and why should one bother with this one and not the others?
In any case, one can disagree with me on this, but they have not made their case strongly enough in my opinion for me to sit up and take notice.
Doug Jones (09:05:26) :
every second sunspot cycle usually gives a sharp peak due to magnetic polarity cf earths own polarity. And one was due for this cycle changeover. However the peak has stayed very flat at high levels for the last two+ years
Be careful not to over-interpret this. The theory does not say it should be peaked, just that the modulation should be different [the precise details we can discuss separately] from the rounded transitions. The sharpness of the earlier peaks is an artifact of the transitions being short.
I don’t know of a single scientist or fellow “denier” who claims that TSI all by itself is the major driver of climate.
The claim is that TSI is a proxy for other solar factors.
If you want to demolish someone’s argument, it helps if you start by understanding their argument.
Anyone else spot the flaw in this argument.
TSI alone is not enough to account for the measured warming of the last 100 years.
Therefore it must be CO2 that has caused the warmin.
The sun produces less energy in the UV range during a minima. The amount by which UV varies is greater than the amount TSI varies.
UV light is responsible for creating the ozone layer. Less UV, less ozone.
Other changes in the sun allow more cosmic rays to reach the earth. Cosmic rays break down ozone.
Ozone is another greenhouse gas.
Is it possible that this is another mechanism by which changes in the sun result in changes in the earth’s climate?
DR (18:14:49) : ,
There are more than 8 solar cycles in the record. Do you know why the model only verified using the last 8?
One possibility that comes to mind is that the model uses an input that was not being recorded during earlier parts of the record.
“And before we go off half cocked on a “great leap forward” on energy, perhaps we ought to actually get our facts straight, not pretend that we have them straight.”
Dr. Hansen is now claiming that we are about to hit a tipping point, and if we don’t start doing something right now, the results will be catastrophic and unstoppable.
Sounds to me like the alarmists are quite aware that the data is not going there way, and are getting desperate to get their political agenda enacted before the whole act starts coming apart.
Pamela Gray (09:00:22) :
How can anyone say with a straight face that the Sun has no real effect on temperature? If it has such a dramatic affect on cyclic cosmic rays, poles versus equatorial heat, Summer versus Winter, wheat versus no wheat, two cuttings versus three cuttings of alfalfa hay, grapes versus no grapes, and CO2 measures, why is it then summarily disregarded as a main climate driver?
Pam, you forgot to mention the dramatic difference between day and night. Generally, the effects you mention are due to the Earth: it is round, its axis is tilted, it is rotating. Make the Earth flat, right its axis to be perpendicular to the orbital plane, and stop its rotation and those effects would just disappear. The dismissal of the Sun as a driver of climate is based on the Sun not varying enough to account for the variations of the climate that we are seeing.
Small periodic changes can cause a much larger output in a target system, if the periodicity happens to hit one of the harmonic frequencies in the target system.
Does the solar cycle match one of the harmonic frequencies of the earth’s climate system? Nobody knows. However, such speculations can’t be dismissed by just declaring that we already know that CO2 is the only factor that matters.
Here is my update I did have it wrong they are protons at 1 GeV that penetrates to the troposphere.
See here page 19 from Gopalswamy presentation.
http://cosray.phys.uoa.gr/SEE2007/Presentations_files/Session%20C/see2007_cme_gopalswamy.pdf
You can see from the links that show that CME’s and the solar wind do change the weather patterns and that the CME’s do effect the lower atmosphere through magnetic and by protons.
More on Angular Momentum, LOD and Solar wind
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030306075514.htm
http://maia.usno.navy.mil/
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2005ScienceMeeting/presentations/thur_am/Perry_Mississippi_River.pdf
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast08dec98_1.htm
http://www.wettzell.ifag.de/veranstaltungen/fgs/workshop2004/abstracts/FGS2004_deViron_abstract.pdf
Leif….
You claim that solar variation has demonstrated no real detectable link to temperature variations, yet how do you explain that La Ninas and lower global temperatures have occurred around every solar minimum in the past century? 2008, 1996, 1985, 1975, 1965, 1955…if solar minimum by itself has a correlation with temperatures, then why wouldn’t weaker overall cycles as well (I believe there is also correlation here, but it is masked more by decadal oceanic cycles).
MarkW (09:39:55) :
I don’t know of a single scientist or fellow “denier” who claims that TSI all by itself is the major driver of climate.
The claim is that TSI is a proxy for other solar factors.
For you and your fellow deniers suffice it to say that as TSI goes so go all the other factors. It doesn’t matter that their variations are larger. If factor X varied ten times as much as TSI, if TSI now is what it was 100 years ago, then factor X now is also what it was 100 years ago.
MarkW (09:42:31) :
Anyone else spot the flaw in this argument.
TSI alone is not enough to account for the measured warming of the last 100 years. Therefore it must be CO2 that has caused the warming.
You tell us what the flaw is, since you seem to have figured it out.
Pamela- “And why am I fretting about cutting enough wood in time for old man winter when the Sun’s rays hit me with only a fleeting glance instead of straight on?”
Hi Pamela, interesting points, maybe you need a new oven!
The atmosphere has a massive effect on how we feel the heat from the sun. Simply explained the main reason why the sun feels much cooler in the winter is because the solar radiation has to pass through a lot more atmosphere to get here as it is lower in the sky and most of the main carrier of the heat, UV,is absorbed (blocked) by good old oxygen. Reading many of the posts it seems that the importance of the atmosphere on global heat is underestimated. Where there is no atmosphere, such as the moon there is either hot or very cold, depending if you are in the sun or not. As the atmosphere is so important it is safe to conclude that the contents of the atmosphere are as important including , of course, CO2.
Off course the sum is important but small changes in the atmosphere will have more effect on global temperatures than small changes in solar output, if Solar output was more important would’t we see an 11 year patteren of cooloing and warming on Earth?
Jim Arndt (10:17:32) :
You can see from the links that show that CME’s and the solar wind do change the weather patterns and that the CME’s do effect the lower atmosphere through magnetic and by protons. […]
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast08dec98_1.htm
The 1 Gev events are very, very rare, and therefore not significant climate drivers. I just picked a random one of your links [shown above] and read it, it does not say ANYTHING about the weather nor the climate.
Jared (10:36:35) :
You claim that solar variation has demonstrated no real detectable link to temperature variations, yet how do you explain that La Ninas and lower global temperatures have occurred around every solar minimum in the past century?
La Ninas occur every 5 to 6 years or so without any strict period. My birthday has occurred at every solar minimum in the past 2/3 century. How do explain that? 🙂
Jared, here is a list of La Ninas:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml
note the La Ninas in the solar maximum years 1968,1970-71, 1988-89, and 199-2000
P.S. I also had birthdays in those years.
La Nina in 1999-2000, sorry for the typo. Also note that El Ninos are generally flanking the La Ninas [and vice versa] . It seems that what goes up [down] must go down [up].
Mary Hinge (11:08:05) :
Pamela- if Solar output was more important wouldn’t we see an 11-year pattern of cooling and warming on Earth?
Trouble is, Mary, that some people think we do [e.g. Jared and his La Ninas]. The reality is that there may be such cycles, but their effect is so small that they don’t do much for Pamela’s fanny. And if they are small, they are not significant drivers of climate.
RE: Pamela Gray (22:17:31) : and Robert Bateman (22:37:27) :
By my reckoning, based on the apparent starting point of a series of record lows affecting the Far West, many areas of the region started their de facto climatic autumn on or around July 19th. Last year it was July 30th.
Robert, notice something interesting about the deciduous trees? Notice both wild and irrigated ones in landscaping. Our eyes do not lie.
By the way, there was a Bobcat foraging at my place yesterday, the first I’ve seen in 10 years.
MarkW (10:02:35) :
Small periodic changes can cause a much larger output in a target system, if the periodicity happens to hit one of the harmonic frequencies in the target system.
Does the solar cycle match one of the harmonic frequencies of the earth’s climate system?
The solar cycle is not strictly periodic and varies enough that is hardly can hit anything. AFAIK, the Earth’s climate system isn’t strictly periodic either [looks even less periodic that the Sun], so further diminishing the chance of being hit by a solar cycle.
Leif
Solar switching vs forcing.
Cf: Scafetta and West:”. . .The complexity-matching effect in the Sun–Earth network is evident in the equality of the inverse power-law indices.”
Leif: “In my book, the mere equality of such indices does not constitute cause.”
Observations:
Most thermal energy is in the oceans and major temperature oscellations appear to be impacted by ocean currents.
With a simple model, Roy Spencer has shown that changes typical of historic climate changes can be obtained by combinations of the various oscillations. PDO etc.
Scafetta and West show a number of correlations between solar flares and climate.
Svensmark is proposing solar regulation of cosmic ray cloud nucleation.
What if these were combined. e.g., that Scafetta and West’s solar flare observations were regulating clouds via Svensmark’s nucleation & via ultraviolet impact on poles, which in turn influenced the clouds which influenced the ocean currents which affect the Arctic, Pacific and Atlantic oscillations and thus the observed temperature.
In this scenario, Scafetta and West’s observed solar-climate correlations would be brought about by small solar “switching” of clouds which impact ocean currents rather than by macro “solar forcing” per se.
Hi Leif,
tht was what I was trying to say, if these cycles are hidden by so much noise then isn’t the effect of solar cycles actually very small. As I understand it the suns output is about 30% higher now than during the carboniferous (relying on memory so any links/figures very welcome) and the global climate was a lot hotter than it is now. Even allowing for the very different topography of the earth then and the huge expanses of warm shallow seas/swamps the high temperatures of the time were most probably because of the very high levels of CO2 in the atmosphereof the time,the inference being that the Earths mean temperature is more influenced by atmospheric make up than solar output.
David L. Hagen (13:05:27) :
In this scenario, Scafetta and West’s observed solar-climate correlations would be brought about by small solar “switching” of clouds which impact ocean currents rather than by macro “solar forcing” per se.
You may assume that I’m fully aware of all these things, pros and cons and maybes. The effect of the clouds would seem to be through modifying the Earth’s albedo [the amount of solar radiation reflected back into space and thus not messing with our climate]. Direct measurements of the albedo [e.g. by measuring Earthshine reflected off the moon] show variations that are not correlated with the solar cycle, so that settles that argument, at least for me and for now. There has been no changes [apart from the solar cycle variation] in cosmic ray intensity since the 1950s [for sure] and since the 1930s [less sure], so no long-term climate changes can be ascribed to cosmic rays and their proposed effects. You can always claim otherwise by invoking the argument of ‘ignorance’ : we don’t know what other mechanisms may be involved masking/helping/triggering/amplifying/modifying/whatever the effects from cosmic rays or the solar wind or the Sun in general. I tend not to worry much about such.
Leif,
You tell us what the flaw is, since you seem to have figured it out.
Given your history, it’s hard to tell whether this was sarcastic or merely clueless.
The flaw is that there are more things under heaven and earth than just TSI and CO2.
Leif,
From my degree in electrical engineering, when dealing with a noisy signal, you don’t have to hit the harmonic perfectly in order to excit it.
Mary Hinge (13:17:23) :
that was what I was trying to say, if these cycles are hidden by so much noise then isn’t the effect of solar cycles actually very small. As I understand it the suns output is about 30% higher now than during the carboniferous .
Not quite, but much earlier [4.5 billion years ago] when the Earth was born, the Sun was 30% dimmer and it has slowly increased in luminosity since. Nevertheless the temperature of the Earth has managed to stay more or less the same, probably due to greenhouse effects.
MarkW (13:29:04) :
Given your history, it’s hard to tell whether this was sarcastic or merely clueless.
I am never sarcastic [bad form in serious discussion], so I plead clueless as to what TSI and CO2 have to do with each other. And why CO2 was brought in to a discussion of what the Sun is doing.
The flaw is that there are more things under heaven and earth than just TSI and CO2.
And so what? I don’t think that that is earth shattering news. Sounds like a trivial point to me.
From my degree in electrical engineering, when dealing with a noisy signal, you don’t have to hit the harmonic perfectly in order to excite it
True enough, but we are dealing with two noisy signals, so there is no harmonic to be excited, especially since the harmonic is the Earth’s climate system that is a VERY noisy signal with no clear underlying signal – the harmonic. But, hey, if you believe that anyway, what does it matter what I think?
Leif Svalgaard (13:31:52) :
“Not quite, but much earlier [4.5 billion years ago] when the Earth was born, the Sun was 30% dimmer and it has slowly increased in luminosity since. ”
Thanks Leif, I was typing from memory and new 30% was there somewhere! Only over 4 billion years out!
There was a huge amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere during the carboniferous (now being liberated as fossil fuels.The late Carboniferous and early Permian, with resulting lower CO2 levels, were noted for their ice ages.
Leif
Thanks for the reference to measuring earthshine to measure albedo.
I found this 2006 presentation on it:
Recent changes in Earth’s albedo and implications for climate change, Enric Pallé
Leif, I did refer to day and night temps: see “fanny freezing”. What is your take on a constant source of [insert name of stuff] energy eventually changing that which it is impinging on? Why are we looking for changes in the Sun? I don’t change the dial on my oven. I wait for the oven to heat up. I also understand how the atmosphere shields us from the full impact of the Sun. But what if a constant source of stuff from the Sun and galaxy eventually changes the atmosphere, thus causing us to cool down or heat up? The Sun has a dramatic affect on ozone over the Antarctic, not because the Sun changes, but because the Earth tilts and the constant rays that eventually strike a more direct blow eventually eats up the ozone there. So what if the magnetic shield is so poor right now that cosmic rays are hitting ozone more globally than before? And the constant bombardment is doing something to our atmosphere that is allowing these colder temperatures to freeze my fanny?
Leif…
But EVERY solar minumum (since 1950 at least) has featured cooler temperatures than the surrounding years. I find it hard to believe you would attribute that all to “chance”.
In addition, El Ninos have invariably followed the rapid rise of a solar cycle. It happened in 1957, 1965, 1976, 1986, 1997…again, too much correlation to simply dismiss as coincidence, if you ask me.
Other “coincidences”: Cycle 20 was weaker than both Cycle 19 and Cycle 21, and the mid-60s to mid-70s were notably cooler. Cycle 23 was slightly weaker than the previous two cycles…and global temperatures have leveled off over the past 10 years.
Pamela Gray (14:32:47) :
And the constant bombardment is doing something to our atmosphere that is allowing these colder temperatures to freeze my fanny?
No doubt, your fanny is telling a truth, it is just that we have little evidence for that being due to the Sun.
Jared (14:41:46) :
But EVERY solar minumum (since 1950 at least) has featured cooler temperatures than the surrounding years. I find it hard to believe you would attribute that all to “chance”.
I certainly would, especially since we have temperature records going back much further than 1950 and they don’t show this. Also, if La Ninas have a roughly 5-6 year ‘periodicity’, once it gets into phase with the solar cycle [once by chance] it will stay in phase and hit every 5-6 years and thus every 11 years as well for a while [without these hits adding to the significance] until it eventually gets out of phase.
Jared (14:50:25) :
In addition, El Ninos have invariably followed the rapid rise of a solar cycle. It happened in 1957, 1965, 1976, 1986, 1997…again, too much correlation to simply dismiss as coincidence, if you ask me.
But I wouldn’t ask you. El Ninos occur on either side of La Ninas, so if La Ninas make you see something, El Ninos will show the same thing. Same coincidence, not independent evidence. Anyway, it would seem hat you would predict an El Nino soon. Would you predict that to come before SC24 takes off, or after? That is in 2008/2009 or in 2009/2010? The other coincidences are also clearly that. There is something in statistics called ‘degrees of freedom’ and that number is very low when you deal with a handful of cycles. I realize that nothing I say will shake your faith, so there we have it.
Hi Pamela,
should first say that ‘Fanny’ has a different meaning in the UK than the USA! Interesting point you raised about the ozone and the weakening magnetic field. Just throwing this into the mix here, if the ozone layer is weakening such as in the 1980’s. 1990’s and early 2000’s, there is less absorbtion (blocking) of UV which hits the earth and is reflected back at shorter wavelengths such as IR reulting in warmimg. Recently the ozone layer is thickening again so if less UV hits the earth, less IR is reflected resulting in cooling.
Is it possible that as the ozone layer thickens this cooling could become more pronounced?
Jared, maybe I should just point out that the year 1965 occurs in both your lists of La Nina and El Nino years. There was no rapid rise in solar activity in 1965. Here are the sunspot numbers for 1965:
196501 1965.043 17.5
196502 1965.123 14.2
196503 1965.205 11.7
196504 1965.287 6.8
196505 1965.372 24.1
196506 1965.454 15.9
196507 1965.539 11.9
196508 1965.624 8.9
196509 1965.706 16.8
196510 1965.791 20.1
196511 1965.873 15.8
196512 1965.958 17.0
The rapid rise came in 1966:
196601 1966.042 28.2
196602 1966.122 24.4
196603 1966.204 25.3
196604 1966.286 48.7 <=== here
196605 1966.371 45.3
196606 1966.453 47.7
196607 1966.538 56.7
196608 1966.623 51.2
196609 1966.705 50.2
196610 1966.790 57.2
196611 1966.872 57.2
196612 1966.957 70.4
and here are the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) for those years
1963 -0.6 -0.3 0.0 0.1 0.1 0.3 0.7 0.9 0.9 0.9 1.0 1.0
1964 0.9 0.4 0.0 -0.5 -0.7 -0.7 -0.7 -0.8 -1.0 -1.1 -1.1 -1.0
1965 -0.8 -0.5 -0.2 0.0 0.3 0.7 1.0 1.3 1.5 1.6 1.6 1.5
1966 1.2 1.1 0.8 0.5 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.0 -0.2 -0.2 -0.3 -0.3
Cold years in bold. It would seem that the Earth’s atmosphere knew that a sharp rise in sunspots would come in mid 1966, or [more likely] that there is no connection between these numbers.
Thanks for the explanation, Leif.
Leif…
First of all, La Ninas don’t occur every 5-6 years on cue as you infer. There is no such exact pattern, or they would be easy to predict and time, wouldn’t they?
None occurred between 1957 and 1964 – that’s 8 years. And what do you know, that 8 year period followed the strongest solar cycle in history. Another coincidence.
How about 1977 to 1984? Another 8 year stretch with NO La Ninas. And what do you know again…a very strong solar cycle.
Cycle 20 was weaker than any of the other past 4 cycles: 19, 21, 22, 23. And guess what? It had 7 La Nina winters/episodes, more than any of the other cycles. Yet another “coincidence”.
I’m sorry, Leif, but the evidence is certainly there – unless you want to just dismiss ALL of these occurences as chance. It seems quite evident to me that global temperature trends are largely a combination of solar influence overlaid on periodic atmospheric/oceanic cycles.
Leif,
When you mentioned earthshine it reminded me of a question I’ve posed but haven’t an answer to. The question is:
Why not just measure (via satellite) the amount of energy incident upon the earth and subtract from it the amount radiated away? Should that not that tell us the long term temperature trend?
Leif said:
I’m curious what you think of the solar inertial motion type theories, because it seems to me that this technique is spookily accurate as a predictor for ENSO events. The most outstanding being 2007 – most were predicting El Nino, SIM suggested, as one possibility, an El Nino that “fizzed out”, which is exactly what happened. The last 5 major ENSO events (inc. 2007) predicted at least 3 years in advance is not too shabby!
The dismissal of the Sun as a driver of climate is based on the Sun not varying enough to account for the variations of the climate that we are seeing.
So, Leif, are you saying you’re a solar denialist? Couldn’t it be possible, indeed more likely that you just don’t know, or indeed want to know about the sun? You seem to have made up your mind, and that you already know all there is to know about the sun. Some scientist.
Lief, I find your posts interesting.
My “conservative” (i.e. only a few physically based coefficients to adjust) physics 101 “modeling” indicated a strong possibility that solar effects (of some possibly complex sort) timed to the sunspot numbers could account for all but 0.2C of the temperature rise in the last couple centuries. My model even reproduced much of the variation in GT on a decade scale (if volcanic activity was figured in). Intellectually, it seemed unlikely that “GT being such a clean (in climate model terms) function of Sunspot count” could be accidental — though I did nothing to prove significance & cannot argue that my results are more than “interesting”. It makes me feel there is something yet to be learned.
You say “no”. And, not only do you know much more about the topic than me, you present fact based arguments. Since all that matters is the truth, I’ll keep an open mind on this one.
Leif, sorry about misspelling your name.
Leif
A brief sampling of my analysis of Makarova’s work based on monthly totals arrived from daily and hourly average solar wind ram pressure plots. As you can see, as the number of major solar wind ram pressure spikes changes in any month[ as determined from hourly average plots] , the global land temperature anomalies also changes. I have switched to collecting the data on a daily bases now and I am finding better correlation. With the aid of AMSU satellite data , I can now look at the changing temperatures at different elevations as each solar wind ram pressure spike occurs. Other data like magnetopause position and solar wind angle or direction can also be plotted daily. I have done this for June, July and August in 2008
2008 NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER CRUTEM3
hourly av hourly av of hours of hours GLOBAL
MONTH SOLAR SOLAR SOLAR SOLAR LAND
RAM RAM WIND RAM TEMP
PRESS. PRESS. FROM PRESSURE MONTHLY
SPIKES SPIKES SOUTH’ SPIKES ANOMALY
5nPa & > 10nPa&> 5nPa & > [C]
JAN 2 6 15 0.24
FEB 3 5 11 0.336
MAR 4 2 17 26 0.902
APRIL 4 6 12 0.328
MAY 2 1 1 4 0.282
JUNE 3 10 17 0.432
JULY 2 6 8 not yet
available
Bruce, Leif is a fact based scientist and can change his mind. No-one has come up with the proof of small solar variations effecting weather. The correlation is not absolute, and even if it were, correlation is not causation.
If someone could prove the link, solar scientists would become some of the most important scientists around. I doubt Leif would object to that.
Leif
It would appear that the excel spread sheet does not reproduce on the post. For you information these are the column headings after each month of 2008.
THE FIRST DIGIT IS THE NUMBER OF SOLAR RAM PRESSURE SPIKES 5NPA & >
THE SECOND DIGITIS THE NUMBER OF SOLAR RAM PRESSURES SPIKES 10NPA & >
THE THIRD DIGIT IS THE NUMBER OF HOURS THE SOLAR WIND IS FROM “SOUTH” OR [-]
THE FOURTH DIGIT IS THE TOTAL NUMBER OF HOURS SOLAR WIND IS 5 NPA & >
THE FIFTH DIGIT IS THE CRUTEM3 MONTHLY GLOBAL LAND TEMPERATURE ANOMALY [C]
If anyone wants a clean spread sheet e-mail me [ tartu950@cogeco.ca]
Jared (16:17:25) :
First of all, La Ninas don’t occur every 5-6 years on cue as you infer. There is no such exact pattern, or they would be easy to predict and time, wouldn’t they?
But they occur at each solar minimum 1955, 1965, 1975, 1985, 1996 and so seem also easy to predict, no? just go forward 10 and a bit years and you have the next.
Your idea that La Ninas occur at minimum does not take into account that one of the strongest [should I begin to use your phrases: guess what, what do you know ?] occurred at the maximum of solar cycle 23 during 1999-2000. And another strong one during the maximum of cycle 22 in 1988-1989. And another good one near the maximum of cycle 20 in 1970-1971. But, as I said, all of this doesn’t matter to you.
Neil claims that SIM suggested, as one possibility, an El Nino that “fizzed out”, which is exactly what happened. I can only ask if those predictions fit in with what Jared thinks and if Neil and Jared could harmonize their views and convince us that there is something there.
Bruce and Allen seem to have somewhat differing view on my knowledge of the Sun. The arguments [including MarkW’s] begin to be increasingly about me and what I know and don’t know, rather than on the Sun and its influence. At such a point it seems prudent to stop bickering and let this thread die, as all of these ‘solar threads’ eventually do [even ending with the traditional ‘barycenter’ arguments].
Leif writes: “I agree with Hathaway. The solar contribution would be of the order of 0.1 degree or smaller [as it was during the last Grand Minimum, when average TSI was 0.5 W/m2 smaller than now]. Archibald’s 2 degrees has no solid justification.”
Let’s consider this: Leif is suggesting that the Maunder Minimum climate change was not related to the sun! He is suggesting that the current transition from a warming period to a cooling period on Earth has nothing to do with the sun!
For someone who knows so much about solar physics, Leif, you sure have a low opinion of the sun! Or maybe you’re a warmist, here to distract the skeptics from their pursuit of truth :0
Leif has admitted elsewhere, by the way, that he has never read the definitive text on cosmic rays and climate, Henrik Svensmark’s “The Chilling Stars.” It’s ALMOST as if he is competitive with Svensmark and can’t give him his due. If you had read the book, Leif, you might know that measuring cosmic rays at sea level is far from telling. I promise you that as you shake your head above your computer screen, cosmic rays are forming sun-shielding, cold-engendering clouds.
For those who want to engage with a scientist willing to spar with non-scientists, Leif is a rare find. Feel free to keep letting him sidetrack you with his the “perfectly stable” TSI. Several prominent experts, though, have pointed out that the only thing total about TSI is the first word in its name as well as the fact that the atmosphere is influenced in complex ways by many solar factors.
For those who want to understand why Leif’s professional work predicting solar cycles actually does matter, read Svensmark. He is the Einstein of climatology and will be recognized as such by and by.
matt v. (17:44:00) :
It would appear that the excel spread sheet does not reproduce on the post.
And I must admit that the post is so hard to decipher that I don’t see what you are getting. Maybe post something like this:
YYYY MM — XX — YY — ZZ
and explain in words what we are supposed to see.
David Corcoran (17:32:41) :
If someone could prove the link, solar scientists would become some of the most important scientists around. I doubt Leif would object to that.
David hits a very important point. I would personally be elated if a solar-climate relationship would be established. Just think of all the funding that would come my way. In particular, if I was the one proving such a relationship. So, I’m personally as motivated as one could be, but alas, the funding agencies [read: the tax payers] don’t share such enthusiasm.
Mary Hinge: “Hi Pamela, should first say that ‘Fanny’ has a different meaning in the UK than the USA!”
And elsewhere. There are folk remedies for warming up freezing fannies, but since this is a family blog, best left unsaid.
I should add that Svensmark himself does measure cosmic rays at sea level, but carefully enough to limit various forms of noise. If he publishes a paper saying that cosmic rays are not varying with the solar minimum, that would mean something to me. Because cosmic rays’ lifespans are incredibly short, and because having created condensation nuclei they are less likely to be measured at ground-level, getting a good number for them is not all that straightforward.
Read “The Chilling Stars”! That means you, too, Leif!
Old Man Winter (18:26:57) :
[…] Leif has admitted elsewhere, by the way, that he has never read the definitive text on cosmic rays and climate, Henrik Svensmark’s “The Chilling Stars.”
I think ‘admitted’ is not the right term to use here. I have not read his book [which is for public consumption], but I have read every one of his technical papers which ought to count for more than reading the popularized book. And, as I said, the thread is becoming more about me, the ‘some scientist’, than about the Sun which means we have left science behind.
Old Man Winter (19:00:03) :
I should add that Svensmark himself does measure cosmic rays at sea level, but carefully enough to limit various forms of noise. If he publishes a paper saying that cosmic rays are not varying with the solar minimum, that would mean something to me. Because cosmic rays’ lifespans are incredibly short, and because having created condensation nuclei they are less likely to be measured at ground-level, getting a good number for them is not all that straightforward.
Read “The Chilling Stars”! That means you, too, Leif!
Cosmic rays have been measured accurately by a worldwide network for over half a century. It is by reading only the popular account that the misconception expressed by Old Man Winter can come about. If and when Svensmark and colleagues publish a scientific paper setting out their experiments and their case, I’ll certainly read it with interest.
Old Man Winter (19:00:03) :
I should add that Svensmark himself does measure cosmic rays at sea level, but carefully enough to limit various forms of noise. If he publishes a paper saying that cosmic rays are not varying with the solar minimum, that would mean something to me.
From your study of the Book, can you expand on what “cosmic rays are not varying with the solar minimum” means? does it mean that CRs do not vary from one minimum to the next, i.e. that CRs at every minimum are the same? And that Svensmark does not think so?
Please don’t tell me that cosmic rays have been measured accurately by a “worldwide network” for over half a century. Not on this blog. Please. Could this be yet ANOTHER network that needs the eyes, ears, and instruments of one now famous Anthony? We all once thought that ozone was a well distributed blanket with a hole over the Antarctic now and then. But now that global satellite measures shows it to be a swirling mass of “thick here, thin there” globby mess, we ain’t so sure about our blanket no more. My hunch is that CO2 will follow. Case in point: water vapor swirls around like a ghost; here and then there, with broad brushstrokes of nothing inbetween. What else about our atmosphere do we friggin not know.
Leif: I am glad to read between the lines (and I hope I am getting this right) that you don’t think the science is settled.
Many here did take note of the pale green of spring this year. The trees were likewise pale and very late to bloom, and now some of them are ready to go back into dormancy. All the trees are looking pathetic, except for my Giant Sequoias, which turned green in mid june and sprouted thier 2 feet of growth.
Figures, they predate the Dinosaurs, pre-triassic? The cedars, pines, and firs are wimpy by comparison. The oaks are now dropping hollow acorns, or acorns devoid of the nut case altogether. The short-season tomatoes ripened but are tart. We barely made it with the long-season tomatoes last year, the nights just won’t stay much above 50 degrees. One lady reports ‘mini-corn’ where full ears should be. They are done.
The animals have come in droves out of the hills desperate for food in late July.
I hear it all the time, I work at a feed store.
When I ask have you heard of the solar minima, I get blank stares. Science has really been tight-lipped. I hope this changes before the public gets wind of how they have been kept in the dark once again.
They aren’t going to like it, and they aren’t going to like science that forgets to keep them appraised of notable changes.
There is more than enough phenomena on the ground to support the notion that this isn’t your normal minima.
Guess us laymen will have to do science’s work for them.
If we get it wrong, don’t blame us, it’s your job.
blessed be these wounds
blessed be my doom
as I burn, as I burn thy frozen sun
Pamela, how can it be settled? No-one has seen a grand minimum with modern instruments. What if it doesn’t behave like a normal minimum? In fact, how could it?
If the sun refused to shine
I don’t mind, I don’t mind
If the mountains fell in the sea
Let it be, it ain’t me.
As I watched the Olympic swimming tonight it finally occurred to me…
NASA might think about switching totally to swim suits.
Pam & David: the science is never settled. Here is a wild idea: if Livingston and Penn are correct that sunspots can warm up [and are doing it] such as to have so low contrast as to be ‘invisible’ [or at least harder to see], then it is possible that during the Maunder Minimum, the spots were still there, except invisible. We know from 14C and 10Be that the cosmic rays were still modulated by the magnetic fields presumably associated with the invisible sunspots. So, if there were magnetic fields around, but no dark spots, then perhaps TSI was higher then than today. This is a testable speculation if the next few cycles are really low. If correct, would further erode the idea that the lack of solar activity was the cause of the LIA, and give credence to the idea that the climate has internal oscillations.
REPLY: Well postulated, Leif. – Anthony
Evan:
PRAYER
to the sun above the clouds.
Sun that givest all things birth,
shine on everything on earth!
If that’s too much to demand,
shine at least on this our land.
If even that’s too much for thee,
shine at any rate on me.
Piet Hein, Danish poet.
Now that you mention it, the leaves fell off the Madrone trees a month ago in the canyons, followed by all the other trees leaves turning yellow and now they are falliing off in mid-august.
It’s a minimum all right, and I’m really sorry the science is so fouled up in fine print and crazy theories that it can’t look out the window.
The Asteroid movies had it all wrong, the scientists were too busy arguing formulas to warn anybody, let alone pay attention to what was in the telescope.
If the science is never settled, Leif, than what’s stopping you from looking at what’s happening all around you?
Do we even agree that the minima is real, or is this going by the way of analysis paralysis?
We’ve had two minima of note since modern Astronomy got it’s feet wet.
Both got cold, one got really cold.
Does it really matter if the sunspots are merely invisible if the end result is still the same thing, i.e. – drastically reduced growing seasons?
Who cares why at this point? We are either in a minima or we are not.
It’s either going to get progressively colder or it’s not.
Call it.
We can wait another lifetime for the how & why and all the grand models.
Just call it like you see it.
Hi Leif,
thanks for your contribution making this one of the most informative and well argued threads on the blog, and Brendan H – a couple of those folk medicines would be welcome to help clear the cobwebs away!
By the way, what ever happened to Gaia?
What ever happened to Gaia?
Can it be she’s not?
Or did she leave the kitchen
when it got too hot?
I never believed in Gaia,
but she kept the pagans quite.
Now a little change in temp,
and they start to riot.
drat! “quite” = “quiet”.
I’ll call it like I see it, and be damned! It has been cold in Sydney this winter. Two weeks ago we had what was initially reported as snow on the North Shore of the Sydney metropolitan area (Roseville, Lindfield high ridges) in the early morning that melted by about 10am as the sun came up. This hasn’t happened for a while. But lo and behold by evening news time this was being reported as ‘soft hail’ by the Bureau of Metereology. In my wild erratic fancy my mind imagined BoM bureacrats rushing out to Roseville on a moment’s notice that morning to apply who-knows-what techniques to establish that this was soft hail and not snow in the half hour before it melted. Anyway, in the end the media (and the ABC in particular) were able to present a message that did not assist in ‘spreading doubt about global warming’ as Jennifer Mahorasy had been accused of doing on the ABC the evening before. As the American Psychological Association has concluded, such negative messages can prevent people understanding the truth of global warming. The Ministry of Truth would be proud. Anyway, it is still cold here. As an old lag this feels about as cold as the mid 80’s. But what would I know..
Leif,
“so I plead clueless as to what TSI and CO2 have to do with each other. ”
Never said they had anything to do with each other.
What I was objecting to was your earlier claim that since TSI alone couldn’t be the cause, it must be CO2.
Actually two noisy signals make coupling easier, not impossible.
Jared,
You have to remember that for Leif, anything less than a perfect match is sufficient to disqualify a relationship.
Unless you are talking about temperature and CO2.
Leif,
Could Sunspot variations and global temperature variations be caused by the same forces – thus, giving a false impression that Sunspots are related to GT?
I have read that Sunspots are caused by changes in the Sun’s orbit around the Solar System center of mass. These center of mass changes are due to the constant, cyclic repositioning of the planets’ masses. It is hypothesized that the tidal and acceleration forces on the Sun cause internal changes that lead to cyclic sunspots. It would seem a lot of energy is transferred (or at least changed from potential to kinetic) by moving the Solar System center of mass.
Could similar tidal and acceleration forces be acting on the Earth as the Solar System center of mass cyclically varies? At a minimum, there would be cyclic accelerations to the Earth. Could these accelerations/forces impart enough energy to the Earth (say by deforming the crust or causing ocean tides) to create temperature variations in the land and sea? Or, could they change underground magma flows?
In brief, one could hypothesize that the cyclic changes in the Solar System center of gravity that causes sunspots could also interact with Earth causing a type of “geothermal energy” that affects Earth GT. These would be synchronized with sunspots — thus giving the illusion that they were somehow caused by sunspots (or Solar mechanisms related to sunspots) — where, in fact, it would be the same “third party” mechanism causing both sunspots and changes in GT.
Has someone specifically disproved this particular hypothesis?
I’m gonna assume that other people saw this posted at junkscience.com.
It’s in a letter sent to the Belfast Times
Lazlo (04:48:57): “In my wild erratic fancy…”
Just so long as you keep seeing the vision splendid, of the sunlit…, Lazlo
LEIF
Hopefully this chart reproduces better. The table shows that during each month this year, as the number of major solar wind ram pressure spikes [5 nPa and higher] changes, so does the CRUTEM3 global monthly land temperature anomaly. I noted [in the brackets] the total number of monthly hours that the solar spike was 5 Npa or more [using hourly average plots]. I also noted the number of hours that the wind was from the ‘south’ or negative angle in the last column. What I found, as MAKAROVA found, is that major solar wind dynamic pressure spikes if from the ‘south’ bring the magnetopause closer to earth and this seems to raise Stratosphere temperatures. I am seeing a temperature spikes in the troposphere as well. The AUGUST 8, 9 2008 solar wind spike well illustrates this. The warming first started at the stratosphere level and then spread to the troposphere. I am currently doing this analysis on a daily basis noting the temperature changes at various elevations up to 17 km with each major solar wind dynamic pressure spike[ over 5nPa] . A similar pattern is emerging from this daily study and the impact is even clearer. Strong La Nina and El Nino conditions seem to modify the results .When the wind angle is from ‘north’ or[+], the temperature impact is much less and even nil. The direction sometime is changing so rapidly, that it is hard to measure which governs
2008 # OF
MONTH SPIKES [HRS] TEMP ANOMALY HOURS SOUTH
JAN 2[15] 0 .24 6
FEB 3 [11] 0.336 5
MAR 4 [26] 0 .902 17
APRIL 4 [12] 0.328 6
MAY 2 [4] 0 .282 1
JUNE 3 [17] 0.432 10
JULY 2 [8] NA. NA
MarkW (05:06:05) :
“so I plead clueless as to what TSI and CO2 have to do with each other. ”
Never said they had anything to do with each other.
What I was objecting to was your earlier claim that since TSI alone couldn’t be the cause, it must be CO2.
You keep saying that. Please show me [dig it up if you have to] where I ever claimed that. Do you really think that CO2 caused the MWP or that lack of CO2 caused the LIA? If not, how can you ever believe that I would think so? Even if you did [do?] hold such a silly belief, does that give you the right to ‘object’? No, all you can do is ‘argue’ your case, not ‘object’ to someone having a different belief [especially if he does not].
Allen (06:03:20) :
[…] I have read that Sunspots are caused by changes in the Sun’s orbit around the Solar System center of mass. […] Has someone specifically disproved this particular hypothesis?
There is no need to disprove this because the neither the Sun, nor the Earth feel any forces associated with their orbits, they are both in free fall, just like an astronaut on a spacewalk or an [unfortunate] man in an elevator where the cable is broken. No astronomer or physicist is working on disproving the hypothesis, just like nobody is working on proving that the planets are being pushed around in their orbits by angels.
Robert Bateman (00:43:34) :
If the science is never settled, Leif, than what’s stopping you from looking at what’s happening all around you?
For the record, I believe the climate undergoes swings: MWP, LIA, modern warming, possible cooling coming. I do not believe these swings are caused by the Sun. Or rather, I believe that the scientific case has not been made that they are. This means in my book that they could have been caused by the Sun, just that we have no evidence that they are, or, rather, that the ‘evidence’ presented is too weak to convince me. You may be convinced, that is your problem.
matt v. (07:26:29) :
Six cases do not make good statistics. There is solar wind data back to 1963, so do the analysis for the full dataset.
Pofarmer (07:24:10) :
Based on the past Armagh measurements, this suggests that over the next two decades, global temperatures may fall by about 2 degrees C.
In the past 200 years global temperatures have not varied by 2 degrees, so why should they now? The variation has been less than 1 degree. I assume we are not talking about individual years but some kind of smoothed variation [“over the next two decades”]. Individual years can vary a lot more in either direction.
Profarmer- “However, temperatures have already fallen by about 0.5 degrees C over the past 12 months and, if this is only the start of it, it would be a serious concern.”
Where was the figure of 0.5 degrees Centigrade plucked from? Is it a global or a local termperature. If it is a global mean then it is plainly false, unless you know different! If based on local temperatures it’s called weather.
“Cycle 23, which hasn’t finished yet, looks like it will be long (at least 12 to 13 years) and cycle 24, which has still to start, looks like it will be exceptionally weak.”
Again misleading and innacurate, all the indications are that Cycle 24 will be very active followed by a quiet Cycle 25, I don’t know if that will happen but this is the accepted probability. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10may_longrange.htm
It’s this kind of regurgitated nonsense presented as a fact that is driving the whole global warming argument into a farcical sideshow. So Profarmer, do you actually think what you’ve posted is accurate and helpful to the discussion?
Mary Hinge (08:30:08) :
[…]all the indications are that Cycle 24 will be very active followed by a quiet Cycle 25, I don’t know if that will happen but this is the accepted probability
No, Mary, there are good indications that SC24 will be very weak. E.g. see http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf and http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Predictions%20SHINE%202006.pdf . Even the official solar cycle 24 prediction panel is split between a high cycle and a low cycle, e.g. http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/SC24/index.html . I’m a member of the panel, and the support for a strong SC24 is dwindling.
RE: “The oaks are now dropping hollow acorns, or acorns devoid of the nut case altogether. The short-season tomatoes ripened but are tart. We barely made it with the long-season tomatoes last year, the nights just won’t stay much above 50 degrees.”
Acorn crop on the coast live oaks in my locale is one of the lightest I’ve ever seen. My brother’s tomato plants were very late to produce, and now, the crop is very limited. In July, we experienced lows in the upper 40s, a first in my lifetime in the climate zones I’ve spent my 4 plus decade life in (Sunset Western Gardening Guide’s Zones 15, 16, 17 and 24). Systemically, nearly all deciduous trees have begun to turn, no matter what their location, no matter how much moisture they have.
Where was the figure of 0.5 degrees Centigrade plucked from? Is it a global or a local termperature. If it is a global mean then it is plainly false, unless you know different! If based on local temperatures it’s called weather.
Bring it back to Feb. 2007 and it has probably been somewhat over 0.5°C. Globally. That’s according to the big four (NASA, NOAA, UAH, and RSS).
There was a La Nina (now over) and the PDO, on schedule, has shifted to a (probably multidecadal) cool phase. The AO, and NAO may be following suit. Both of these shifts to cool seem quite premature judging by the 20th century record.
We do not know if this is “just the beginning”, but if the ocean cooling continues, it would not appear unlikely.
This is quite apart from the solar issue, which NASA has shown quite unable to forecast. I would say we really don’t know what’s going on with the sun; we’ll just have to wait and see.
Sorry: By “big four” I mean NASA, HadCRUT, UAH, RSS.
(NOAA is the basis for the NASA measurements.)
If we want to be anecdotal, NYC had a mild winter and is having a mild summer.
Leif:
#B^1
Evan Jones (10:12:21) :
#B^1
at least you didn’t say !@#$%^ 🙂
“The number of interstellar dust grains increased from four per day, per meter in 1997 to 12 per day in 2000, Landgraf said. The results were announced earlier this month. He expects the rate to stay constant until 2005, and then increase by another factor of 3 prior to 2013.”
from:
http://www.space.com/scienceastron/dust_storm_030814.html
It’s getting dusty in the solar system according to this article and it is linked to the sunspot cycle.
Pam, this could have an effect on household dust, too.
Evan,
# = hair?
B = eyes?
^ = nose?
1 = mouth with cigarette?
REPLY: Keep it up…and I’ll turn the smileys back on – Anthony
So Profarmer, do you actually think what you’ve posted is accurate and helpful to the discussion?
Well, what I posted is from a researcher working for Armagh observatory in Ireland and is about the current solar cycles and possible climatic effects, so, yes, I thought it was topical. As to it’s accuracy, that will be up to the future to see. I really don’t see how it would be unhelpful, unless you disagree with it. Not my work. You can google the guys name, go to Junkscience.com. Go to the Belfast Times website, or to Armagh observatories website for more information. I thought it was interesting, on topic, and current, so I posted it. I see Evan has already taken care of me on the topic of global temperatures. Thanks.
Interesting that Hathaway’s “you are here” lies well below the confidence interval given in his earlier projection (a near zero yearly sunspot rate in August 2008, vs Hathaway’s predicted minimim sunspot rate for this date of about 70 per year). Yet his new confidence interval bounces upward even more steeply than his earlier one.
Really? He is even more confident that the sun will quickly become active, now that it has demonstrated that it is in a persistent lull? Apparently he believes that the sun just does not go into persistent lulls, but then he cites the Maunder Minimum, so he KNOWS that it sometimes does. Just another stinking propagandist.
This is precisely what I don’t get: the link between rising CO2 and temperature is supposedly “very clear”, and yet links between solar activity and temperature are not? Neither is perfect to be sure, but solar (combined with natural oceanic/atmospheric cycles) has far greater correlation over the long run!
It is an absolute joke that billions of dollars are put into climate research that focuses on CO2/GHG/AGW, yet very little research or funding goes into possible solar climate influences.
Yes, Leif, ENSO events are not dependent on solar activity. They seem to function independently on their own cycles in some ways. And yet, weaker solar activity does seem to make Ninas more likely, and once cycles start upward again and get stronger, Ninos seem more likely.
In addition, I can find no better explanation out there for why temperatures have leveled off/cooled slightly the past ten years other than solar. Solar output decreased a bit in Cycle 23, and temperatures stopped rising. The PDO was still largely in its positive phase, so that is not a good explanation. And of course, CO2 continued to skyrocket. So if someone has a better explanation for me, I would be happy to hear it.
Something else anecdotal (for fun, but still noteworthy): here on the Front Range of Colorado, the temperature is currently 51 degrees at noon, with a light rain. The normal high temperature is 87 today. Denver is forecast to reach a high of 59. If that occurs, it will smash the record low high of 68 for the date. Tomorrow’s record low high of 63 is also in jeopardy.
Mary, pofarmer, and others:
Let’s not get personal. Stick to the topic and no ad-hom remarks or snide comments, please. Disagreement is in principle good.
Leif Said:
“…There is no need to disprove this because the neither the Sun, nor the Earth feel any forces associated with their orbits…”
Leif, I think it is more complicated. The planets are not in undisturbed free fall. There are mutual differential gravitational attractions. Moreover, there are accelerations (orbital perturbations) associated with changes in the center of mass of the Solar System due to the planetary orbits themselves — since planets are not infinitely rigid, these accelerations will cause deformations that will raise temperature — “how much” is the issue.
As background, tidal forces (that deform seas and land mass) in mutually orbiting bodies are well known – and they have very significant effects on the bodies. For example, the Earth/Moon revolve around their common barycenter. The effect on tides, speed of rotation of Earth and Moon, changes in orbital distance are well known – all those changes represent changes of energy states some of which could be resolved as “heat” and “temperature”. Google presented this easy to read explanation (out of many):
“…The ocean tides are an obvious effect of the Moon’s gravity but the Moon causes “land tides” to occur too. As the Moon passes overhead the Earth rises towards it by several centimeters and then drops down again as the Moon moves on. .. What I am talking about here is the actual distortion of the Earth’s solid “rock” due to the Moon’s gravity..
Land tides occur on every object in the Solar System (if it has “land”). They cause friction …”
Thus, the Sun and all the planets are “pulling” on each other thereby causing gravitationally induced waves in seas and landmasses. Changes in the “barycenter” of the solar system will perturb orbits (accelerate planets and Sun) thereby modifying the gravitationally induced waves – that does not seem open to question – the question is the significance on Earth GT, if any.
My hypothesis was/is that these gravitationally induced waves could cause some internal friction and an elevation in the temperature of the “ground” and “oceans” — seems the energy has to go somewhere.
Perhaps because of other temperature noise and the fact that no-one has looked for this specific effect, it has been missed. Or, maybe somebody has calculated the energy involved and determined that the temperature changes would be negligible – but, we don’t know that yet (in this thread).
So, I conclude we do not know yet (in this thread) if my hypothesis has been studied and rejected.
Anyhow, this is presented in a spirit of unemotional discussion, for what it may be worth.
Leif- “No, Mary, there are good indications that SC24 will be very weak.”
Thanks for the correction, nice to hear it from someone ‘in the know’!
Profarmer- I was very harsh and I apologise, though 18 months is a bit longer than 12, but I accept the point you made.
Allen,
Its all about magnetism and not so much gravity. The Sun, Earth and gas giants are all connected by magnetism and gravity but by far magnetism has more influence (magnetism is strong force and gravity is a weak force). If you look at a theory with any relevance they all contain magnetism as a main feature, even Leif uses it for his forecasts. I think that the magnetic planets when they pass the suns magnetic (7 degree tilt) poles do influence the suns activity, flares, CMEs or spots, I know Leif will disagree as he does with my CME stuff.
If you look at the rate and speed of CMEs and flare there is a good correlation to satellite temperatures, not perfect but good, oceans tend to dampen quick changes. See page for for the graphs, they are not pretty but give a good indication.
http://cosray.phys.uoa.gr/SEE2007/Presentations_files/Session%20C/see2007_cme_gopalswamy.pdf If you look at the 1989 event the temperature starts to rise but is cut short by Pinatubo. I think this is something that most over look. As Anthony has pointed out its like electronic circuits. Think LCDs and how very little energy is needed to change the amount of light that gets through the color filter, it does this by changing the shape of the liquid crystal by twisting it. Maybe similar to what is going on with clouds, small changes in energy may have big change in clouds, CME, flare or CRF. I may have not yet found the mechanism but it is there, maybe proton maybe not.
Allen (11:28:52) :
The planets are not in undisturbed free fall
What is holding them up then? They are in free fall following a geodesic in space; what this means is that space itself is curved [as Einstein saw] by the masses in the solar system [primarily the Sun, of course] and these masses are not being acted upon ‘at a distance’ by any forces but simply following geodesics in a curved space.
tidal forces (that deform seas and land mass) in mutually orbiting bodies are well known – and they have very significant effects on the bodies.
Tidal forces arise when the opposite sides of a body follow slightly different geodesics because the curvature of space is different on either side of the body. The tidal forces that Jupiter exerts on the sun does indeed give rise to a tidal bulge of height one half millimeter [1/50 of an inch]. If all the planets were lined up, the total bulge would be 1 millimeter high. This is to be compared to the constant overturning of the solar material where Texas-sized masses move up and down at 0.5 km per second.
This has been extensively discussed on this blog; in fact, every single post on the Sun has ended up with this issue, which seems to have strong legs and popular appeal, even if its scientific value is nil.
“For the record, I believe the climate undergoes swings: MWP, LIA, modern warming, possible cooling coming. I…”
Leif: What source(s) do you acknowledge as proof of the MWP?
“As the American Psychological Association has concluded, such negative messages can prevent people understanding the truth of global warming.” Lazlo (04:48:57) :
Wow, that tree limb is getting pretty crowded.
Jim Arndt (12:32:32) :
Its all about magnetism and not so much gravity. The Sun, Earth and gas giants are all connected by magnetism and gravity but by far magnetism has more influence (magnetism is strong force and gravity is a weak force). If you look at a theory with any relevance they all contain magnetism as a main feature, even Leif uses it for his forecasts. I think that the magnetic planets when they pass the suns magnetic (7 degree tilt) poles do influence the suns activity, flares, CMEs or spots
No, this is totally wrong. Gravity falls off with the square of the distance, but magnetism falls off with the cube of the distance. Consider a small toy magnetic and a big nail. You can find a nail that is so big that the magnet can just hold it up. Any heavier and the nail falls off. We have all played with that, so this should be clear. Now, hold the magnet with the nail. All the gravity of the entire Earth is not enough to pull the nail away, so, indeed, the magnetic force in that small toy magnet is very strong compared to gravity. We can quantify the force of gravity on the nail as one ‘g’. So the magnetic force is also one ‘g’. The distance between the center of mass of the Earth and the nail [which is what determines gravity] is 6400 km, and the distance between the magnetic poles and the center of mass of the nail is, perhaps [depending on the exactly we use] 1 cm = 0.00001 km. Now, move the nail away from the Earth one earth radius [6400 km]. That reduces the gravitational force by a factor of four to g/4 [twice as far, four times weaker; square of distance]. The magnetic force is reduced by a factor of (6400/0.00001)^3 = 2.5 x 10^26 = 250,000,000,000,000,000,000. Move the nail out to the Sun and the force is reduced by a further 10,000,000 times. Now, the little toy magnet is actually a lot stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field [otherwise the Earth’s magnetic field would tear away the nail – just think of bringing a BIG magnet close to the nail], so the ‘magnetic’ planets have absolutely no measurable effect upon the nail, not to speak about upon the entire Sun.
There are so many zeroes in play here that I even got the second number wrong. The force is not just reduced a further 10,000,000 times, it is reduced by a further 13,000,000,000,000 times = (149600000/6400)^3 where the 149600000 km is the distance to the Sun. So, the magnetic planets have no magnetic influence on the sun.
Bill P (12:56:20) :
Leif: What source(s) do you acknowledge as proof of the MWP?
The Vikings could colonize Greenland [which was green where they lived] and a namesake could discover America.
More modern sources may be found here:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3266
and I’m sure in many other places. Was the MWP global? Well, if it was not, the Sun is hardly to ‘blame’ for the MWP, The Vikings thrived in Greenland for a longer time than I would image if the MWP was just a small regional blip. What I really meant was that even if MWP was real and global I don’t think it was caused by the Sun. So, I’m willing to accept internal oscillations of that magnitude, should they occur.
Bill P (12:56:20) :
Leif: What source(s) do you acknowledge as proof of the MWP?
This one is also convincing, to me, at least:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3395
Leif,
Well, as an emoticon, I find #B^1 to be more expressive than a plain old 🙂
Since it is of my own device I am prejudiced towards it. (So far as I know, no one else is using it: I googled it and found no match.)
1 = mouth with cigarette
Just a wry grin. The eyes have glasses.
Modifications include: #p^j and #B^U
Keep it up…and I’ll turn the smileys back on – Anthony
Nooooooo!
At least wait until the year (2008) is over!
There is a site called “Ask a Physicist”. The internet is wonderful.
LEIF
Six months of results does not conclusively prove that major solar wind ram pressures and global temperatures are related but it should spark some more interest. Makarova also did field tests before presenting her results.
I only posted a limited part of my work here to show that currently the relationship exists. It would be inappropriate to flood this blog with more detail.
I see little value in going back to 1965 to further verify Makarovas or my own studies. I have already looked at many of the years of the current solar cycle [#23] plus spot years prior where there were no EL Ninos or El Ninas. Sometime regression analysis of past data can be a hindrance too if one fails to recognize new or changed conditions which can make much of the past data obsolete or of historical value only. One can observe some of the limits of regression data in the failed attempts to predict the start of the next solar cycle, or the hurricane forecast for the last 3-4 years or some of the climate change models that don’t seem to work. Meanwhile I will continue my study to look at the current daily correlation between major solar wind ram pressures, magnetic field directions, the magnetopause position, and global temperatures. If anyone is interested in this they can e-mail me. I posted my e-mail previously for those who are interested.
Thank heavens. I thought you were swearing.
Leif,
I think Allen shows strong evidence supporting my hypothesis from the last thread. Notice his admittance to a lower level of physics? Notice how you had to explain why the forces do not exist even after you said they don’t?
I think it would be beneficial to simply come out and “call foul” on the underlying understanding.
Allen,
I hope if you are still reading the thread, you are willing to respond and let me know if what I am saying makes sense to you.
The models you learned in Physics 101 were “good enough” to help you understand the material at a “physics 101” level. However, not everything taught will carry over to more advanced problems– those models are no longer “good enough”.
The point in case here is the center of gravity from Newtonian physics. It is “good enough” to understand a one or two body problem. But when you look at a many body problem you’ll notice that there would need to be extra forces to explain some strange behavior. These forces are only an artifact of the model being used.
Newton’s theory of gravitation was replaced with General Relativity. In GR, these forces do not exist as Leif briefly explains. It is a case of the model you understand not being “good enough” for the purpose you want to use it.
Thanks Leif,
Next time I go into space I’ll bring the little magnetic toy to protect me from the CRF. Sarc / off. Sorry Leif I couldn’t help it, a little magnetic humor.
I realize that the magnetic field drops off quite fast, my point to Allen was it is a stronger force than gravity and that you do use it for your forecasts for the sun activity, correct. You don’t measure gravity to forecasts solar activity. I’m not saying that magnetism is heating things up but I am saying that it maybe switching things on and off like an IC does. But there are magnetic “ropes” (lack of a better term) that connect the Earth to the sun. I think NASA included this in one of their missions around 2003 I think. Sun Spots are magnetic, same with CMEs Flares, and CRF is modulated by magnetism. This is also how most of our power is generated.
Jim Arndt (17:22:13) :
you do use it for your forecasts for the sun activity, correct. You don’t measure gravity to forecasts solar activity.
I use the Sun’s magnetic field, close to where the action is 🙂
Some of the other good folks here try to use gravity [SIM, barycenter, tides, etc] to forecast solar activity.
But there are magnetic “ropes” (lack of a better term) that connect the Earth to the sun
That is true, the magnetic field of the Sun and the Earth are indeed connected, but the influence is one-way from the Sun to the Earth. The reason is that the magnetic field is ‘frozen’ into the solar wind and moves with it. In a plasma, like the solar wind, the effect of a change of the magnetic field travels as a wave [much like a sound wave] called an Alfven wave [after the Swedish physicist Hannes Alfven who in the 1940s discovered this]. The speed of these waves is called the Alfven speed and serves much the same role as the speed of sound, to ‘communicate’ changes of physical characteristics of the medium. Much as we have a ‘Mach’ number for sound waves, there is also an ‘Alfvenic Mach’ number for a plasma. For the solar wind that number is typically around 11, meaning that the solar wind moves away from the Sun 11 times faster than magnetic changes can move towards the Sun. It is like you trying to swim upriver at 1 mile an hour in a stream that runs downriver at 11 miles an hour; you just won’t get upstream.
I said: Much as we have a ‘Mach’ number for sound waves, there is also an ‘Alfvenic Mach’ number for a plasma. This is not the correct way of saying it. I should have said: “Much as we have a Mach number for objects moving through the air, we have an Alfvenic Mach number for a plasma”. Sound waves, of course, always move at Mach 1.0 🙂
Hi Leif:
You wrote:
IIRC your historical analysis projects higher TSI than Lean’s or Wang’s.
The last fat lady to sing then would be what? Isotopic proxies of 10Be & 14C? We’ve touched on this before & IIRC the jury’s still out. After all this, are we to just asperse correlations between sun spots & climate as worse than anecdotal? Coincidental?
leebert (19:39:58) :
The last fat lady to sing then would be what? Isotopic proxies of 10Be & 14C?
The problem with the radionuclides is that different ice cores or tree-ring series give different results and there are calibration issues as well. A good example of some of the problems with the 10Be record can be found here:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI%20From%20McCracken%20HMF.pdf and here: http://www.leif.org/research/Comment%20on%20McCracken.pdf
The final word here is not in as you remark. In time, these things will sorted out. We should not draw too hasty conclusions on the preliminary data we are still trying to understand.
One of the problems with the 10Be record is the deep ‘drop-outs’ every 100 years or so, see page 2 and 3 in: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI%20From%20McCracken%20HMF.pdf Comparisons with other proxies [geomagnetic activity] suggest that these drop-outs are spurious. They also coincide with significant volcanic eruptions that produced large quantities of sulphur-rich aerosols, which in turn influences the deposition of 10Be. But, as I said, in due time, we’ll figure all this out. It will be an interesting journey.
Leif Svalgaard (07:58:37) :
For the record, I believe the climate undergoes swings: MWP, LIA, modern warming, possible cooling coming. I do not believe these swings are caused by the Sun. Or rather, I believe that the scientific case has not been made that they are. This means in my book that they could have been caused by the Sun, just that we have no evidence that they are, or, rather, that the ‘evidence’ presented is too weak to convince me. You may be convinced, that is your problem.
One does not have to be convinced to observe what’s going on all around you, one only has to take the time to look.
Theories, this isn’t about the whys and hows, it’s about what’s going on for well over a year now.
We are in a deep extended lull, and it’s quieter now up there than it’s been in a very long time, and there are phenomena going on that science has run away from, preferring to dwell in theory rather than informing.
I get the feeling I’m talking to government scientists paid to keep this swept neatly under a rug.
All this ‘nobody can tell, maybe we’ll know in 100 yrs maybe not, gosh we could be wrong’ stuff is analysis paralysis.
We know from the Maunder and Dalton minimums what happened in Europe and North America. We know from the Spanish missions what went on with their crops on the West Coast when the sun went quiet. We see the same quiet sun and the very same things that happened then appear now.
When does it stop being merely interesting and take on the form of fair warning?
Leif:
I followed your replies to the numerous comments here and on Climate Audit Thread #8.
In answering all of the specific questions on these two threads regarding various theories, ideas, and speculation three broader questions remain in my mind.
1) Given the current understanding of the science what, in your professional opinion, are the remaining significant uncertainties (if any) regarding the influence of the sun and cosmos on earth’s climate?
2) Who (if anyone) is conducting research on those uncertain influences.
3) Is there any evidence that the IPCC is considering these uncertainties?
Your patience is phenomenal.
Keith
[…] only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar […]
If you want to check out a solar tide relationship to sunspots, take a look at http://www.heavens-above.com and click on solar system under astronomy. There, for August 2008, you will see Jupiter and Saturn postioned in what would be slightly past the last quarter of the moon in earth tide comparison. A time of very little tidal activity on Earth. It will be January of 2011 before Jupiter and Saturn come into Oppostion with the Sun. A time comparable to the New Moon phase on Earth which is a time of high and low tidal fluctuation. If Solar Tides caused by planet position have any effect on sunspots, the year of 2011 should see some marked increase in sunspot numbers.
Keith Wooster (10:36:34) :
remaining significant uncertainties (if any) regarding the influence of the sun and cosmos on earth’s climate?
You three questions are really three sides of the same coin [if you can imagine such one 🙂 ]. Claims of solar influences on weather and climate have been put forth ever since it was discovered that the Sun was not perfect [had blemishes in form of spots]. The Jesuit Giovanna Battista Riccioli speculated in 1651 that variations in the number of spots had considerable influence on the Earth. We are still struggling [rather unsuccessfully] to get a handle on that question. It seems to me that the issues of today are more political than scientific. The clearest way to progress is to remove politics [and emotionally laden wishful thinking and ideology] from the scientific pursuit of insight. Here it is not only about sun and climate [AGW], but also about numerous other things, like evolution [creationism], cosmology [the universe is 6000 years old], biology [immortal souls], etc. I have added [between brackets like these] some of the [weird] things that a large percentage of [supposedly educated and self-proclaimed rational] people believe in or pay lip-service to.
A fundamental problem is the [until now] uniqueness problem: we have only one planet with good data on climate, only one star with good data on activity, only one biosphere, only one sentient and articulate [even if not always rational] kind of beings.
Comparative studies go a long way towards a fuller understanding. The study of other planets, of boreholes on the Moon, of ice cores from Mars, of activity on solar-like stars, etc, will help us in separating the many simultaneous causes and effects in the extremely complicated physical systems we are part of. This is only now beginning [or near a beginning in the foreseeable future].
It is often said that more funding for science is key, and if we only give scientists more money all will be good. This is a misunderstanding of the reality of the human condition. We do not study science for the sake of science or truth or whatever [although some scientists may like to think so]. We study science and fund science and improve education only when and if there is something in it for us economically or ideologically [which in the end is also economically]. We go to the Moon, map the Ocean Bottom, set up vast networks of observatories or measuring stations, etc, because there is a perceived benefit derived from it. Even the ancient astronomers [e.g. Kepler] made horoscopes for their benefactors, because the benefactors thought it was to their own benefit. So, in the end, science is bound up with the goals and aspirations of society [although a small percentage of scientists manage to slip in some ‘pure’ science for their own fun and enjoyment].
A huge problem is the complexity of our environment [and possibly of ourselves, as well]. Public understanding of this is important, but the declining quality of science education [at least in the US, where Intelligent Design and such are creeping into the curriculum] makes it more difficult for the public to assess and weigh the societal effects of and need of scientific research. This is also a potential National Security Issue if other nations should pull ahead [think of a Chinese on Mars, or a Sputnik overhead]. Policy based on faulty science [e.g. Lysenkoism in the former USSR] can be disastrous.
So, back to your questions. What are the uncertainties? I’ll like to answer that by quoting Donald Rumsfeld: “there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns”. It is the latter that you are asking about, and if we knew, they wouldn’t be unknown unknowns. Maybe more dangerous are the things we know, that ain’t. I have a feeling that much of climate research belongs in that category.
I’m sorry for this long and rambling answer, which necessarily has taken on a somewhat personal flavor. There are no easy answers.
Jamie D. Tucker (12:08:18) :
It will be January of 2011 before Jupiter and Saturn come into Oppostion with the Sun
illustrate what I meant by the level of scientific understanding among the public. The Emperor that Kepler worked for would have been happy with this argument. Today we know, that the tidal effect of Jupiter is minuscule and that of Venus is much larger [~30 times] than that of Saturn.
“[at least in the US, where Intelligent Design and such are creeping into the curriculum] ” Leif
Why don’t we abolish the government school system and allow a diversity of viewpoints to be taught? Surely, the viewpoints closest to the truth will win out on a fair playing field?
As for ID, Newton and Einstein would come down in its favor, or do you disagree?
Giovanni, not Giovanna.
statePoet1775 (13:57:16) :
Why don’t we abolish the government school system and allow a diversity of viewpoints to be taught? Surely, the viewpoints closest to the truth will win out on a fair playing field?
Maybe, but the poor children that were taught the loosing viewpoint would suffer. Would you want your children to partake in such an experiment?
As for ID, Newton and Einstein would come down in its favor, or do you disagree?
They were products of their age. Certainly Newton. I would think that if Newton knew what we know today about biology, geology, and evolution, that he would not embrace ID. Einstein to my knowledge did not have an opinion on this.
Even I could have been taught better [or learned better}: “losing”. My excuse is, of course, that English is not my mother tongue.
Then, on the other hand, perhaps “loosing” was not so bad, after all. There strong and tight, and weak and loose lines of argument…
Dear Poet, I would believe in ID if it weren’t for the number of highly educated but woefully unintelligent humans that populate the Earth. And I must respond to your truth statement:
Truth can sometimes equal fact, and fact can sometimes equal truth. But it is dangerous to say that truth will win the day. It is not so dangerous to say that fact will win the day.
Pam,
I would chime in on that too. If I – me – am a product of the ID the Designer could come up with, that alone is a strong argument against her. 🙂
“Would you want your children to partake in such an experiment?” Lief
I wouldn’t mind having a Newton for a son. It is dangerous to put all our eggs in one basket. As you mentioned, millions of Soviets were misled with regard to genetics because of political reasons.
“Einstein to my knowledge did not have an opinion on this.” Lief
Einstein was a deist as far as I can figure, i.e., he believed in a Creator but not an Intervener .
“I would think that if Newton knew what we know today about biology, geology, and evolution” Lief
I read the mathematicians and the biologists broke up in 1964 over the origin of life.
Pam,
I am not arguing for ID but for academic freedom. In my world, YOU could pick a school (or even start one) that agreed with what you believed. Of course you could do that now, but with all the money people pay in taxes for government schools, only the rich can afford decent private schools.
Lief,
Actually, you are a good argument for a Creator. And wasn’t He nice to allow you to even be able to discover SOME things about the Universe?
statePoet1775 (15:31:02) :
“Would you want your children to partake in such an experiment?”
I wouldn’t mind having a Newton for a son. It is dangerous to put all our eggs in one basket.
You really didn’t answer the question. From what you did say it seems that you would put your son in a school with one viewpoint and your daughter in a school with the opposing viewpoint?
I believe there are schools that teach young students to hate certain people and to even develop goals to kill these people. And it is, I believe, their understanding of “truth” that has led to such schools. Yeh. I would want my next door neighbor to start that school. My hunch is that were it the case that anybody could start a school based on their own beliefs, the very people who advocated for such a method would soon be hollering to limit such schools.
statePoet1775 (15:47:21) :
Actually, you are a good argument for a Creator. And wasn’t He nice to allow you to even be able to discover SOME things about the Universe?
I consider that my accomplishment, not something She allowed me to do.
Leif: “Maybe, but the poor children that were taught the loosing viewpoint would suffer. Would you want your children to partake in such an experiment?”
What experiment? Science is an experiment, and is always changing, “self -correcting” if you will. Many things kids are taught turn out to be incorrect, or just plain wrong. You beliefs are showing when you claim they would be taught the “losing viewpoint”, but what StatePoet actually said was to teach a variety of viewpoints, and having a “fair playing field” where the “true” viewpoint will win out. I’d interpret “playing field” to be taught critical analysis, and “true” to be the most valid at the moment.
The view of many here in the US is to allow students access to and analyze a variety of “viewpoints”, and that the teaching of critical learning skills is much more important than teaching the current mainstream view. Those mainstream views have been wrong before. ID and AGW are very much alike now in this respect, with views skeptical discussion of AGW being suppressed, as is ID.
I think this thread is coming too close to spiralling into a religious discussion,
but as evolution is a “fact” and “discussion over” compared to ID, so is AGW a
“fact” and “discussion over”. Is that how you see AGW? Which is the “losing
viewpoint”, and which viewpoint do you hold?
“From what you did say it seems that you would put your son in a school with one viewpoint and your daughter in a school with the opposing viewpoint?” Lief
I would put both in the best school(s) I could find best on MY beliefs. That is the best I can do. But I would expect you to pick the best school(s) according to YOUR beliefs. Isn’t freedom wonderful? We both do the best we can for our children but yet an experiment is run for the benefit of future generations.
typo, first “best” = “based”. When i wax eloquent, typos abound.
typo on previous typo, i meant second “best”. My poetic license is about to be canceled.
Leif:
Let me rephrase the question.
The IPCC AR4 summary identifies solar radiative forcing as a small natural factor in warming. The scientific literature, this blog and many others abound with ideas on which you have commented.
Are there solar and/or cosmic factors potentially influencing earth’s climate for which the science is still immature and that are worth further scientific research?
If so who is doing research in those areas?
Keith
Glenn and StatePoet:
Solid science education is not about ‘viewpoints’ of ‘beliefs’. We shouldn’t teach our children that some say the Earth is flat and that others say it is round and that it is up to them to sort out for themselves which is correct. We shouldn’t teach our children that some say that the Universe is 6000 years old and that others say that it is 13.7 billion years old and that it is up to them to sort out for themselves which is correct. We should not teach our children that some say that natural selection provides a mechanism for evolution of higher life and that others say that an Alien Designer put everything in place at day one and that it is up to them to sort out for themselves which is correct. We should not teach our children that some say that there is but one god and XXX is his prophet and that others say there are thousands of gods and that people may be reincarnated as deserved forever and ever and that it is up to them to sort out for themselves which is correct. We should not teach our children that some say that our planet is going to fry and that some say that we are entering a new ice age and then that it is up to them to sort out for themselves which is correct, etc, etc.
We should teach them what the result of hundreds of years of experiments and thought have shown us to be the best explanations we have at the moment, how the scientific method works, and how new data and insights always can modify what we hold as current ‘knowledge’; that ‘science’ is never ‘settled’, but that science is based on a number [actually a rather small number] of ‘crucial’ experiments that form the basis for that interlocking set of wonderful explanations for the natural world, and that new knowledge often supersede what we thought we knew . We should also teach them about human follies and the propensity of humans for delusion and fraud, but also about our capacity for goodness and love.
And we should not make all those choices for them by having them conform to our own beliefs. If I think the Earth is flat, that XXX is His prophet, that blood transfusions are sinful, that the Earth was created last Tuesday, I should not inflict those follies upon my children. That is freedom taken too far. A child should have the right to the best, society can do for it. Granted that it often doesn’t work that way, but I see it as a desired goal.
“I consider that my accomplishment, not something She allowed me to do.” Lief
No matter how hard one tries, one must have TALENT. And you have it with regard to science. But also, I’ve read that the solar system is currently above the galactic plane which is too dusty for much astronomy. “Who ordered that?” We would only be able to see a few thousand stars if we were in the galactic plane. There are many coincidences in science that line up to make science “do able”. I think this is called “discoverability”.
It seems to me the universe has been set up to encourage learning but also to instill some humility too.
Leif, it IS “up to them to sort out for themselves which is correct, etc, etc.”
Eventually. If you deny the realities of their lives and beliefs of their families, you ignore the opportunity for them to be taught and employ objective decisions when they are in school. I think you should think about this some more.
As to not teach that some say the Earth is flat, I say that would be an excellent lesson, to find out how we know it isn’t. We learn by taking part, not by being stuffed full of what is always claimed to be “fact”. You are right that science is never “settled”, but to listen to most scientists, and in textbooks, it appears so. Till the next lesson.
Lief,
I might consider a school run by you but you would have to assure me that you would stick to what is known by science. I would not have you destroying “the earth is 6000 years old” straw men, for instance.
Keith Wooster (17:45:01) :
The IPCC AR4 summary identifies solar radiative forcing as a small natural factor in warming. The scientific literature, this blog and many others abound with ideas on which you have commented.
Yes, maybe it is good to get back on topic. If solar forcing [not just radiative but of any kind] is but small and insignificant as claimed by IPCC then there are questions as to what have caused climatic swings in the past, like the MWP or the LIA. One ‘solution’ to that problem is to deny that these swings exist. Since we are forced to work with proxies for those earlier times, research into proxies seems to be a must. when dealing with proxies there are always the danger of selection effects. Which proxy? Which time series to use? What corrections and adjustments to apply? Access to and archiving of proxies. And even access to the scientific literature. Most papers are ‘pay-walled’ and cost a fair amount of money [~$30] to access. The public is not going to shell out money to read a paper that it may not even fully understand. Most of the ideas that the public come across are seen through the distorting view of the Internet (if I do a search on Google on ‘climate change’ I get 60,200,000 hits – just did it), put there by ‘advocates’ and interest groups rather than by scientists. Many of these ideas are simple-minded and not scientific accurate or viable.
Are there solar and/or cosmic factors potentially influencing earth’s climate for which the science is still immature and that are worth further scientific research?
I think there the fundamental science is mature enough. What is lacking is data series that are long enough and good enough. An example is the question about Earth’s albedo, supposedly influenced by clouds, in turn supposedly influenced by cosmic rays. Cosmic rays have been monitored accurately for a long time, but the albedo has not. I have commented on the measurements of the albedo using Earthshine reflected off the Moon by Palle and colleagues, but their measurements only go back a decade or so, not long enough to provide compelling answers [climate is a 30-year ‘thing’]
Another example is the disagreements about the calibration of TSI. Good measurements with reliable calibration only go back to 2003 by the TIM instrument on SORCE. Can we find the funding to continue these measurements indefinitely. Yet another example is the measurements of the Sun’s magnetic field by the Wilcox Solar Observatory since 1976. The WSO has difficulties finding [the very modest, less than $100K/year] funding needed to continue. Same thing with other solar measures, F10.7, flare-patrols, etc. The argument is always: “but you have measured this for decades, what more do you need?”
There are novel proxies, like leaf size and shape, see Dana Royer’s work athttps://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/droyer/web/publications.htm and I have already mentioned ‘off Earth’ proxies of the future. In my own field, there is a wealth of 19th century data that has not been digitized and therefore cannot be processed with modern methods, see e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/IAGA2008LS.pdf
“I believe there are schools that teach young students to hate certain people and to even develop goals to kill these people. ” Pam
Oh, well. No one consulted me about immigration laws. But be that as it may, it is still the PARENT’S right to decide how their children will be educated. In the end, the truth will win given a fair chance. The government is too blunt and bloody an instrument to be used for every problem.
statePoet1775 (18:07:59) :
It seems to me the universe has been set up to encourage learning but also to instill some humility too.
I personally agree with Steven Weinberg [google him] that “the more we learn about the universe, the more it seems to be pointless”. I would add that we can give it the meaning and the point that it seems to lack.
Glenn (18:15:05) :
I think you misunderstood me [I was not clear enough]. We should teach the children how to think, but not by burdening them with outmoded and false ideas.
As to not teach that some say the Earth is flat, I say that would be an excellent lesson, to find out how we know it isn’t
I disagree, we don’t need to tell them why it isn’t flat, we simply show them the picture of the Earth rising over the Moon’s horizon, or from a stationary weather satellite. This is not ‘stuffing them with fact’, it is showing them the wonderful world they live in.
Leif,
I have long since forgotten the math to solve the equations, and rely on understandings I developed while I could still solve them. Most times I can figure out what you are talking about, but in this case I am at a loss.
That is true, the magnetic field of the Sun and the Earth are indeed connected, but the influence is one-way from the Sun to the Earth. The reason is that the magnetic field is ‘frozen’ into the solar wind and moves with it. In a plasma, like the solar wind, the effect of a change of the magnetic field travels as a wave [much like a sound wave] called an Alfven wave [after the Swedish physicist Hannes Alfven who in the 1940s discovered this]. The speed of these waves is called the Alfven speed and serves much the same role as the speed of sound, to ‘communicate’ changes of physical characteristics of the medium. Much as we have a ‘Mach’ number for sound waves, there is also an ‘Alfvenic Mach’ number for a plasma. For the solar wind that number is typically around 11, meaning that the solar wind moves away from the Sun 11 times faster than magnetic changes can move towards the Sun. It is like you trying to swim upriver at 1 mile an hour in a stream that runs downriver at 11 miles an hour; you just won’t get upstream.
Is this the propagation of EM though a moving medium? I had always considered the magnetopause to be a cool point where forces are balanced (rather like the center of gravity) but never considered there was a real effect there. I would have thought the low density of the medium prevented a measurable effect?
Glenn,
I would send my child to a school where something close to my viewpoint was taught. I worked very hard to get it. Let OTHER parents decide on competing viewpoints.
Raphael (19:22:43) :
Most times I can figure out what you are talking about, but in this case I am at a loss.
The Wikipedia article here is actually quite good;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamics
Please don’t hesitate if you have specific questions.
At the magnetosphere boundary there is a balance between the kinetic energy [“the dynamic pressure”] of the solar wind and the magnetic energy [“the magnetic pressure”] in the geomagnetic field. This balance results in a “standoff” between the two media. The ‘standoff-distance’ is about 10 Earth radii, but varies [up to an order of magnitude] with the varying solar wind.
Lief,
I’ve just read Steven Weinberg’s “A Designer Universe?” at http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_weinberg.cfm
It is very good but I think I see weakness in some of his arguments.
I need to read it again (and again and again). And I am not quite sure how definite he is in his conclusions.
Thanks for the tip.
The length of the current cycle appears to be approaching 12 years.
http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html
If true, this makes it the longest on record since ca. 1800.
So, it looks like this is cooler stuff, and if it goes on another year, we are looking at really cold stuff.
However you want to look at it.
Is there any conscensus on just how long SC23 has been going on?
Robert Bateman (01:52:53)
“The length of the current cycle appears to be approaching 12 years.
http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html
If true, this makes it the longest on record since ca. 1800.
So, it looks like this is cooler stuff, and if it goes on another year, we are looking at really cold stuff.”
Possibly – but cycle 20 was 11 years and 7 months and this was followed by the late 20th century warming, so it’s perhaps a bit premature to declare certain cooling.
LEIF
I have noted that whenever the standoff postion drops below 10Re [say 7-9], usually as the result of a significant solar dynamic pressure pulse of say over 5-10 nPA [ but 10 nPa and if this lasts for many hours and if the magnetic field is ‘south’ , the AMSU satellite temperatures show a spike in our atmosphere staring at 56000 feet and all the way down to 3300 feet. The temperature spike starts at the 56000 foot level and works its way all the way to 3300 feet , often for 1-2 days and more . You can observe this during the current month on AUGUST 8 & 9 , and again August 12 &13 and possibly August 16.
Is there any conscensus on just how long SC23 has been going on?
It officially began in May, 1996, making it now about 12 yrs, 3 mos. and counting. Funny, since two years ago “scientist” Hathaway said SC24 should begin “any time now”.
Bundle up. Eddy Minimum, here we come.
Bruce Cobb (07:40:59) :
two years ago “scientist” Hathaway said SC24 should begin “any time now”.
Bruce, it is not correct to put quotation marks around scientist. Hathaway is a good scientist, he just happens to be wrong on this particular prediction. It is a hallmark of science that it can be wrong, otherwise it would just be dogma.
REPLY: I agree with Leif, the man has the credentials. While such credentials offer a probability that the bearer will like be correct about science more often than one without, it doesn’t offer a guarantee. And being wrong and learning from those mistakes is often just as useful but by no means reason to minimize the person. Hathaway may come around yet. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.
Apparently Hathaway’s solar theory needs more work. I don’t fault him for his revisions but for a solar theory to be proven correct it will probably require at least two or more solar cycles. You can approach being 100 percent correct if you keep modifying your prediction with current data. Even if a theory predicts accurately the duration and peak of a solar cycle that is a great accomplishment the curvature or number of monthly sunspots may be much more difficult to predict.
John Finn (07:17:15) :
Robert Bateman (01:52:53)
“The length of the current cycle appears to be approaching 12 years.
http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html
If true, this makes it the longest on record since ca. 1800.
So, it looks like this is cooler stuff, and if it goes on another year, we are looking at really cold stuff.”
Possibly – but cycle 20 was 11 years and 7 months and this was followed by the late 20th century warming, so it’s perhaps a bit premature to declare certain cooling.
If it goes on another year, it will be 13 yrs. That was my point, this cycle is already longer than 20, and we seem to be dealing with thresholds when it comes to solar cycles. There is little point in trying to predict now, all the models have problems. Perhpaps that is because they are built around shorter cycles trends, I don’t know.
What’s left is to relate, and as long as this sc23 continues, the # of cycles and patterns that follow get increasingly restricted.
Reaching past 12 yrs and on into 13 years puts us backat least to 1800 and the Dalton.
It hasn’t happened yet, but it also hasn’t stopped lengthening.
Where do YOU put the start of SC23? Oct, 1996? Some say May, 1996 with smoothed monthly at 8.5.
For the former, SC23 is at 11yrs 10 mos., for the latter, SC23 is at 12 yrs 3 mos.
Leif,
My atrophied math skills are definately going to get in the way of my understanding easily.
At the magnetosphere boundary there is a balance between the kinetic energy [“the dynamic pressure”] of the solar wind and the magnetic energy [“the magnetic pressure”] in the geomagnetic field.
While I admire models which allow understanding, I do not see this prohibitting the propagation of the earth’s magnetic field.
If we look at the problem from the rest frame of the solar wind, this pressure problem disappears, leaving only the propagation of the wave form of a virtual photon through a medium. This leads back to the density of the medium to prevent propagation.
I really don’t want to read an internet’s worth of MHD, so my specific question is: Does MHD have a “problem” with a frozen in state and a low density plasma?
Raphael (13:45:05) :
my specific question is: Does MHD have a “problem” with a frozen in state and a low density plasma?
No, it does not. In fact the Sun’s magnetic field is frozen into the solar wind and is transported to where the solar wind goes, i.e. away from the Sun. Recall, that the original problem was to what extent the Earth’s magnetic field could act upon the Sun, and the answer is that it cannot, because the solar wind moves away from the Sun much faster than an Alfven wave can move towards to Sun. If you turned off the solar wind, then the Earth’s dipolar magnetic field would engulf the Sun [but be very, very, …, very weak]. Now, turn on the solar wind. When the solar wind plasma meets the Earth’s magnetic field [extending to the Sun] the field freezes into the plasma and moves with it away from the Sun. I have, by now, forgotten what your problem with all this was.
Raphael (13:45:05) :
my specific question is: Does MHD have a “problem” with a frozen in state and a low density plasma?
Perhaps I should try to treat the problem the same way as it was originally approached by Chapman and Ferrarro in ~1930. As the solar wind nears the Earth, it will see a varying dipole field where dB/dt gets larger and larger as the wind nears the Earth. This induces an electric current that produces a magnetic field ‘mirroring’ the Earth’s dipole, thereby confining the Earth’s magnetic field to a small ‘cavity’ that we today call the ‘magnetosphere’ [coined by Thomas Gold]. Here is a brief explanation of this process:
http://arc.iki.rssi.ru/mirrors/stern/Education/bh1-3.html
Leif,
Thanks for trying to help me understand. I realize now there should have never been a misunderstanding on my part. I had a temporary case of stupid. I was a bit too distracted by what you were saying and failed to apply the terms to my existing imagery and follow it though.
[…] only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar […]
And the last sunspot was an SC23. Area 1000 I believe they called it.
12 years long it is. Not the granddaddy, but a long one indeed.
What if SC24 has already begun, but it has so little impetus that it won’t be recognizable until 2-3 years down the road?
Chilling.
Leif,
Thanks!
And just to add to the fun…. have you seen this?
NEW CLIMATE RECORD SHOWS SOLAR-DRIVEN MEGA-DROUGHTS
http://news.research.ohiou.edu/news/index.php?item=503
There’s such a tempting – and seemingly more than anecdotal or coincidental history of solar influences on Earth’s climate – that I feel we should carefully frame the way long-term TSI is relegated as a lesser climate factor.
If TSI is less variable than previously believed, then the ramifications are manifold & seem to me as posing some fascinating quandaries. The mystery compounds, and if cosmic rays aren’t the answer (not to say they aren’t, b/c we agree the jury’s still out on GCR flux) then Earth’s climate is far more responsive to solar influnces than previously known, and by association, could also be more sensitive to other forcings.
However, this may not be the case, because TSI and greenhouse gases aren’t fungible. As I’ve pointed out before, TSI has slackened by the equivalent of -0.1 degrees Celsius since circa 1992 with a functional -0.065 degrees C/decade effect, while Earth’s albedo has been boosted by aerosols with a nearly -0.07 degrees C/decade effect (Ramanathan, Carmichael, 2008). The net effect is -0.135 degrC/decade effect, with a concurrently stable global temperature trend of slight cooling in the seas & air.
But the point in all this is that TSI’s direct effects are more or less linear, but CO2’s effect is not — it’s logarithmic. If GCR flux doesn’t prevail as a major player, a lesser role for TSI puts a new wrinkle in CO2’s logarithmic effect — perhaps more intense at lower concentrations, greater saturation at higher concentrations.
The upshot of this is that the sun & aerosols have offset (or masked) the effects of greenhouse gases by the same amount. If these two trends don’t abate & temperatures remain stable, I feel we might have a pretty solid indicator of total GHG effects at +0.135 degrC/decade – not a scary AGW result at all, in my mind. Unprecedented? Maybe…. Less than ideal? Perhaps. Dangerous? I don’t see it.
[…] only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar […]
[…] only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar […]
[…] only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar cycle. As we reported last week, the Armagh observatory, which has been […]
[…] only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar […]
The global cooling isn’t on the nightly news, and the public is blissfully unaware of it.
They don’t even know what Solar Minima means, much less deep Solar Minima.
The Media pounds green to fight Global Warming, and the average Joe thinks it’s the latest cup of tea.
[…] only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar […]
Courtesy of Kuhnkat at Jennifer’s:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/tsi_data/daily/SORCE_L3_TSI_DM_V0008_20030225_20080812.txt
Note TSI at earth distance. Including the albedo, UV associated with solar flaring, and solarwind/geomagnetic fluctuations the energy absorbed by the earth varies >10%.
I see a harmonic relationship between the 188 yr cycle and the oft out-of-sync 243 yr cycle that plays a big role in ending the minimum of note (like the oort, wolf, maunder, etc.).
astro-ph, 2006 June 27
LONG-TERM VARIABILITY IN THE LENGTH OF THE SOLAR CYCLE
The Minimum are triggered by very long SC’s as measured from minima to minima. They are ended in the relationship of where the Minimum started on the curves of the 243 yr cycle and whether the 188 yr cycle was rising or falling when the Minimum began. Another 1000 yrs of data would be helpful, but the relationships are harmonious and neat.
Looking at the sunspot cycle length for the triggers the lead to the Maunder and the Dalton Minimums, a preceeding minima to minima plus maxima to maxima of an average of 14 yrs or longer suffices to ‘pull the trigger’.
So, we would need SC24 to start at 2010.5 and maxima at 2014.3 to have a new Minimum of record firing mechanism, or any combination of SC24 start and SC24 maxima that leads to an average of 14 yrs from the SC23 start and SC23 maxima. i.e. – sc24 start of 2010 and sc24 maxima of 2015 would do.
[…] the truth is that we are NOT at a 100 year high (days w/o sunspots). Not even close. At wattsupwiththat: Adding up every daily blank sun for the past three years, we find that the current solar minimum […]
[…] It didn’t take long for nature to show the IPCC was wrong. Excuses were equally quick to appear. For example, they said it was El Nino but that turned out to be a non-event. Of course, the IPCC couldn’t get the right answer for the cooling trend because it was not programmed in the computer. While they include solar activity they only consider one aspect – the electromagnetic spectrum. Meanwhile they studiously avoided any discussion of the clear relationship between sunspot activity and temperature. They claimed there was no mechanism to explain the correlation so it could not be included, but that is incorrect. A very valid mechanism known as the Cosmic Theory (Svensmark and Calder, “The Chilling Stars”) has been in the literature with increasing detail since 1991. The date is important because IPCC claimed it was excluded because it was not published in time to meet their cut off date for consideration. Solar activity has declined since a peak at the end of the 20th century. There have been virtually no sunspots for over 400 days. […]
I just found out about a putative influence of Saturn and Jupiter on sunspots after seeing a reference to it the account of Velikovsky’s last of his numerous meetings with Einstein.
http://www.varchive.org/bdb/meeting.htm
(Velikovsky’s ideas for why the coupling exist aside, the relation does seem to exist, whatever the cause.)
Here are some links I’ve found pertinent to the Jupiter/Saturn/Solar interaction. I don’t know which, if any, are reliable, but they look like they might provide at least some useful information.
http://lep694.gsfc.nasa.gov/gunther/gunther/MikulaSS2006Article.pdf
http://www.john-daly.com/topevnts.htm
http://www.jupitersdance.com/
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1979stiw.conf..193M
http://www.predictweather.co.nz/assets/articles/article_resources.php?id=89
But my question is, IS ANYONE USING THIS INFORMATION TO PREDICT WHAT TO EXPECT FOR SS24? IF SO, WHERE CAN I FIND IT?