This is unusual. A live media teleconference on the sun. Even more unusual is this statement:
The sun’s current state could result in changing conditions in the solar system.
As you may recall, I posted an entry about the Ulysses mission back on June 16th and the findings of a lowered magnetic field in the sun, from the JPL press release then:
Ulysses ends its career after revealing that the magnetic field emanating from the sun’s poles is much weaker than previously observed. This could mean the upcoming solar maximum period will be less intense than in recent history.
We live in interesting times.
Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
MEDIA ADVISORY : M08-176
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/sep/HQ_M08176_Ulysses_teleconference.html
NASA To Discuss Conditions On And Surrounding The Sun
WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a media teleconference Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 12:30 p.m. EDT, to discuss data from the joint NASA and European Space Agency Ulysses mission that reveals the sun’s solar wind is at a 50-year low. The sun’s current state could result in changing conditions in the solar system.
Ulysses was the first mission to survey the space environment above and below the poles of the sun. The reams of data Ulysses returned have changed forever the way scientists view our star and its effects. The venerable spacecraft has lasted more than 17 years – almost four times its expected mission lifetime.
The panelists are:
— Ed Smith, NASA Ulysses project scientist and magnetic field instrument investigator, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
— Dave McComas, Ulysses solar wind instrument principal investigator, Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
— Karine Issautier, Ulysses radio wave lead investigator, Observatoire de Paris, Meudon, France
— Nancy Crooker, Research Professor, Boston University, Boston, Mass.
Reporters should call 866-617-1526 and use the pass code “sun” to participate in the teleconference. International media should call 1-210-795-0624.
To access visuals that will the accompany presentations, go to:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/ulysses-20080923.html
Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live at:
– end –
h/t to John Sumpton
As usual, i show my inadequacies by screwing up the URL. So I have learned my lesson. It can also be accessed by the following name [that WordPress will not stumble over]
“A readable version of that was given by Ed cliver at a meeting last year at Perugia, Italy” : http://www.leif.org/research/SSN%20Validation-Reconstruction%20-Cliver.pdf
Walt,
At the bottom of the page on your first citation was this question:
“What does a spotless day look like? ”
That’s pretty funny. I think we all know what it looks like. There is a new picture of one right on this page nearly every day!
Glen,
As an example of how to conduct a critique of a scientific paper I offer my own referee report on Dikpati et al.’s sunspot prediction paper. Please read it carefully:
http://www.leif.org/research/Dikpati%20Referee%20Report.pdf
What’s this about Lockwood?
“There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth’s pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.”
http://publishing.royalsociety.org/media/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf
Leif, the main issue between us has been whether there is a correlation between SI and temp. From this recent paper from Lockwood above you can see they do not dispute a correlation, except for the last 20 years.
This is just one more example that supports my understanding. Of the last 20 years,
“they argue that this historical link between the Sun and climate came to an end about 20 years ago. Here we rebut their argument comprehensively.”
http://www.spacecenter.dk/publications/scientific-report-series/Scient_No._3.pdf
Were TSI flattened out over the last couple hundred years, another mechanism besides solar energy would be needed to explain the temperature differences that have occured. “Natual variability”, “AMO” or “PDO” won’t do unless a specific causitive mechanism(s) comes with the explanation.
[…] via Watts up with that […]
Glenn (21:39:47) :
What’s this about Lockwood?
I’m not referring to the Lockwood and Froehlich paper. Your confusion comes in because you do not take the trouble to read the papers I referred to. If you had, you would have seen that an important ingredient in Solanki’s and Lean’s and Wang’s reconstruction of TSI is an presumed doubling [nay, more than a doubling] of the Sun’s magnetic field. This causes ‘background’ level of TSI on which the sunspot cycle variation rides to increase over time [even more than the cycle itself from min to max]. The Solanki model you referred to was based on the same effect. The doubling of the sun’s magnetic field was first proposed by myself in 1977-78 based on a rise of the geomagnetic aa-index. Lockwood et al. extended that analysis through 1995 in a very famous paper in Nature and that result has been embedded in many models and reconstructions. In about 2002 I realized that I had been wrong. We discovered that the aa-index which was the basis for all this was incorrectly calibrated [a finding that is now finally accepted] before 1957. For high activity the error is not large, but for the small activity at the beginning of the 20th century is was large, 40%. In addition, Lockwood et al. had used the recurrence tendency of aa to infer the solar wind speed. This seemed to work well 1963-1995 [with some exceptions in the late 1960s], but since it was just a [albeit strong] correlation and not based on physics, the relation failed miserably after 1995, especially in 2003. This often happens if you equate correlation with causality and use the correlation on new data not used to establish the correlation. Bottom line, the doubling didn’t happen, but all the models etc still continue to use the old obsolete inference of the sun’s magnetic field, even James Hansen in his latest 2007 paper where he uses Lean’s 2000 TSI reconstruction [also used by shindell and Co.] not knowing [or worse: ignoring] the fact that the doubling did not happen [not even Lean believes in her old reconstruction].
Again, digging up papers older than 2008 [and even some very new ones] is apt to find papers based on old data that neither Lockwood nor Lean believe in anymore. It takes several years before such misconceptions are flushed out of the system. I have given you material enabling you to be ahead of the curve on this, but you have steadfastly refused to look at them. This is no way to conduct a serious discussion.
Glenn (21:39:47) :
You had asked for URLs to peer-reviewed published papers on this, here is one:
paper
Please, at least take a look at it. Your refusal to do so is so foreign to my experience as a scientist dealing with other scientists that I have a hard time coping with it. Maybe it has been useful for me to come down from the ivory tower and meet real people.
Of interest to the topic of this thread, allow me to quote the last paragraph of the paper I just referred to:
“Our debate with Lockwood and colleagues on the long-term evolution of the coronal magnetic field and the solar wind may be resolved within the next few years if our prediction [Svalgaard et al., 2005] of a solar maximum with peak sunspot number comparable to that of cycle 14 bears out. If so, direct measurements of solar wind properties during conditions similar to those during the previous minimum of the Gleissberg cycle would take the estimates of IMF B out of the realm of extrapolation. It is noteworthy that the IDV index (and thus B, regardless of regression method) for 2006 (based on the first 7 months only, but expected to fall further as we approach solar minimum) is already the lowest in the last 94 years.”
I think that the NASA people will be reporting a similar conclusion nicely confirming our prediction.
‘if the second there is no delay in the cooling so why would there be a delay in the warming? If you selectively invoke delays here and there, you can match anything.’
It has to work both ways if there is to be warming & cooling delays. Yes, that is what I was trying to get at. The oceans are a great sink. Takes what, 1,000 yrs for it to circulate all the way down to the deep parts. Did previous warming upset a subclimate and force a radical change in circulation to upwell some of the deep water? And what about cooling?
Proving a negative is always hard. “Prove that you are not the disguised Queen of the Space Unicorns,” is one famous example. The real lesson of the “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” adage is that the absence is relevant when a good-faith, persistent, competent search for such evidence has been done. And then there is still always the possibility that evidence of presence (non-absence) may be lurking somewhere you didn’t think to look. So absence is always a matter of (guesstimated) probability. That’s presuming that the “absence” in question is not a completely inane formulation, and you’ll have to rely on your own judgment to define “inane” in each case.
As for “experts” having a lower chance of being wrong, that depends. Bertrand Russell once put it something like this: “If the experts are agreed, it is not intellectually safe to be certain of the opposite position. If they are disagreed, it is not intellectually safe to be certain of any opinion.” Implicit is that since experts disagree rather frequently, some must necessarily be wrong. Even if they’re all agreed; something may yet prove them ALL wrong, though the odds are lower than for one side in a 50:50 split.
[…] other post talks about recent NASA observations that the magnetic field of the Sun is at a 50 year low. This […]
If we didn’t have changes in our climate over the centuries, we wouldn’t be looking for the reasons why. It’s human nature to want to know why, not just scientific curiosity.
It especially important to humans to know why when all they have between continued existence or extinction is a few degrees C and a few PPT of that..
Trust me when I say that if science can’t do any better than “oh, this is normal” when things start happening that nobody in living memory has seen, everybody & his brother is going to be filling in the gaps
This is the 21st century, the days of the masses following every word of somebody’s edict are over.
All I can say for NASA is they need another Carl Sagan to deliver.
Anthony,
You (and Leif) claim that you are trying to promote scientific discussion
here and yet you immediately close down any plausible scientifc arguements that you don’t like.
I recently published a paper in a respected peer review journal (PASA Publication of the Astronomical Society of Australia) from the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization – Australia) which raised the posibility that there may be a spin obrbit-coupling mechanism between an (as yet unknown) phenomenon asociated with the the barycentric motion of the Sun and the equitorial rotation rate of the Sun. In this paper we openly admit that mechanism for this spin-orbit coupling is as yet unknown. However, we present observational evidence that is difficult to dismiss out of hand.
I realize that Barycentrism has a large non-scientific following and that any mention of it brings out a flood of psuedo-scientists who have no trouble throwing scientific principles to the wind. But I feel that you and Leif are too hasty in dismissing this idea out of hand.
I am the first to admit that until we find a plausible (scientifcally-valid) physical mechanism for producing the spin-orbit coupling, we need to remain
very wary. However, I have data covering the years 1874 to 2005, that allows me to predict that equitorial rotation rate of the Sun between 2010 – 2025 will be (significantly) higher than the rotation rate between 1986 and 2002. This prediction is based upon the assumption that the spin-orbit coupling pattern that has existed from 1874 to 2005 will continue for another 15 years.
I would ask you have an open enough mind to at least acknowledge that if my prediction turns out be correct [we have only 2 years to wait) that you might consider the possiblity that such a spin-otrbit coupling may exist.
Reply – I don’t speak for Anthony, but I am a fan of Barycenterism to an extent. Leif holds an opposite view and presents strong arguments against it. Both of us are skeptic of AGW. Discuss away but be prepared for the counter arguments – Dee Norris
REPLY: Dee moderates in EST for me. We’ve had lots of discussion here on Barycentrism in the past, so your claim that I’ve “shut it down” is not quite accurate. I learned much about it since then and well, I’m skeptical of it. So yes, my statement of “it will not be well received here” is accurate. I’d also say the same thing if somebody launched a discussion on Kirlian photography. – Anthony
Robert Bateman: Sorry about the length of this and its off-topic tone. You wrote, “The oceans are a great sink. Takes what, 1,000 yrs for it to circulate all the way down to the deep parts. Did previous warming upset a subclimate and force a radical change in circulation to upwell some of the deep water? And what about cooling?”
To confuse matters more, there are shorter cycles for Thermohaline Circulation/Meridional Overturning Circulation. Shallow routes may take a few years; deeper routes, 2 to 3 decades. I’ve tried–trust me, I’ve tried–to get these oceanic oscillations to correlate with solar cycles. I’ve even attempted to combine TSI and volcanic aerosols to create an “apparent solar” data set. I’ve then made assumptions that major perturbations in SST caused by extremely large volcanic eruptions [Mayon of the Philippines (1766), Tambora in Indonesia (1815) and Nicaragua’s Coseguina (1835), which dwarfed Mount Pinatubo] were repeated at two different frequencies (26 and 32 years, timing of which is justified in the post) and at decreasing amplitudes, and when the two repeated signals came into synch, there would have been a greater decrease in SST. It “worked” with one very detailed South Pacific SST reconstruction from 1727 to 1997. I posted on it a couple of months ago here. The first two posts are lead-ins to the third.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/06/combined-solar-and-volcanic-aerosol.html
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/07/combined-solar-and-volcanic-aerosol.html
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/07/combined-solar-and-volcanic-aerosol_05.html
It’s pure conjecture and uses data sets that make it work. Does it prove anything? No. But it does illustrate that someone with a scientific background and with better tools than I have should look into it.
I’m now working on a post about hemispheric tropical SST for the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. I just finished most of the graphs of the Atlantic and one thing is very clear. THC/MOC upwelling points off Africa’s southwest and northwest coasts dictate the long-term variability of the Southern and Northern tropical Atlantic SST, respectively.
Which brings me to: THC/MOC in all major oceans have a major effect on global SST. Many times these signals are in synch, other times they’re out of phase. Climatologists create the AMO and PDO by subtracting global SST from the SST of the respective oceans. BUT, since the THC/MOC signals significantly contribute to the global SST, the effects are being masked by the global reference. No one has, as far as I can tell, attempted to remove all THC/MOC components from the global SST data set. With all of the THC/MOC signals removed, how much of an increase in 20th century SST would be left?
[…] is going to have a press conference on the Sun. Seems that solar winds are at a 50 year low in addition to the fact that there have been few solar […]
Robert Bateman (03:58:50): “This is the 21st century, the days of the masses following every word of somebody’s edict are over.”
Wish, my friend. Wish so much…
Ninderthana (04:54:41) :
However, I have data covering the years 1874 to 2005, that allows me to predict that equitorial rotation rate of the Sun between 2010 – 2025 will be (significantly) higher than the rotation rate between 1986 and 2002. This prediction is based upon the assumption that the spin-orbit coupling pattern that has existed from 1874 to 2005 will continue for another 15 years.
Perhaps you could show us what the solar rotation rate was in the past. A plot of the rotation rate since 1874.
Hi Lief,
I’ve read the upper oceans have something like a 10- to 20-year lag effect in response to thermally conductive heat exchange with the air, the deeper oceans of course show longer cycles. Seems to me there’d be some relationship…
I doubt science has any reliable way to model whether short- vs. long-term ocean heat exchange cycles coincide with solar activity of the past and present.
I still think someone could have some fun looking into the possibility of thermomagnetism in the seas — the effect of magnetic fields increasing heat conductivity of fluids with dissolved magnetic metals.
Well, hello leebert; you should return to DotEarth, the warmistas are getting sullen.
==========================================
leebert (06:57:01) :
I still think someone could have some fun looking into the possibility of thermomagnetism in the seas — the effect of magnetic fields increasing heat conductivity of fluids with dissolved magnetic metals.
There is no shortage of ideas. Another one is that we know [because we have directly measured it with satellites] that during geomagnetic activity currents are induced in the ionosphere. This same process also induces almost equally strong currents in the ground and the sea. A current produces heat [your electric range], so these currents heat the sea, etc, etc. If you work through the numbers, you find however that the temperature increase is way too small to be measurable. At this point you begin to invoke storage: “yeah, but a 0.00001 degree increase over long enough time must have some effect, etc”.
Leif Svalgaard (06:36:27) :
Ninderthana (04:54:41) :
Perhaps you could show us what the solar rotation rate was in the past. A plot of the rotation rate since 1874.
While we wait, we can discuss solar rotation in general. The Sun is a ball of gas and the ‘rotation’ we see at the surface [the Sun’s ‘atmosphere’ in a sense] is the sum of the ‘real’ rotation and a system of ‘winds’ or flows [called zonal flows [East-West] to distinguish them from the meridional flow (North-South)].
On the Earth you have a similar situation. An alien in space measuring the rotation rate of the Earth by studying how fast the clouds go around will discover the trade winds, the jet streams, etc. All these ‘flows’ are distinct from the Earth’s rotation rate. If you study Venus’ clouds you find that they ‘rotate’ 50 times faster than the surface below. So there is a strong shear, both on Earth and Venus [and it turns out on Jupiter and Saturn as well] between the surface and the flows in the atmosphere. On Earth, this shear [or difference] can drive sailing ships across the oceans.
There are also similar shears on the Sun. The very surface layers ‘rotate’ slower than the matter interior to the outer 4% of the Sun [in radius]. This slowing down is attributed to magnetic ‘stresses’ caused by solar activity [see references in our paper http://www.leif.org/research/ast10867.pdf ] . There are also spatial structures [‘torsional oscillations’ – bad name, but that is what they are called] seen in the flows. The various flows are small compared to the rotation itself, a few meters per second compared to the rotational 2000 m/sec.
We use helioseismology to study the rotation and the flows inside the Sun. A very good introduction can be found here http://www.yale.edu/yibs/Solar%20Variability%20Program/climate_forum_basu.ppt that comes from a recent meeting: http://www.yale.edu/yibs/Solar%20Variability%20Program/Solar%20Variability%20Program.pdf with lots of interesting papers.
The basic picture is that the rotation of the Sun does not vary, but there are lots of flows and ‘winds’ and shear and structures that do vary and that variation is due to, in part, solar activity. Solar activity is thought [by most solar physicists] to be generated deep within the sun, below where all those flows are.
The prevailing view is that those minute changes [~0.5% on top of the basic rotation rate] is caused by the activity, slowing down the flows. The helioseismology data only goes back a solar cycle and the errors in trying to determine the flows before the modern age are huge and any changes are uncertain and not generally accepted. The torsional oscillation has been observed for some thirty years, here is a link to what it looks like http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/torsional.html
To summarize, solar activity seems to control flows in the outer layers of the Sun [very small compared to solar rotation itself]. With declining solar activity {we would thus expect these flows to ease a bit and the ‘equatorial rotation rate’ of the Sun to increase slightly in the coming years}, a prediction not unique to the spin-orbit coupling picture. I would expect the spin-orbit coupling to be with the spin of the Sun [i.e. the base rotation] rather than with the structurely complicated very small flows in the outer layers of the Sun [meters per second vs. kilometers per second for the spin]. There is a spin-orbit coupling between the Moon and the Earth, not with Moon and the trade winds.
Note: {Material} edited per request of Leif Svalgaard – Anne
http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi/nx1.cgi
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadat/images.html
The sun has been changing with reduced solar wind ram pressures for some time now .This is more evident since 1990. Using OMNIWEB 27 day averages, the 1990 average was 2.8 nPa.The 2007 average was 1.92. To- date the average in 2008 is 1.74. During 2008 the average has dropped from 1.73 to 1.41, an 18% drop. The temperatures are also falling especially at the higher altitudes. Is there a connection?
Leif Svalgaard (17:24:16) :
“edcon (16:55:53) :
Since the sun basically consists of H and He what mechanism is responsible for the sun’s magnetic fields?
Nothing to do with iron [above the Curie temperature for FE anyway]. When the Sun was formed 5 billion years ago it ‘inherited’ a weak magnetic field from the Galaxy [If you ask where that came from, be prepared for a much longer answer OT]. The Sun’s matter is an electrically conducting plasma that moves around.”
Having worked in the power production field for a long time I understand how power is generated; however, I haven’t seen a large plasma generator though MHD was at one time considered a good prospect. It seems rather arcane as to how the galaxy could have induced a weak magnetic field in the sun 5 billion years ago but I need to investigate that further. The galaxy itself may be one giant dynamo of sort. I don’t think we understand exactly all the effects that we may encounter as our solar system moves through the galactic field and our galaxy moves through the local cluster & etc. May be we don’t have the “branes” yet!
I appreciate your comments and the time you spend responding to comments.
matt v. (09:16:29) :
The sun has been changing with reduced solar wind ram pressures for some time now.
The solar wind density that goes into the ram pressure calculation that you can find at the OMNI site is possibly too high during 1971-1999. Different spacecraft give different values for the density and Joe King who maintains the OMNI set is aware of the potential problem with the density [see http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/html/omni2_doc.html#norm ], but does not know how to correct in a non-objectionable way, so has opted for waiting with a final calibration until some more spacecraft data is available.
It is interesting that we have those problems all over the place: sunspots, solar wind data, temperature data, aa-index, TSI reconstructions, cosmic ray flux, etc. What it shows is that we are only at the beginning of the process of accounting for changes in our environment.
edcon (10:17:54) :
It seems rather arcane as to how the galaxy could have induced a weak magnetic field in the sun 5 billion years ago
It is like this: there is a weak magnetic field throughout the Galaxy [we know this in several ways, one is through Faraday rotation of polarized light from galactic sources]. The interstellar cloud from which the Sun formed was thus threaded already with a magnetic field. As the cloud contracted, the magnetic field following the matter was thus born into the Sun. Actually, the magnetic field of the ancient Sun was MUCH [perhaps 10,000 times] stronger than today and ‘solar activity’ was immense. The solar wind was furious too. The magnetic field of the solar wind worked as a brake on solar rotation [still does – but is very weak now] and slowed the Sun from a rotation period of typically one day to now 27 days.