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
stephen richards (13:27:35) :
There are two publications I refuse to even glance at:
Time Magazine
Scientific American
My dad was a long time reader of Time and I picked up the habit when I started my own family. Then I started noticing how the writers would get things ‘a little’ wrong on those topics I knew something about. Not blatant lies, just slight tweaking of the presentation, resulting in misleading conclusions. I decided if they were doing this on the things I know something about, what about the things I don’t know about?
I loved Scientific American as a student. Then I saw what they did to Bjørn Lomborg after the publication of the Skeptical Environmentalist. There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with someone, but they wouldn’t let him present his side of the story.
So, I suggest they should rename the publication as Political American and be done with it.
Glenn (22:05:16) :
Why do you make an issue of this SORCE statement being “careful” not to claim a causative connection? Why do you mention it at all now?
Simply because they know that it would not be scientifically correct to claim a causative connection.
Glenn (22:07:35) :
No, it isn’t the same thing. It’s from the SORCE website. Had they put up something about astrology, would you have said the same thing and ignored the fact that it was a statement on the SORCE website?
So, the SORCE website cites an obsolete paper by Willson, which you in turn cite as support for something you believe in [why otherwise cite it?] It is not what THEY put up, but what YOU decided was worth citing that matters. and you decided it was worth citing the reference to and the conclusion from that obsolete Willson paper.
Don’t forget now to tell us the text on slide 14 and your assessment of what it means.
And, folks & moderators, it is time for bed, but I’m not in a lather and I hope I have kept an even tone [with only the occasional barb when needed].
In my humble opinion all this fuss about TSI and how much it affects the temperatures etc etc is due to the difficulty the mind has of comprehending complex systems. That is systems that are not linearly causative but have many coupled connections that when written mathematically give rise to a system of coupled differential equations.
The brain likes things linear and imposes linear logic, cause and then effect. I have been following a series of lectures on complexity theory last year over many subjects, biology, chemistry, physics, by different researchers who are working with those tools in their discipline.
It aint simple. Even though I have followed a chaos course by G. Nikolis some time ago, it still is not simple to summarize in my head and create a reference set up for the way things are handled. I hope this year to be able to get a handle on this.
It should be clear though that the weather- turned -into -climate system of differential equations is one of the most complex systems that can be expressed. All the GCM are treating this huge complexity in linear terms, taking averages and making linear extrapolations. It is inevitable that they will fail, but it is also inevitable that there will be many believers. The human brain likes linearity.
As there are believers in the Sun as the motivator of change. It is hard for people to understand that there are many inputs and the output is not a direct cause and effect line.
I think it would be good for the climate modelers to stop and say like Socrates :” I know one thing that I know nothing” and start from scratch, studying and using complexity theory. There are already some studies using chaos theory, Tsonis et al for example. That is the way to go.
All this “it is the sun, stupid”, “it is CO2”, “it is PDO” “it is —-” delays sitting down and putting elbow grease on learning the necessary tools for such complex systems.
I am not suggesting it’s the PDO. I’m suggesting it is the PDO, IPO, AMO, NAO, AO, and AAO . . .
As for what’s driving them, or if they are the only drivers at work I am not speculating at all.
(As for elbow grease, I am planning on drawing up a warm-cool comparison for as far back as we “know” to illustrate just so it can be roughly eyeballed.)
Anna,
I agree with most you wrote there except:
It is hard for people to understand that there are many inputs and the output is not a direct cause and effect line.
There is only one input, solar output, and one modulator of that solar output, the planet’s orbit. The rest is climate.
Robert Wood (02:42:50) :
“Anna,
I agree with most you wrote there except:
It is hard for people to understand that there are many inputs and the output is not a direct cause and effect line.
There is only one input, solar output, and one modulator of that solar output, the planet’s orbit. The rest is climate.”
I was thinking of input to the differential equations: boundary conditions.
[…] Watts Up With That Monday, Sept 22, 2008 […]
anna v (23:41:42) – Thank you!
I sense a golden kernel, there; perhaps even enlightenment.
intresting… 🙂
Leif
There was another very recent example of how solar wind pressure spikes and atmospheric temperature spikes seem to occur together in our Troposphere and the Stratosphere
In the period September 14-15, 2008
THE MAGNETOPAUSE STANDOFF DISTANCE WENT FROM 14 TO 9 Re
SOLAR WIND DENSITY WENT FROM LESS THAN 10 TO 60 1/ CM3
SOLAR WIND VELOCITY WENT FROM LESS THAN 300 TO 550 KM/S
SPECIFIC SOLAR WIND PRESSURE SPIKE READINGS ARE NOT AVAILABLE FOR 2-4 WEEKS AFTER THE VENT BUT THE SIGNS ABOVE CLEARLY INDICATE A PRESSURE SPIKE EVENT, VERY LATE SEPTEMBER 14 OR SEPTEMBER 15
THERE WERE NO MAJOR HURRICANE EVENTS TO CAUSE MAJOR ATMOSPHERIC TURBULENCE IN THE ENTIRE TROPOSPHERE OR THE STRATOSPHERE [LIKE DURING THE PERIOD OF HURRICANES IKE, GUSTAV, HANNA]
THERE WAS A TEMPERATURE SKIKE ON SEPTEMBER 15 THAT WENT UP ALL THE WAY TO 31 KM [prior to this period and after the period thetemperatures were dropping].
THE TEMPERTURE SPIKES [INCREASE] AT THE VARIOUS ELEVATIONS WERE AS FOLLOWS:
I KM 0.03 [F]
4 KM 0 .01
7.5 KM 0.02
11KM 0 .02
14 KM 0 [WAS COOLING BEFORE]
17 KM 0.02
21 KM 0 .06
31 KM 0.14
matt v. (06:18:12) :
There was another very recent example of how solar wind pressure spikes and atmospheric temperature spikes seem to occur together in our Troposphere
There are solar wind spikes like that 2-3 times a month, ~30 each year. So over the last 20 years you should have 600 of these. Were there also 600 Tropospheric temperature spikes coinciding [within a day following] with the the solar wind spikes. Make a list of both sets of spikes. Provide a URL to the list, and report here how many ‘hits’ there were.
“All solar cycle indicators we have show that the current cycle 23 was just like cycle 13”
Thank you for participating. Not in length nor maximum nor shape–how incongruent our spin.
“every time neptune, uranus and jupitor line up and saturn is apposing we have a cooling and less sunspot activity”
Oh, but that’s not science. It’s ‘cyclomania’. Offer one bull, without blemish, as a whole burnt offering and depart from our presence.
This is only my second post here because, as someone else once said, the qualifications and knowledge many of the posters have can be a little intimidating, so I usually prefer to take a passive role when visiting by sitting back and enjoying the comments. So thanks everyone 🙂
For a different view on the sun and what is currently happening (or not happening) at the moment I thought I’d post something about a little known theory which seems to be gaining ground. The electricity/plasma model theorises that electricity (rather than gravity) is the main force in the universe and it is this which powers all stars through massive but largely unseen electrical currents in space. The electric model can explain a lot of things that mainstream models can’t. I’m sure people like Dr Svalgaard know all about this theory but thought I’d mention it anyway since I think it would be new to most people, and this model might also help to explain why the sun goes through these sunspot cycles. Apologies if this topic has already been discussed before but I did a search on “electric universe’ and nothing came up.
With regard to the Sun the electric universe theory explains:
– How the sun is able to burn for billions of years without consuming itself in a fraction of the time. The nuclear model assumes that the sun is a disconnected and isolated body whereas the electric model assumes that the sun is connected to the universe in an electrical sense and is not required to burn itself out in a relatively short period. Instead the sun acts as a focus for that incoming energy.
– Why the sun’s surface temperature is a mere 6000 K or so, while the corona’s temperature is way up in the millions of degrees. If the energy/heat comes from the centre of the sun then how can it be that the surface temp. is much cooler than that of the corona? But if energy arrives from outside of the sun then it solves this problem.
– Why charged particles in the solar wind accelerate with greater velocity as they get further away from the sun. The sun is a positively charged body which eminates an electric field so the charged particles within that field speed up.
– Why sunspots are dark and the coolest part of the sun, despite the umbra being a hole.
– The electrical model can explain a lot of anomalies about the sun and other phenomena in the universe which the traditional models are apparently not able to (Why comet tails point away from the Sun, how Mar’s Valles Marineris was formed etc.) The following documentary gives a great overview of this.
34:30 min: The Sun
http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=4773590301316220374
http://thunderbolts.info/home.htm
Haven’t found anything yet on sunspots and how they might be affected by the electric model but will post if I do. Perhaps, Leif, you might like to comment?
Reply – Keep posting and feel free to ask questions. – Dee Norris
All available information is here:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=26459
Wow! This puts a crimp in Al Gore’s carbon tax credit fiasco. He must be eating crow right now.
Wow. Thanks for the incredibly detailed reply, Leif! Upon reading it I realized that I’d come across that somewhere before, and had forgotten it. 🙂
Oh, and congrats on your new post as WUWT’s official solar physicist! 🙂 Be sure to add that to your CV. 🙂
Gary Gulrud (08:15:32) :
“All solar cycle indicators we have show that the current cycle 23 was just like cycle 13″
Not in length nor maximum nor shape–how incongruent our spin.
If you want to insult, you better have your stuff correct.
The length of a cycle is difficult to pin down exactly and there are often a double minimum. One way would be to take the time halfway between the double minima. You get:
Cycle 13:
min 1889.0, 1890.2: avg = 1889.60
min 1901.4, 1902.1: avg = 1901.75
length = 12.15
Cycle 23:
min 1996.4, 1996.6: avg = 1996.50
min 2008.6 assuming now = 2008.6
length = 12.10
The reported sunspot numbers for cycle 13 are 37% too small as I have discussed earlier [and we can have that discussion again, possibly off-line], so sizes:
cycle 13: 87.9 * 1.37 = 120.4
cycle 23: 120.8
The shapes are never the same, so that doesn’t bother me.
Gavin (09:15:22) :
Haven’t found anything yet on sunspots and how they might be affected by the electric model but will post if I do. Perhaps, Leif, you might like to comment?
The Electric Universe is usually considered [by me also] as pseudo-science, so you maybe be wasting your time, except that the postings on that are often quite hilarious and I get a kick out of them.
“A live media teleconference on the sun” ????????!!!!!!!!!??????
My God – stop them!!! Don’t they know they will burn to a crisp!!!
Those fools!
Here you go, Leif –
http://www.the-electric-universe.info/the_electric_sun.html
or perhaps:
http://www.the-electric-universe.info/the_electric_climate_model.html
“All solar cycle indicators we have show that the current cycle 23 was just like cycle 13″
“Not in length nor maximum nor shape–how incongruent our spin.”
Looks that way.
http://www.dxlc.com/solar/cyclcomp2.html
“If you want to insult, you better have your stuff correct.”
“Stuff, Sir. Stuff”.
“Perhaps you are clairvoyant.”
A., B. or C. (and/or D. none of the above) is an insult? No habla, usted?
http://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/display/RT_t.cgi?page=potential
GAVIN
You can see that there are web pages that are starting to show some of the electrical universe data as it relates to our planet. More will come in the future . Tesla encountered the same scientific resistance when he tried to let the electrical cat out of the bag.
Dee Norris (11:59:06) :
http://www.the-electric-universe.info/the_electric_sun.html
As I said, quite hilarious, to a point, after which it becomes sad.