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
kim (04:38:17) :
So is there a purpose in having a big teleconference? What might be the questions that they’d get from a curious world about the meaning of this manifestation of solar change? Is this merely routine after a paper, or is something else afoot?
The purpose is to draw attention to the paper [and to tell the tax-payers that their money is well spent :-)]. This is pretty much routine. Same thing happened, for example, after the Dikpati et al. sunspot prediction paper.
Leif Svalgaard (16:38:20) replying to Jeff Wiita (15:47:18): The current ozone hole is as big as ever [maybe even the biggest ever] but has not grown very much, as you can see yourself by checking the page, so perhaps the CFC ban is helping a bit.
I find your question, Jeff, and your response, Leif, disturbing.
Adding both to bits and pieces I have come across recently I detect an unsettling parallel between the ozone hole and man-made global warming which causes me pause.
Was the ozone hole gallop just a warm-up for the CO2 stampede? Is terrifying the children the new business model of preference for the carpetbaggers of the world?
I can think of a few simple questions:
1.) Might this be an indication as to temporary fuel pressure loss in the Sun (aging process)?
Are you certain that the loss of open magnetic flux is the end of the chain, and that it does not indicate an even deeper loss.
Stephen Richards:
Try reading the article itself and you would find that it actually supports some of what is being said here, despite the summary I posted.
I’ll admit that SciAm is no longer the concise reference that it used to be but hey, at my age a good comic passes the time easily. Also, I am sure that you would not be so dogmatic as to stick to one source of information.
Leif Svalgaard (04:16:02) :
Cooler? Hey, has anyone suggested that a hotter denser solar wind dries out, err, warms up the Earth better than a less energetic wind? 🙂
Just kidding – most of the solar wind gets bent around the Earth and what does make it in is too thin to matter much. Aurorae perhaps excepted, but big ones are fed by large spikes in the incoming energy.
Interesting, but needs work. The NAO is not a multi-decadal oscillation, though it does have multi-decadal trends. There’s a useful graph of 140 years of NAO levels at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/NAO_200307/NAO_4.html
The article you linked to says “During the Maunder Minimum, the Sun emitted less strong ultraviolet light, and so less ozone formed. The decrease in ozone affected planetary waves, the giant wiggles in the jet stream that we are used to seeing on television weather reports.” It doesn’t say how stratospheric ozone affects the jet stream in the troposphere. Leif (and any other good scientist) won’t be satisfied until there’s a mechanism backed up by observations.
That, of course, is a paraphrase of an Arthur C Clarke quote from back in the days when hard SF was a lot more optimistic than it is now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws has it as:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I apolgise beforehand for being completely ignorant about sunspots and such but isn’t anyone concerned with the suns weaker polarity and the firing of the Large Hadron Collider project just started in Europe?
REPLY: No concern at all. The LHC and sunspots are unrelated.
Tom in Florida (19:24:26) :
I “discovered” that when I was writing a program to compute sunrise and sunset on a Radio Shack TRS-80. Jean Meeus’ (he posts here occasionally) book with handy Fourier transformed math wasn’t out yet, and I more interested in doing the physics anyway. The shift is due to the effect of the Moon. Near perihelion and aphelion, the radial velocity of the barycenter (the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system, a mathematical convenience that only works when large and small distances are involved) is near zero. If the Moon lags or leads the Earth, that means the Earth’s motion around the barycenter is means that the perihelion of the Earth won’t be quite the same as that of the barycenter. The effect is small and brief, but could lead to huge amounts of speculation here. Please don’t! 🙂
BTW, some of what I learned from that period lives on at http://wermenh.com/eqoftm.html and explains why the earliest sunset is weeks before the latest sunset. (While the effect is greatest for the December solstice, it happens in June too. Southern hemisphere folks would see latest sunset and earliest sunrise or something like that. It’s hard to think while standing on my head.)
Leif (04:56:43) Nonetheless, the news of some manifestation of the sun being at its lowest for 50 years, combined with the generalized cooling, is going to make this press conference and its reporting not routine. What might be a good question for someone like, say, Andy Revkin, to ask there?
============================================
[…] NEWS: NASA to hold press conference on the state of the sun […]
Hi, Leif!
I quite enjoy your presence here – I feel that you help cool off the CO2-induced rhetorical heat around here. 🙂
Actually, I was pondering how big the sun must be if it took light 75 hours to get to the surface… I’m so glad that you corrected this, because I was pretty boggled. It takes, what, 8? minutes for the sun’s light to get to earth, the whole 75 hours thing was… well… boggling! 15 hours is boggling enough.
But a quick question: I’m assuming that the photons are not traveling in a straight line from the sun’s core (whatever that is!) to the surface – but rather that they are batted about by the magnetic field etc. Is that the case?
(I hope I got the blockquote tags correct!)
“Except it still has a long way to go [like a degree or so] to get down to where it was.” – Leif
And he has a hockey stick to prove it.
Ross McKitrick has produced a peer reviewed study, that to my knowledge has not been refuted that puts the number at half that. The rest seems to have a very high correlation with human economic activity. Where I live there is significant warming on one side of the lake, Vermont, where population has grown significantly, and far less warming on the other side of the lake, The Adirondack Park, where economic activity has all but frozen since the 19th century, and populatio has dropped significantly since the ’60s.
RE: Julie L, I rather enjoy Leif’s presence also so I’ve made a decision:
Rush Limbaugh dubbed Dr. Roy Spencer as the EIB “official climatologist”, and in that spirit I’m going to dub Dr. Leif Svalgaard as the WUWT “official solar physicist”.
So when we’re told unequivocally that current warming is unprecedented it’s most likely wrong? Or when we’re told that humans are definitely causing this unprecedented warming it’s most likely wrong?
As for the ozone hole. As far as we know it’s always been there and always will be. It hasn’t changed appreciably since it was discovered in the mid ’50s.
Was the ozone hole gallop just a warm-up for the CO2 stampede? Is terrifying the children the new business model of preference for the carpetbaggers of the world?
That’s been my theory for a while now. The whole Ozone hole thing showed how the public could be manipulated, then it just had to be ramped up.
wattsupwiththat (08:04:20) :
Great! Now he can’t claim he needs a break from here. What’s a phyicist, anyway?
REPLY: Heh, typed too early in the morning, fixed – Anthony
I am completely exposing my ignorance here, and I really don’t mean to cast myself into the lunatic fringe category, but is there anything to the upcoming magnetic/polar reversals on the sun and here on earth? There were some references to “dark matter” and it’s affect on the sun in the first few comments, does that in any way relate to the “dark rift” of our galaxy that our solar system will be crossing into on or about the infamous 2012 date? I can only find a bunch of new-age psycho-babble when I search for info.
Julie L (07:52:12) :
Actually, I was pondering how big the sun must be if it took light 75 hours to get to the surface…
Well, the question was about the edge of the heliosphere [that volume around the Sun where the Sun’s magnetic field and the solar wind is stronger than those of the interstellar matter]. But let’s follow the journey of radiation generated in the core of the Sun. Because the density in the core is high [~10 times that of lead] and because the opacity is very high a photon does not travel very far before being absorbed by an atom. The so excited atom shortly thereafter re-emits the photon, but in a random direction [very close to half of time actually back into the Sun]. Then the photon is absorbed by another atom and re-emitted, etc. After gazillions of such absorptions/re-emissions the radiation finally arrives a distance of about 70% of the radius of the Sun. this takes a long time, numbers varies from 10,000 to a million years. My favorite number is around 200,000 years. At that point, radiation ceases to be the most efficient way of transporting energy [and Mother Nature usually picks the easy way] and the transport happens now by convection [hot gas rising and cool gas sinking]. This is a very efficient process and the energy goes the remaining 30% of the way to the surface in about 10 days. At the surface, gravity [and the Sun’s gravity there is 27 times as large as the Earth’s] prevents any further rise of the gas and the radiation can now freely stream out into nearly empty space. Its journey to the Earth at the speed of light in a straight line takes 500 seconds = 8.33 minutes. Since the Heliopause [the edge of the Heliosphere] is about 100 times further away the radiation takes 8.33 x 100 = 833 minutes = 833/60 = 13.9 hours to travel that far. Since the edge flaps around and the distance is not precise we round that to 15 hours.
So, you see, the flow of energy takes a tortuous path.
wattsupwiththat (08:04:20) :
I’m going to dub Dr. Leif Svalgaard as the WUWT “official solar physicist”.
In spite of my distrust of anything ‘official’ I’ll serve the best I can. Graucho Marx once said that he would not like to belong to a club that would accept him as a member 🙂
Jeff Alberts (08:33:50) :
So when we’re told unequivocally that current warming is unprecedented it’s most likely wrong?
It is certainly wrong. There has been greater and quicker warmings [and coolings] before in the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s existence. So when he says ‘it is impossible’ for this to have happened before that would fit in with ‘the impossibility being almost certainly wrong’.
Or when we’re told that humans are definitely causing this unprecedented warming it’s most likely wrong?
Now, here we may be talking about the possibility of something happening and that would fit with ‘if he says something is possible he is likely to be right’. So, not the same as the previous case. 🙂
But ‘likely’ does not mean the same as ‘definitely’ so he could still be wrong.
As for the ozone hole. As far as we know it’s always been there and always will be. It hasn’t changed appreciably since it was discovered in the mid ’50s.
go look at http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/statistics/meteorology_annual.png to update your knowledge.
Patti (09:39:05) :
is there anything to the upcoming magnetic/polar reversals on the sun and here on earth?
A typical ‘trick’ of crackpot theory is to latch onto something that is for real. The Sun’s magnetic field reverses every 11 or so years, next time in 2013. The Earth’s magnetic field reverses much very irregularly every million years or so. It has been declining rapidly of late and may reverse in about 500 years.
All the rest is pure ‘babble’ as you said.
Anna V:
Many of the people who say that the sun has an influence aren’t saying its only the sun. But we understand that the sun does have an influence. The correlation between global temperatures over the last 600+ years and sunspot activity is too large to deny. Now, does the thermal input change dramtically? No. But other things seem to – this includes changes in the sun’s magnetic fields, leading to the cosmic ray/cloud formation theory. I haven’t looked into Pamela’s UV theory to say that its realistic or not, but it is interesting. THe cosmic ray theory though could very well explain the little ice age and colder temperatures last century.
Additionally, many of us here argue that the asorption bands that CO2 is supposed to have an influence on are heavilly saturated, and that due to reradiation effects, CO2 influence is near its asymptote on afffecting temperatures. My old PhD advisor was telling me last year he had spent a significant amount of time examining the issue, and had come to the conclusion that many of the CO2 claims are insuportable. He is a carefull, brutally intelligent guy who makes me look like a mouthbreather – but he had come to the same conclusion I had.
So, sure, the atmosphere acts like a regulator system. But I’d like you to remember – to keep your house temperature at a constant, the air conditioner has to work at longer or shorter times, depending on the outside temperature. Earth’s air conditioner has operated for billions of years without the runaway affect you have insinuated – including operating at significantly higher CO2 levels than we see now. This impies a system that with significant feedback affects that are not easily overcome.
Over ten years ago, I argued with my AGW friends that I would wait ten years to see if there was some significant impact. After all, if things were as bad as they were saying in the 90’s (and with the mouth spittle reactions in ’98) surely by 2008 things would be really bad. That hasn’t happened. Given that things haven’t quite gone the way the AGW crowd said they would ten years ago, I’m willing to state we need to wait another ten years before we wreck our economy on unsupportable energy policies (not that its not close to a wreck now).
Am I an anti-progress freak? No – but I believe energy has given humanity more freedom to reach its potential than anything else we have developed. I am all for more nuclear (and no, we don’t have to store the waste for 10K years – there are alternatives -even alternatives to using uranium as the fuel source). If wind is effective, lets use it. If solar works (cost effectively) we can use it too. Kyoto specifically stated that nuclear could not be used as an alternative to meet its requirements. Doesn’t that say something about the intentions of its writers? Certainly what I’ve seen at CA says something about them too….
By the way, until we do have a good mobile fuel alternative – drill here. Drill now.
mark wagner said
100 years ago earth was cooler. so low solar wind ~1900 = cooler. low solar wind ~2008 = cooler; is this not what we’ve seen over the last decade? Temps peaking and dropping in conjunction with the peak and fall of solar activity?
Leif said
Except it still has a long way to go [like a degree or so] to get down to where it was. I don’t think it will, because the oceans still hold a lot of heat. and as you know, I don’t think that tiny solar variation packs much heat. [no pun on packing heat].
Perhaps it is not 1 degree but only half a degree (UHI effect) and the oceans will release the heat over time, especially if the sun remains dormant as in the maunder minimum. I am sure there must be proxies that show the strength of the solar wind 200 or more years ago.
NASA press release from 1996, showing strong evidence of life on Mars.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/marslife.html
the findings are thought to be strong evidence pointing to primitive bacterial life on Mars.
—-
Don Savage
Headquarters, Washington, DC March 14, 1997
(Phone: 202/358-1547)
Linda Copley
Johnson Space Center, Houston TX
(Phone: 281/483-5111)
NOTE TO EDITORS: N97-18
PRESS BRIEFING TO PRESENT NEW DATA AND STATUS OF
‘PAST LIFE ON MARS’ DEBATE SCHEDULED FOR MARCH 19
Seven months after NASA’s initial announcement
suggesting that a Martian meteorite shows life may have
existed on ancient Mars, a panel of science experts will
present new data and deliver a progress report on the
continuing “Past Life on Mars” discussion at a press briefing
scheduled for 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, March 19, in the media
briefing room at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), Houston, TX.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/text/nasa_pr_970314.txt
Brendan (10:38:44) :
The correlation between global temperatures over the last 600+ years and sunspot activity is too large to deny.
I’ll deny it. First, the 600+ year might be 400+, and for the period where we have relatively good data [since 1850] the correlation is not there. Solar cycles 11 and 10 were as active as 22 and 23, but temps are significantly higher now. You have two ways out of this:
1: you say that the temps are no good
2: you say that my sunspot number series is no good
Which one would you prefer?
The admission by NASA that the Sun is returning to a low state also in a small way argues against that correlation.
Rob (10:40:53) :
I am sure there must be proxies that show the strength of the solar wind 200 or more years ago.
Yes, and I have referred to several in this thread and others already. One more time:
http://www.leif.org/research/Heliospheric%20B%20from%2010Be.pdf
or if you want to pay $9:
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 109, A12102,
doi:10.1029/2004JA010633, 2004
The heliospheric magnetic field from 850 to 2000 AD inferred from 10Be records
R. A. Caballero-Lopez, H. Moraal, K. G. McCracken and F. B. McDonald