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
Leif, I understand your reasoning about the Sun being not very different from before; but temperatures have varied before and it was not due to Mann-made global warming then, so what was it due to and why assume mann to be the cause now?
This is the problem I am faced with. And everyone goes around denying everyone else’s pet cause. But the force of the argument in the first paragraph is undeniable.
So, does Mann made global warming only exists in computer models, UHI and data adjustments? I am at a loss for other root causes than the Sun. Obviously, we are looking at 60 year time lags and various ocean thermal cycles; all interacting.
BTW I personally, a) don’t consider 1 degree centigrade serious and b) believe that a Warm Planet is a Happy Planet and c) more CO2 is good for life.
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. When you move a conductor in a magnetic field that induces a current, which itself has a magnetic field, which when moved induces a current, etc. This is called a dynamo, and you car has one. The dynamo-generated magnetic fields fall apart at the surface [no more movements of the plasma that makes up the Sun]. We see that as flares and other activity. Not all of it dies, a small fraction [1 in a thousand] survives to start the dynamo cycle all over again. By measuring how much survives we can predict the next sunspot cycle.
Ric,
Now that you mention the Galveston Hurricane, the period 1900 -1915 encompasses two small solar cycles and a significant drop in global temperature, and the two Galveston Hurricanes occured during two solar minima. 1900 was said to be a Cat 4, and the 1915 was said to bring sea surges of +20 feet to Galveston.
Glenn (17:16:09) :
Cherry picking your own literature and assuming that is the end of the story isn’t the way to convince any but the faithful.
So you have not read the paper [it is short] and this shows me that you are not serious about this. You do not respond to the points I raise, just repeat the mantra that “there is a correlation seen by many between the sun and climate”. You say “Till then it appears that you are on your own”, but ignore the fact that the Lockwood group has already acknowledged the wrong calibration of the aa-index which was the basis for Solanki’s model. So, I’m not completely on my own. And the way forward is to look at what evidence there is for a similar error in the sunspot number. and that you refuses to do. No wonder you don’t move forward on this, but that is maybe something you don’t want to do anyway as you are most comfortable with established wisdom [e.g. as expounded by the IPCC that you quoted]. This is, of course, you choice, but that does not equate into the use of words like ‘silly’.
“I once said that you would only use or believe ‘official ‘ numbers.”
Huh? So what if you said that. Probably you mean I said that, but I didn’t. You may have misunderstood, but regardless there really is no point in arguing what you claim is wrong with literature. My quotes stand on their own, unless you wish to claim quotemining.
“There is no ‘additional’ support”
Uh, yes, I have provided additional support. More just today, in fact.
the first graph in this report says it all….we are in a unique position that only comes along every 178.8 yrs…what a time to be alive.
http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/archives/17#comment-531
REPLY: barycentrism is not well received here. – Anthony
Robert Wood (17:19:06) :
Leif, I understand your reasoning about the Sun being not very different from before; but temperatures have varied before and it was not due to Mann-made global warming then, so what was it due to and why assume mann to be the cause now?
But I do not assume that. There are plenty of reasons for oscillations within such a complex system as the climate. Even the weather does that, involving planetary waves in the atmosphere of a duration of about a week.
Obviously, we are looking at 60 year time lags and various ocean thermal cycles; all interacting. except that people that show you their correlations don’t operate with a 60 year lag. The current minimum is low, thus the sun is cooling is the battle cry.
BTW I personally, a) don’t consider 1 degree centigrade serious and b) believe that a Warm Planet is a Happy Planet and c) more CO2 is good for life.
And I totally agree with that.
Leif, you’re are basically saying the Sun’s energy reaching the Earth varies by only 0.1% or so, the same amount it varies during a solar cycle. To extend the argument, the Maunder Minimum was similar to just a long bottom of the cycle, only 0.1% below the high irradiance levels. You’ve have convinced me of this (with your persistence perhaps) and I defer to you as the official solar physicist.
So, what do you think caused the Little Ice Age then? Temps are generally assumed to be 1.0C to 1.5C below today (which is really not much of a temperature drop compared to what people assume for the Little Ice Age). What caused this temp. drop then?
But I do not assume that
Sorry, Leif, poor writing, I didn’t mean to suggest you did.
The only almost instantaneous interaction I can think of would be via GCRs and cloud formation, preventing direct insolation. This would rapidly cool the air temperatures, and we’d all feel it, especially in the continental interiors; but the oceans would still change only slowly.
Anecdotally, here in Ottawa, Canada, we’ve had a cold summer, with almost continuous, 100% cloud cover. Any where I can check on the local GCR flux?
Glenn (17:36:52) :
“I once said that you would only use or believe ‘official ‘ numbers.”
Won’t you allow the occasional [single] typo?
but I didn’t
In the ‘New paper…” on 9/19 at 15:35:11 you said:
“I’d rather take official information at face value”.
So, you are not interested in a serious debate on this, that starts with you reading the paper and finding faults with the paper I referred you to?
nobwainer (17:39:06) :
REPLY: barycentrism is not well received here. – Anthony
I was kind of waiting for this 🙂 it ALWAYS happens.
Leif,
Regarding the magnetic properties of the sun that edcon asked about, don’t extremely compressed gasses aquire metallic properties. I have a memory/delusion that I read that somewhere.
Bill Illis (17:47:47) :
Leif, you’re are basically saying the Sun’s energy reaching the Earth varies by only 0.1% or so, the same amount it varies during a solar cycle. To extend the argument, the Maunder Minimum was similar to just a long bottom of the cycle, only 0.1% below the high irradiance levels.
Yes, in fact.
So, what do you think caused the Little Ice Age then? Temps are generally assumed to be 1.0C to 1.5C below today (which is really not much of a temperature drop compared to what people assume for the Little Ice Age). What caused this temp. drop then?
There are long ‘swells’ in the temperature record. Craig Loehle’s plot that we have referred to before [or maybe in another Thread; here it is again: http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/loehle_fig3.JPG ] shows this so clearly. There are smaller wiggles [which in turn have smaller wiggles on them, and do on], but the main feature to appreciate is the long swell that begins 2000 years ago, goes up to a maximum 1000 years ago, then falls down to a broad minimum around 1600 [BTW well before the Maunder minimum started in 1645], followed by a recovery that continues to this day [and possibly beyond, extrapolating the curve if you will]. I see this as a natural oscillation of a complex system. It is curious that people that deny that such oscillations occurs and claim the swell is due to the Sun have no qualms of accepting that the Sun oscillated like this. BTW, the Sun is a much simpler system than the Earth and its climate. This has to do with its high temperature. Build a snowman [low temperature complex structure], heat him up until he vaporizes into steam [high temperature simple structureless system] to see what I mean.
As always there are the usual detractors that say that the temp data is no good and that asks one to compare with the backside of the Moon or Mercury [take the Sun away and see what you get]. BTW, for those people, consider this: the difference between the Earth and the nightside of the Moon and Mercury is NOT due to the Sun, but due to the atmosphere. Take the atmosphere away and that is what you get. Venus has the SAME temperature on the dayside and the nightside [in spite of its very slow rotaion], because the atmosphere is so think [100 times the Earth’s] and consists almost completely of that notorious greenhouse gas CO2 driving the temperature up to 460C.
Steve Keohane (18:15:16) :
Regarding the magnetic properties of the sun that edcon asked about, don’t extremely compressed gasses aquire metallic properties. I have a memory/delusion that I read that somewhere.
Yes, if they are cold. The Sun is HOT HOT HOT. Its interior is an even more ‘perfect gas’ than our air. And [cold] metals as such are rarely magnetic, and hot metals are never. Heat a ordinary magnet to 768°C for iron and its magnetism is gone; the atoms simply wiggle too much to stay aligned.
Leif, that you may honestly have a different idea of what a serious debate is than I do doesn’t mean that I am not interested nor are seriously debating the issues. As far as your literature is concerned, I take that at face value as well. It is just that contradicting opinions abound, and that is not less than a serious examination of opinions. If you wish to compare contrary views with your own to convince readers your view is right, you don’t need me to do it. I would recommend that with your argument that you provide actual URLs of journal articles and quotes from them to compare, though.
But I can just imagine getting into a “serious” discussion over scientific methodology, research data, math, inferences…you’ve already accused me of not knowing what science is, and I would bet that you would soon use the old “you have to be an expert and a math whiz” to understand and make decisions on who is right and who is wrong”. Actually you already have, or have darn close to it.
By the way, my last reference was recent, not much over a year old, the one that claimed that solar irradiance has increased by 1.2 w/m2. You make it sound like everyone has got past that with some new revelation in a year and it’s some kind of accepted wisdom. I just will not accept your word for that, and have not seen the evidence, nor have you provided such.
I will caution you to be somewhat more selective with the papers you claim I have not read, however.
Robert Wood (18:01:54) :
Any where I can check on the local GCR flux?
As you can see from this presentation there is a station in Ottawa as well as other Canadian stations:
http://cosray.phys.uoa.gr/SEE2007/workshop/Presentations/Eroshenko.pdf
I don’t know a URL that gets you to that station, but it shouldn’t matter as the variation is a worldwide phenomenon. any station will give you an idea. E.g. Oulu: http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/
Glenn,
I have been reading your spirited debate with Leif, and in all your replies you have yet to address what one of his objections and two of his questions, the former being of primary concern. Leif said earlier, about the Lockwood model you cited:
“it calibrates the parameters of the model to reproduce the ‘doubling’ of the interplanetary [and by inference, the solar] magnetic field advocated by Lockwood et al. Even Lockwood has now recognized that the aa-index is also incorrectly calibrated and the latest results from his group match closely what we found: no doubling.
Did you read the paper?
And what are your line-by-line objections?”
You haven’t answered these. Instead you just insist that you are right and he is wrong. But you don’t say why. You just keep claiming that correlation equals causation, and that is not scientific. And to my own knowledge Leif has never pulled the “I’m the expert and the math whiz and you’re not” card. Such an attack is argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority) and Leif does not use such attacks as they are useless. That is what is meant by serious debate. You take a position, your opponent voices his legitimate objections, and then you attempt to answer his objections. You haven’t taken that last step yet, and appear not to want to. If you feel you are misunderstood in that regard, there is an easy way to clear that up.
Glenn (18:35:21) :
that you may honestly have a different idea of what a serious debate is than I do doesn’t mean that I am not interested nor are seriously debating the issues. As far as your literature is concerned, I take that at face value as well
That is not sufficient, because then you just get into a void counting game: so many pro and so many con.
What I urge you to do [but you have not] is simply to look at the paper.
But I can just imagine getting into a “serious” discussion over scientific methodology, research data, math, inferences…you’ve already accused me of not knowing what science is, and I would bet that you would soon use the old “you have to be an expert and a math whiz” to understand and make decisions on who is right and who is wrong”.
Maybe you imagine that and would treat someone to that kind of arguments, but that is not my way. I have infinite patience and will explain every step of the way, should it be necessary. But, it should not be, because this is simply stuff. My 10-year grandson could follow the argument [as he has because he was interested in what I was doing].
By the way, my last reference was recent, not much over a year old, the one that claimed that solar irradiance has increased by 1.2 w/m2. You make it sound like everyone has got past that with some new revelation in a year and it’s some kind of accepted wisdom. I just will not accept your word for that, and have not seen the evidence, nor have you provided such.
Lockwood’s Group’s realization of this is, in fact, less than a year old, and the papers [including one of ours] are under review and will appear in due time.
These things are often discussed at meetings and at seminars ahead of publication. I just this week gave a seminar at the Space Physics Research Group at UV Berkeley. You can find the talk here:
http://www.leif.org/research/Seminar-SPRG-2008.pdf skip down to page 27 to avoid all the details that you probably don’t want to see [I would skip down] and take it from there. There was general agreement at the seminar that we all need to rethink the long-term variations. I have already referred you to the argument leading to the revision of the sunspot number. 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
It was also well received. Of course, there are still holdouts [Usokin. Mursula, Solanki]. The story with the Offical Sunspt number can be summarized as follows:
When Rudolf Wolf published his first list of sunspot numbers [derived using his famous formula R = 10*G + S] in 1857, it extended back to 1749. Most of the data from the period 1749-1796 came from a single source: J.C. Staudacher. In 1861, Wolf realized that the Staudacher numbers were too low [read my papers on how he did that] and summarily doubled all the numbers and published the new series in 1861. About 1875, Wolf again realized that all the sunspot numbers before 1849 [that is all numbers not based on his own observations] were still too low [and again read my paper on the why and the how] so he increased all the pre-1849 numbers by an additional 25%. Wolf knew that the visibility of the smallest spots was iffy and depended too much on the ’seeing’ and on the observer, so did not counted those small spots [leaving aside for now what constitutes a ‘small’ spot]. When Alfred Wolfer took over in 1893, he started to count ALL spots down to even the smallest he could observe. This, of course, bumped up the sunspot number which Wolfer tried to counteract by multiplying his count by a factor 0.6, but still it seems [and again read the paper why and how] that he introduced an upward jump of about 20%. In 1945 when Max Waldmeier took over, his inexperience resulted in a further upwards jump of 20%. When Brussels took over further inhomogeneities were introduced. At all times, people did their best, trying to produce a sunspot number that they thought was a good measure of solar activity. The net result of all these upwards adjustments is that the sunspot numbers have gone up and up and up, giving the false impression that solar activity is [or has recently been] at an all-time high.
In the Spring 2008 AGU meeting I gave this presentation http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Spring%202008%20SP23A-07.pdf which was also well received. What I mean by that is that there is a lot of informal discussion apart from just the talks, and it is here that you learn if your research is being accepted [at least provisionally].
A good discussion of the issues of the Solanki/Lockwood models can be found here:
http://www.leif.org/research/Comment%20on%20McCracken.pdf
submitted to Journal of Geophysical Research.
So the papers that you want to see on this are on their way. Do you object to hearing it in advance from the ‘horse’s mouth’?
Leif Svalgaard (13:22:12) :
Walt (13:01:09) :
So, according to NASA, the last time the sun was this quiet was 1934.
No, 1954 June.
Ah. Excuse the outburst from someone just auditing the class…
At the bottom of this page
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/11jul_solarcycleupdate.htm
there is this graphic
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/images/solarcycleupdate/new1933vs2008.gif
which led me to jump to my comment of a notable cold record set during a solar minimum. I didn’t notice the 1954 spotless day minimum listing of 446 that I see on the page dialog.
It does make me curious now if there were any interesting temperature records set during the 1954 solar minimum, cold or hot.
Bobby Lane (19:20:19) :
I have been reading your spirited debate with Leif,
In the interest of full disclosure, I have pointed out that instead of just citing abstract after abstract that Glen would benefit from actually reading some of those papers, including mine. This is a learning process we all have to go through. When I’m debating something with a scientific colleague, I reads his papers and learns what his view and arguments are, and he usually [not always] does the same. This learning process is an important part of the discussion, because one cannot be up-to-date on everything.
Walt (19:40:35) :
It does make me curious now if there were any interesting temperature records set during the 1954 solar minimum, cold or hot.
I don’t think ‘records’ are what you are after, as they have too much scatter. The 1950s [with the biggest solar cycle ever] were cold [after the climatic optimum in the 1940s] presaging the drop in solar activity during solar cycle 20 [1965-1976] 🙂
“Instead you just insist that you are right and he is wrong. But you don’t say why. You just keep claiming that correlation equals causation, and that is not scientific.”
I’ve not made a single claim about being right or another being wrong, nor have I ever nor do I “keep” claiming that correlation equals causation. I doubt we could ever be on an even keel together, Bobby.
Leif Svalgaard (17:16:02) :
Ric Werme (17:07:17) :
> After the hurricane of 1938, hurricane Carol in 1954 is the storm most
1938 was at solar maximum, 1954 at a very deep solar minimum.
What’s the connection?
None, perhaps I should’ve written “Carol is the 2nd most referenced hurricane” and left ’38 out of it.
1900 was at the end of a warm AMO phase, 1915 was a warm AMO phase for just a summer interrupting a cool phase for the rest of the 1902 to 1925 period.
All four storms occurred during a warm AMO phase, that’s the strongest link to intense Atlantic hurricanes.
http://www.intellicast.com/Community/Content.aspx?ref=rss&a=127
Hmm, have we looked at a new Geophysical Review Letters report “United States and Caribbean tropical cyclone activity related to the solar cycle”? See http://climaterealist.blogspot.com/2008/09/new-paper-us-hurricane-counts-are.html
I’m not sure what’s novel about it, it seems like another UV heats the upper troposphere suggestion.
I posted something at climaterealist., so I probably got there from here, but I don’t remember how. I gotta get me a life….
I think the answer is that the AMO is still the best link.