Latest Cycle 24 Sunspot: here today, gone tomorrow

In fact i think the real anomaly stand in duration, just one day or two every single speck(not a spot indeed)

1002 has to be the shortest lived sunspot… DIB… died at birth… 😉

spotlet?

Did he measure the magnetism from it? 2015 or no?
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Not depressed. Upset:
“There are 2 distinct spots, 5:30 pm PDT, and they are both elongated, forming a set of furrowed eyebrows. or an arc.”

Would be interesting to apply a “Medieval filter” to the sunspot count to “correct” the numbers.

By the way…
Region 1002, the ‘quiet… stable…decaying’ Region 1002
is the reason a Maunder Minimum is not likely.
Yes, 1002 was the ONLY reason given by Professor Dr. Nancy Crooker of Boston University during the NASA conference today, when she stated that “a Maunder Minimum is not likely.”
So I think we should all be a little more respectful of Region 1002.
REPLY: Yeah when I heard that, I thought to myself “wow, she’s really reaching here”. – Anthony

There seems to be more activity popping up on the sun this afternoon – not quite so blank as it’s been of late…
I’ll be very interested to see how it looks in the morning.

6:00 pm No Ca PDT, the spot is gone from visibility, it was a smudge this morning in my 70mm refractor. Alas poor 1002, we hardly knew ya.
But the trend since 05/23/08 holds: The spots start in the lower ebb of Planetary A index and Solar Wind Velocity, and end when those indices flatten out.
That’s the way Ol Sol is behaving these last 4 months.
Go Figure.

Yes, 1002 was the ONLY reason given by Professor Dr. Nancy Crooker of Boston University during the NASA conference today, when she stated that “a Maunder Minimum is not likely.”

[snip sorry – not an appropriate comment – Anthony]
(heavens, I love this place!)

‘So what is the evidence that this is really a correct polarity cycle 24 spot at the wrong latitude, or a reversed polarity cycle 23 spot at an expected latitude?’
Here’s a possible clue: They are all following the same behavior and timing.
A commonality, if you will, in when they form and when they die.
I feel that science today strained greatly at a gnat.
I detect great angst in the wishing for SC24 to start.
Sure am glad that it was them and not me.

George M (20:41:26) wrote:
“As usual, I’m confused. Old cycle spots are supposed to be near the equator, new cycle near the poles? Right or wrong? ”
There are never spot “near” the poles. New cycle spots appear about latitudes 25 to 35 degrees, if I am right. Very few appear around 40 or 45 degrees.

NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” today is the SOHO picture of that spot:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080924.html
Kinda funny how the caption mentions “sunspots” plural, when there was only the 1 and it lasted so short a time. And the final statement “Predictions hold that. . . . ” as though a prediction is what’s going to happen rather than actually being a guess.
At least they do recognize that the sun is “unusually quiet.”

(Without the misspellings!)
I would assume that such a spot would not have been observed 200 years ago…no way. It was simply too small and observation techniques back then were just simply too primitive. This latest SC24 spot was a well-fed Tiny Tim at best.
This has to be taken into account when comparing todays’s data with historical data, meaning the sun today maybe even more quiet than we actually believe.

“In a closed-door meeting on June 4, 2007 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Griffin said:
“Unfortunately, this is an issue which has become far more political than technical, and it would have been well for me to have stayed out of it.” “All I can really do is apologize to all you guys…. I feel badly that I caused this amount of controversy over something like this.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin
He should have kept it political and fired Hansen.

Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!

forgot the link to the paper. sorry.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.3762.pdf

Pierre Gosselin: “This latest SC24 spot was a well-fed Tiny Tim at best.”
Kind of OT, and I apologise, but this got me thinking about Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol. If the sun continues to be miserly with its spots and we do experience something approximating the Dalton Minimum, perhaps there will be the sort of Christmas again that Dickens remembered from the early 1800s.
Thick snow, a biting frost, a bitter wind – but hopefully still some food, fuel and good cheer to go around. :o)

Alex for most of us we will survive but I wonder what has happened to the homeless and the poor this last winter in the southern hemisphere and what will happen to those in the northern hemisphere in coming months if the world continues to cool. These faceless souls seem unimportant in the whole AGW debate

‘I think it is Churchill who said that “all that is necessary for evil to win is for good men to do nothing.” ‘
Actually it was Edmund Burke.

If you think AGW is off-base and are afraid of what the absence of sun spots may mean for mankind, then you need to see this documentary. It is another prime example of apocalyptic fear mongering in the pursuit of science. I saw this last week and it will air again this Thursday 9/25. At least they are giving us 1500 years to worry about it.
Earth’s Invisible Shield
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/naked-science/3838/Overview
Thursday September 25 5P (EST?)
The Earths magnetic field, the protector of all life on Earth is under constant attack from deadly cosmic radiation. This invisible shield that we live in is weakening in a region over the South Atlantic, leaving it exposed to potentially lethal radiation. Is the Earth losing its magnetic field and doomed to a fate similar to Mars? Many scientists believe the answer lies in paleomagnetic data, and that this weakening may be a precursor to a magnetic field reversal scientists know Earth is long overdue. However, humans were not around when the last reversal took place, so what does this mean for life?
More at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Atlantic_Anomaly

Just an interesting footnote to Lief’s comments on scientific methodology: UV radiation was not discovered until 1801 and the ionosphere was not discovered until last century. So the early observers of this compass deviation could not explain the physical mechanism involved. But they observed the high degree of correlation between sunspots and magnetic changes.
The IPCC AR4 rejects solar correlations to climate change because the physical mechanisms (i.e., cause and effect) are not understood. This is a step backward in science. You don’t have to understand the complexities of air pressure and fluid density to use a barometer. Physical explanations will come in time. Most discoveries are made this way. I fear the trend toward dynamic modeling, which requires physical equations, may be inhibiting rather than helping science to advance.

http://www.solarcycle24.com
” If sunspot activity for the month of September 2008 remains the way it is now until the end of the month, It will mark the first month where Cycle 24 activity outnumbers Cycle 23 activity … “

That was me that projected that spot. When a spot is that small, you have to move the paper around to see it if it is not distinct. It only took a few hours for that spot to get fuzzy. My seeing here is generally 3 out of 5, with periods of 4 on a routine basis. Not unlike Mt. Wilson, I too get a finger of oceanic air that represents the northernmost area of consistently good seeing subject to storms, of course. So, my question is that I don’t have a Fraunhofer to check out against, the optics may be much better now that would make a difference between picking that spot out in mediocre seeing after it’s intial clarity had fuzzed.
No, I am not at all convinced that my good fortune in knowing that the spot was there would be repeated 200 yrs ago between bouts of clouds or whatever. It could have easily been missed.

I have used the small production telescopes of 50 yrs ago, and let me tell you that the difference is quite pronounced for what you can get today. Eyepieces too.

Leif (07:26:34) Thank you very much, and thanks for the tip about the range of values the result may have. I’ll watch here for Bill’s report.
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“However, humans were not around when the last reversal took place, so what does this mean for life?”
Since there doesn’t appear to have been any negative affects to life in general in the last several reversals, I don’t see why there is any need to panic over this one.

Lief, as your illustrations from history point out, the current paradigm is always conserved because the burden of proof is on those who seek to overturn it–as it should be. I am not sure that this has been applied consistently to climate science. In order to establish their hypothesis, the proponents of AGW need to demonstrate that natural variability cannot account for warming over the last century or so. Given the fact that our understanding of these natural factors is still emerging, it follows that they can cannot be ruled out–at least not with the 90%+ level of certainty claimed by the IPCC. Again, scientists need to have more humility. Unfortunately I have see very little humility.

Leif (12:37:34) The CO2=AGW paradigm won’t die from human mortality, it will die from freezing up and cracking into little shards. The politicization of science by this episode of the madness of crowds has made this paradigm brittle and fragile. Mortality was the easy way out, not so available today, and in this instance. It is hubritic, the things that made it too powerful, money, fame, and power, also contribute to the fall.
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When a symposium of distinguished scientists agree on anything…flee to the bar in the hotel lobby before the BS gets too deep! Infiltrating Marxist pseudo-intellectual ‘theorists’ have even de-constructed climate science to advance their foggy agenda! Our blazing parent star has been a mysteriously self regulating entity for 4 billion years acting on its own accord. All we little ants on anthill earth can do is observe the phenomena and survive the consequences as best we know how. I’m getting my heavy duty L.L. Bean winter gear out of mothballs and ordering up a couple of cases of MRE’s!

“Global Warming” is not a scientific discovery…
it is a political invention.
See, science works like this…
“[science] has two rules.
“First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless.
“Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised…
“…To understand the global weather, you must first collect a great body of meteorological data; you must discover how weather actually behaves.” – Carl Sagan, “Cosmos”
“It is time however that we began to realize that much of what passes for science today may have been scientific yesterday but can no longer qualify because it does not make any additional meaningful statements about anything. It blindly adheres to procedures as a church adheres to its ritual.” – E.T. Hall, “The Silent Language”

I believe I have entered into some kind of fugue state. I am watching FOX News Special Report, and guess who is sponsoring it? wecansolveit.org… that’s who’ Then the ad comes on… We can repower America with wind and solar. Get rid of our dependence on foreign oil. Big oil is spending lots of money to keep you dependent.
My mind is swimming… Am I in the Twilight Zone or what?
I guess that’s the $300,000,000 ad fund at work.
I guess we don’t need nuclear… or all the coal plants we are building. With this mortgage thing, we are already tapped out.

RE: Glenn (01:32:41) :
Actually, by NOT firing Hansen, NASA is being political. The guy’s broken all the rules of conduct, yet skates. I surmise there are one or more heavy hitters either at the cabinet level or one layer below that, who have drunk the AGW fanatic Kool Aid. Even the big, big boss has shown a degree of AGW fanatical orientation.
Old world saying: “A fish rots from the head.”

‘Leif Svalgaard (11:00:16) :
As I have just explained at length, the difference in technology does not mean that the old sunspot numbers are undercounted.
Wolf took the difference in technology and seeing and eye-sight into account [although his method was forgotten or ignored during the 20th century].’
That is what leads me to count 2 orders of magnitude here.
200 yrs to Wolf to Modern.
And I agree with you that there is inherent confusion in doing the double conversion.

Leif,
“I was under the impression that AGW was physics and not correlations.”
The basic mechanisms are based on physics, however, estimates of past and future warming are model generated guesses (realclimate has admitted this in a recent post).
More importantly, the IPCC acknowledges that ‘natural factors’ are the null hypothesis and tries to use models to show that the planet would have cooled over the last 50 years without GHGs.
IOW, the IPCC is committed to the 100% GHGs hypothesis and nothing else because accepting that even 20-30% of the warming was caused by other factors would require them to admit that:
1) the models were tuned to match the hindcast;
2) CO2 climate sensitivity is likely less than they have been saying;
I agree with you that there is no one factor at work and we will eventually figure them all out.

Leif Svalgaard
“… The Sun varies so little that for me to accept that “it is the Sun, stupid” I want to see mechanisms that serve to amplify the tiny variations…”
one possible mechanism could be measured and quantified with the CLOUD experiment.
i think, it is quite disturbing that this experiment has been delayed so long.
I hope science is still that interesting to scientists that human curiosity wins in the end.

“How much variability in solar output would be necessary to explain the temperature record?”
“Ten times as much. ” — Lief
Based on the GCHs. (Global Climate Hacks) A “hack” is a computer program written by somebody who doesn’t completely understand the problem space which that programmer keeps adjusting, still without understanding (taking hacks at), until he gets something that approximates the expected answer.
Lief can say that it will take 10 times as much all he wants but he has no evidence of this beyond the climate models and the assertion of a negative. Lief has asserted this negative many times. There is no mechanism that he believes could alter the climate based on the known variation in TSI. Whatever. This “10 times as much” figure is pulled out of a hat. The only way such a judgement is valid is if all of the facts are known. Even the IPCC admits they don’t understand cloud cover. It is like the argument of creationists who say that they just can’t concieve that life “is an accident” The climate is not limited by current human understanding, or even by the ultimate possible human understanding. “Ten times” is only a judgement, an opinion. It is not a scientific finding that can be proven through rigorous logic.

Which is the accumulator that accumulates all those small TSI differences?

Leif
“They compare the temperatures with Lean’s old TSI-reconstruction which not even Lean believes anymore. The reconstruction was made to match the Lockwood ‘doubling’ of the Sun’s magnetic field. Lockwood’s group now find that their old result was flawed and that there has been no ‘doubling in the last 100 years’”
Were these ‘new’ findings made before or after the two Scafetta and West papers?

Tiny Tim, spotlet, sunspeck, sunprick, drop of tint on a football field of paint base.
All born to fade.
Not much more than a ‘bubble’ reaching the surface.
The size of the bubble is in observed proportion to the time to live.
They die quickly.

There are at least three levels on the earth which are capable of sustaining geomagnetism. The ionised upper atmosphere is one. The core and mantle is another. The third is the oceans and land surface, which consist of water and electrolytes, or soluble ions.
The assumption that the core of the earth is iron must be irrelevant. The temperature below the earth’s crust is above the Curie point of iron, the temperature that iron ceases to be ferromagnetic. It may be relevant that the core may be metallic (i.e. electrically conductive), or that the mantle, like the surface, contains a solution of ions, but the viscosity and inertia of such a subterranean composite structure are unlikely to show changes measured on annual scales. Millennial scales or aeons maybe.
I would suggest that the current decrease in geomagnetism is factored by the atmosphere and oceans, and the conductivity in the near surface soils and bedrock. And of course the changing amounts of polar ice.
Of course no-one has done the experiment with 1000 km lengths of 1cm thick silver cables shielded against electrical and magnetic influences on meridional and longitudinal vectors across land or ocean, monitoring the absolute surface electrical current variation over time. It could be done. Cheaper than NASA!
Then again, we haven’t done this with probes in the earth’s mantle or core, either, which are technically more problematic.
It’s a comfortable thought that there is a big lump of familiar iron at the centre of the earth, keeping our poles magnetically oriented, but an impossible thesis if the poles can reverse, as they apparently have, many times in the past. It would require a reversal of spin, not very likely IMO.
It would be rather disconcerting if we found out our core was actually that dense because it was a mixture of carbon, silicon, nickel, lead and iron and various isotopes of uranium in a well balanced nuclear reactor keeping things ticking over.
Of course we don’t know that. We can only guess that our core is the composition that our current paradigm accepts.
Whatever, the fact that there’s iron there has nothing to do with geomagnetism. It is all electromagnetism, and solenoids require no core to produce magnetic force.
So what would be required for a pole reversal? A shift of landmasses perhaps, blocking ocean currents, or a climate shift, sending ocean currents in different directions entraining the much more flexible ionospheric and thermospheric currents in counter directions from their previous paths.
A little like what we seem to be learning about heliomagnetism.

John, if the core tipped over through 180 degrees, don’t you think this would have some major implications in the spin of the planetary surface? What sort of energies can you imagine would have to be applied to tip over the core, without tipping over the rest of the planet?

So what would be required for a pole reversal? A shift of landmasses perhaps, blocking ocean currents, or a climate shift, sending ocean currents in different directions entraining the much more flexible ionospheric and thermospheric currents in counter directions from their previous paths.

I think it’s much more likely that the oceans would cause a climate shift rather than any other force (besides a collision with a large external body, or the Earth stoping spinning, or the moon suddenly disappearing), instead of the other way around (climate shift reversing ocean currents).

If the sun moved off the main sequence, then it would be about to undergo Red Giant Branch transformation. See any signs of the sun expanding? Warming? Contracting?
What then are the Minimums and why is the TSI down ever so slightly?
The models don’t seem to be able to predict them, which tells me that too much is taken for granted.
The total geologic timeline of Earth seems to indicate that is has been cooling, with a lot of burps along the way. Which brings up a strange relationship: If the sun is slowly getting hotter and expanding, where’s the point at which Earth then starts warming?

Does this make any sense?
By far the greatest amount of CO2 is released by the world’s oceans; they are also the largest absorbers. It should not be assumed that both sides of this process are always in equilibrium. The release of CO2 is not, but its absorption may be affected by the Sun.
Increased UV and gamma radiations are reaching the oceans’ surface during periods of high sunspot activity. There are also charged particles originating either from solar or galactic activity. All of these to a certain degree damage living cells. Clouds provide protection from UV rays; Van-Allen belt provides partial protection from charged particles and the atmosphere to some extent from gamma rays.
If solar activity is on increase (as it has been since 1860-s) then level of all 3 kinds of radiation would be on increase. Coincidently, the average strength of the Earth’s magnetic field has been decaying during same period by about 11% (61 to 54 micro Tesla), consequently protection of Van-Allen belt has also been reduced.
This increase of the harmful radiation is causing reduction of bio-mass of the oceans’ surface phytoplankton, which is by far the largest absorber of CO2 on the Earth’s surface. The damage is either through direct destruction of its cells or process of sterilization by irradiation. Result of this is a reduced uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere and rising in the ‘green-house’ effect. There are already quantifiable evaluations of reduction in the efficiency of phytoplankton. Reverse process takes place during significant reductions in the solar activity e.g. 1650-1710.

From Lief: About the UV: the Far Ultraviolet that varies significantly with the solar cycle does not penetrate. We do get some of the less energetic UV [just below the visible], but the flux of these vary oppositely to solar activity [i.e. goes up when solar activity goes down].
As the links that you provided attest to, the Near UV (the last 1/3 of it) is up compared to the rest of the spectrum. I have wondered somewhat that as soon as you get to the next sensor (the visible) the lowest values are again back down. Is there something in the detectors that is causing the sharp drop? i.e. – the NUV imaging chip might have a propensity to become overly sensitive near the end of it’s ramge, or the filter for the visible range is cutting off the violet sensitivity too early.

The question that has been bugging me for many months, Lief, is that if the NUV in the dangerous range is up, is it getting through to the surface, where us humans live?
i.e. – Should the public be warned?
I believe members of Congress have been warned, as Sen. McCain dropped a hint about the Sun a couple months ago.

Please bear with me (I know I am a pain at times, my apologies in advance):
Are we absolutely certain that the change is ‘normal’ and is well within that which is to be expected at Solar Minimum?

Well, ‘normal’ for the long term, in the sense that nothing terrifyingly new is likely to happen, but this cycle transition has been somewhat ‘subnormal’ in a number of measures, and often just barely so, too. F’rinstance, the magnetism measured by Ulysses; f’rother instance, the number of spotless days. Ignorant of ‘normality’ we be.
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Leif (11:42:57) Well, thanks for the correction. One thing I like about this exchange is how readily I can display vast ignorance. Well, let’s take Livingston’s measurements as another f’rinstance, then.
I maintain, from little actual knowledge, that what the sun is doing now is unusual, not so much abnormal, as irregular, or at the very least, not within a regularity understood by us as yet.
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Re: UV and TSI. The SORCE data sheet indicate that sigma for the UV sensor is 12-24% corresponding to the occasional 100% variance in UV.
In practice, this situation is a challenge for the engineer.
1. A transducer cannot, as a rule be both, sensitive and invulnerable.
2. Analog data that can fluctuate wildly or chaotically (repetitively swinging) has to be damped, inorder that the value settle. Since the higher intensities are temporally brief, the optimization here in UV measurment is at lower, steady-state, energies.
Of the total TSI 40% is IR, of which total only 1% reaches the ground. 40% is in the visible spectrum, subject to reflection with increasing albedo. 20%, nominally, is UV, but the measure of this spectrum is less well taken.

I bow, ‘variablility’. I will review my terminology.