I decided to make an animated GIF of the latest cycle 24 sunspot, dubbed number 1002, which was literally a “flash in the pan”.
Credit: SOHO/MDI
One thing that has been common so far with all cycle 24 sunspots this year is that they have been small and very short lived. This one lived just slightly more than a whole day, a mere blip in solar time, where some sunspots will survive for a whole solar rotation (27 days) or more.
As usual, I’m confused. Old cycle spots are supposed to be near the equator, new cycle near the poles? Right or wrong? Latitude 25 (or 26 degrees depending on who you believe) is nearer the equator, or nearer the pole? Lessee, equator = 0 degrees, pole = 90 degrees, 25 nearer 0 or 90? What am I missing here?
Yeah, yeah, I know about magnetic polarity, but I have gotten an admission that sometimes that is reversed. 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?
Out, out, brief candle!
There never was a horror which surpassed
This icy sun’s cold cruelty, and this vast
Night like primeval chaos; would i were
Like the dumb brutes, who in a secret lair
Lie wrapt in stupid slumber for a space…
Time creeps at so burdensome a pace.
‘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.
I should say that link above is 35 pages. Forgot to put in the number.
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.
Err, Solar cycle 24 sun spot.
For us here in the cheap seats, when did Solar cycle 23 end.
I havn’t seen that said anywhere (I have probably missed that ? ),
well apart from NASA,
and they keep moving that date after the fact.
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.”
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 simple too primitive. This latest SC24 spot was a well-fed Tiy Tim at best.
This has to be taken into acount when comparing todays’s data with historical data.
(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.
This is OT, and connected with the paper I linked to above, but I once saw a question that said something like “why doesn’t Michael Griffin, NASA’s administrator and James Hansen’s boss, do something about Hansen’s antics on behalf of AGW?” I wondered that too. Until I found out why on page 19. Lindzen says:
“Michael Griffin, NASA’s administrator, publicly expressed reservations concerning global warming alarm in 2007. This was followed by a barrage of ad hominem attacks from individuals including James Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer. Griffin has since stopped making any public statements on this matter. ”
A turn on the old phrase it seems: if they won’t join you, beat them.
“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.
Yes I agree, would this spot have been observed 200 years ago? Surely they didn’t keep a 24hour watch on the sun back then? This tiny spot lasted barely over a day, and this would surely make it likely to be missed.
Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!
Glenn,
If you read the paper, linked to above (and here again) you’ll understand the scope of this thing and exactly why Griffin could not fire Hansen without risking his own career.
I think it is Churchill who said that “all that is necessary for evil to win is for good men to do nothing.” That is precisely what is going on here. Intimidation. Maybe Griffin may disagree, but he likes his job more than he cares about disagreeing with the AGW crowd. As long as they let him keep his job, he won’t interfere. I think that is the current, though probably unstated, arrangement.
As noted in Appendix 3 in an article in the Boston Globe by John Holdren, a professor in the Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard and the director of the Woods Hole Research Center (which is an evironmental advocacy center, not a research center, surprise!) virtually all the important people believe in the catastrophic effects of AGW. Who are those, you ask?
1. The leaderships of the national academies of sciences of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Russia, China, and India, among others…
2. All three of holders of the one Nobel prize in science that has been awarded for studies of the atmosphere (the 1995 chemistry prize to Paul Crutzen, Sherwood Rowland, and Mario Molina, for figuring out what was happening to stratospheric ozone).
3. He [John McCain] has castigated the Bush administration for wasting eight years in inaction on climate change, and the policies he says he would
implement as president include early and deep cuts in US greenhouse-gas emissions. (Senator Barack Obama’s position is similar.)
The arguments boil down to two parts:
First, all the leading scientists believe it, and there’s no way they could all be wrong. It is endorsed by political leaders including even those currently running for US president. My own reply to this is that the science is politically-driven (something
The second part of the argument stands itself up with plenty of elitism with scientific skeptics being an infestation, and amateur skeptics simply parroting those arguments produced by the former. Then it sets up not one but three straw men, proclaims the first to be most dangerous, and proceeds to knock it down, the other two falling by association with the first. Then returns to the prior elitism (the important people). Third, he characterizes the skeptics as delayers, and that delay as dangerous, which makes delayers dangerous.
I have to agree with Lindzen, the paper’s author, that the entire AGW movement could be very damaging to science. Regardless of the science, people need jobs to live, cars to drive, lights to see by, etc. Also, I have observed that the technology that the AGW crowd finds compatible with their “pollution-free” ideal of energy generation is substantially more expensive than the alternatives which they detest and would amount to massive price increases. This is already set to happen in Europe. But in some instances there, political leaders are (in talk at least) bucking the ‘green’ trend because they see the train coming, so to speak. The collision between theory (AGW) and observation (reality) is going to be rough.
Secondly, along with religion (which addresses the parts of our lives that science largely does not and CANNOT), the development of the scientific method and science in general is man’s most oustanding achievement. If the public trust in it fails because of the exploitation of it for political purposes, which is obvious to many and perhaps spreading, it may set us back centuries in terms of progress. We are simply looking at nothing less than the potential collapse of the mindset of Western civilization. Not at this very moment, but gradually and over time.
Finally, such a trend would end up setting people against their governments because the laws and policies initiated because of the science will negatively impact the common person, yet they will be told that the science is unquestionable, and so are then the policies, and so they will just have to adapt (make-do with less ring a bell?). Meanwhile, of course, those who are wealthy and connected to the AGW crowd (like Al Gore, for instance) will not have to ‘adapt’ quite so much. That will serve to incite class warfare. Inevitably, laws will have to be passed to maintain social order (which may be foreseen before anything actually happens) and that will further stifle any dissent.
The changes happening are designed to cause chaos. The chaos that ensues is designed to act as a screen to make further and more substantial changes. Also, it will allow for security measures that will support those changes in the name of security and protect the political leadership. By the time the PDO flips back to WARM (in 30 years) you will not recognize the world in which you live. Science is about what possible. Politics, on the other hand, is about what is predictable. If politicians are anything, they are entirely predictable. Wait and see.
forgot the link to the paper. sorry.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.3762.pdf
One! Two!
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)
Glenn and Bobby,
It sounds like Michael Griffin is a coward. I guess you are right, that easy money is hard to turn down.
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
That spot may indeed have been missed 200 yrs ago. The optics we have today are far superior to that of 50 years ago, what with higher transmissions, better glasses, and the focal ratios are shorter and the images crisper. The eyepieces used for projection are also vastly improved. Throw in modern multi-coatings.
I’d like to see a side by side comparison of my off the shelf 70mm F/9 against that Fraunhofer with original equipment. I know that the Fraunhofer would pale against today’s high-end Japanese optics. A Tak would blow it away.
‘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.
I’m no expert, but I’m not as sure as some of you that this spot would have been missed 200 years ago. This spot was much, much more visible that the sun speck that got counted back in August. That one, I agree, was more likely not to have been counted back then. That it was of such short duration isn’t a reason to think it wouldn’t have been noticed, either. There are plenty of months during minima back then where, from the size of the monthly count, the spots couldn’t have stuck around very long.
The sun is going to do whatever it is going to do, and whether or not this spot would have been counted 200 years ago doesn’t change that. I understand the importance of consistency, and I think the scientists who do this stuff (count sunspots) do also. So while there may be some occasions to question the official count (as for the sun speck in August), I doubt that we’re going to see a systemic measurement error bias here. Compared to some data collection processes (think G…I…S…S…) I think this one’s much less prone to measurement error, and that the data are reasonably accurate. (Even Leif’s adjusted data produces basically the same kind of wavelet we looked at here a couple of days ago, FWIW.)
REPLY: One of our commenters in another thread said the spot was visibile on his paper projection, one of the old methods. So I’d say yes, this spot would have been counted back then but the Augist speck would not. – Anthony
Something to keep in mind is that IF we’re approaching a replay of the Dalton Minimum, it will not be until the next minimum before we should see long (meaning multiple months at a time) periods of no sunspot activity.
Isn’t that about the time the Livingston and Penn projection has sunspots disappearing?
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
Rudolf Wolf who invented the sunspot number [SSN] and made the first list of SSNs was well aware of the problem of technology improving with time and also found the solution to that problem.
When there are many sunspots, the ultraviolet radiation from the Sun is also higher. Said radiation knocks electrons out of the atoms of the air, thereby creating an ‘ionosphere’: a conducting layer [there are several, actually, the one of interest is the so-called E-layer at about 110 km altitude]. At night, these electrons find their positive partners and recombine, effectively removing the ionization again. Come sunrise, the UV returns and the ionosphere recovers its conductivity. During the day, the air is heated and a system of winds [thermal winds] is set up that moves the air across the field lines of the Earth’s magnetic field [there are also tides in the ionosphere caused by the Sun and the Moon]. Moving a conductor in a magnetic field induces an electric current [this is called a dynamo – an electric motor in reverse], so a system of currents [two giant vortices – one in each hemisphere] is set up. An electric current produces its own magnetic field, so these current vortices add to the Earth’s magnetic field [not much – one part of a thousand, but readily observable, for the first time in 1722]. Even as the Earth rotates, the current and its magnetic field stay fixed in relation to the Sun [on the dayside under the Sun], so seen from the surface it looks like the current and its magnetic field sweeps over the sky, the compass needle being deviated a little to the East [or West, in the Southern Hemisphere] in the morning and bit to the West in the afternoon. This variation is seen every day and amounts to a total variation of the direction of the needle of typically 10 minutes of arc. Such a variation is easily measured even 300 years ago.
Since the discovery of this regular daily variation in 1722 it was measured for several years in the 1740s and 1760s, and from the 1780s continuously to the present. Wolf [and others] discovered that when there were many sunspots the amplitude of the daily variation was larger. The difference is quite large: at solar maximum, the amplitude of the daily variation is two times larger than at solar minimum. Today we know, that this is to be expected as the UV is larger at maximum. We can even quantitatively calculate from the physics how large the changes should be, in excellent agreement with the observations.
This, of course means that observations of the amplitude of the daily variation of the direction of the compass needle is also a measure of solar activity and hence of the SSN. This Wolf knew very well and used to great effect to calibrate the SSNs observed by different people at different times with different telescopes [technology] at different locations [clarity of the air]. Wolf used himself as the primary observer and yardstick. So say that he counted a SSN of 100 for a daily variation of 10′, and a long-dead observer had counted a SSN of 50 during a year when the daily variation was also 10′, then Wolf would know that to make that observer’s counts to the same scale as Wolf’s own, he would just have to multiply the other guy’s SSN by 2. This would with a single stroke remove all issues of ‘different people at different times with different telescopes at different locations’.
Therefore it is [almost] moot to ask: “would this spot have been counted 200 years ago?” as compensation for different technology is built-in in the derivation of the SSN. The reason for the ‘almost’ is the case of no sunspots at all for an extended period of time [years], because it does not help to multiply a zero-count by a ‘compensation-factor’ no matter how big.
Using this geomagnetic method Wolf kept the calibration of the SSN almost correct for all years until his death. His successors [Wolfer, Brunner, Waldmeier, SIDC, and even Hoyt and Schatten] did not appreciate the strength of Wolf’s argument and stopped using his method, with the result that the SSN calibration since Wolf’s death has become uncertain [and actually wrong]. With modern data we can check and verify that Wolf’s procedure makes physically sense and still works and he passes with flying colors. Effort is underway to apply the method to the SSN record since Wolf’s death and bring it ‘up to snuff’.