I just finished participating in the press teleconference call in for reporters with NASA and their panel of solar experts today. There was a lot of interesting discussions and questions. Unfortunately even though I put in for a question, I was shut out, and judging from the order of the questions asked and the organizations represented, clearly they played favorites for getting maximum exposure by choosing the larger media outlets first, such as AP’s Seth Borenstein who got the first question. That’s understandable I suppose, still I really wanted to ask what they though about the step function in the Ap Index that occurred in October 2005 and has remained flat since.
I took quite a bit of notes, and I’ll write more later from them, but for now I wanted to give my readers a chance to weigh in.
See the written NASA press release here
The three general things that struck me most from this conference were:
1) We don’t know enough yet to predict solar cycles, we aren’t “in the game”, and “we don’t really know how big next maximum will be”.
2) We don’t see any link between the minimums, cosmic rays (which are increasing now) and earth’s climate. This was downplayed several times. Some quotes were “none of us here are experts on climate, and when asked about Galactic Cosmic Rays and Svensmark’s climate theory is the answer was “speculation”.
3) The minimum we are in now is “unique for the space age”, but “within norms for the last 200 years”, but we are also surprised to learn how much the solar wind has diminished on a truly “entire sun” scale.
Here are a couple of the graphics they provided, note the difference in solar wind pressure between the two measurement periods.
And the fact that the electron density and temperature have decreased about 20%
Anyone who has listened to this teleconference is welcome to weigh in. For those that did not hear it, The RealAudio file would not play on my PC, did anyone record it? If so advise and I’ll post it here.
Shouldn’t an increase in stratospheric temp also increase the downwards pressure on the troposphere? Yes it would be a small force and distributed evenly amongst the entire air column, but could it effect the arctic oscillation pattern?
Cheers
Anthony, ect
Someone wanted to see the cloud cover changes over time?
A very interesting graphic of cloud cover changes can be found in a paper by Sloan and Wolfendale. full text available here http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1748-9326/3/2/024001/
The paper is a anti cosmic ray study but it would be very interesting to compare the cloud coverage in this article to the temperature.
The graphic of cloud cover changes can be seen here http://robjmitchell.smugmug.com/photos/321192565_8CaqU-M.jpg
cheers
Re: C. Moore (20:40:06)
“They broke the damn sun!”
LOL!
Get a better picture of yourself. The one you have is blurry.
[…] Details. […]
Just wondering if the Ulysses probe had any magnetic characteristics? Did the probe have any radiation escaping? Perhaps it was outgassing CO2 or some other highly dangerous and polluting earth gas?
Maybe we really DID kill the sun…
Seems like NASA has a breathing space.
Large Hadron Collider shut down until spring
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/09/23/scihadron123.xml
Tried to post the link to the article:
Large Hadron Collider shut down until spring
but it would not take. In today’s UK Telegraph.
Richard111 (05:29:17) :
“Tried to post the link to the article:
Large Hadron Collider shut down until spring”
As this is right on my turf,
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/
“Geneva, 23 September 2008. Investigations at CERN following a large helium leak into sector 3-4 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel have indicated that the most likely cause of the incident was a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator’s magnets. Before a full understanding of the incident can be established, however, the sector has to be brought to room temperature and the magnets involved opened up for inspection. This will take three to four weeks. Full details of this investigation will be made available once it is complete.”
There is always a winter shut down of the energy consuming accelerators. It is part of the contract with France and Switzerland not to overburden the energy grid.
RobJM (00:47:19) :
No, air pressure is due to the weight of the air in the column. If the stratosphere warms evenly, it will expand evenly and not affect surface pressure.
Tropospheric structures such as cold, arctic high pressure systems have a higher density at low levels and that leads to a heavier air column.
One of the easier reads for me on this subject is from JunkScience.
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/Cosmic_rays_and_climate.html
I have a portion of the audio…I missed the first nine minutes because I forgot about it. Hope it helps. Download here
Dispatch War Rocket Ajax to bring back his body (05:19:01) :
“All beings shall make merry”
“Under pain of Death”
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Flash_Gordon
Leif Svalgaard (21:30:16) :
“The ISS is seeing the atmosphere coming up from below as the upper atmosphere heats. The heat does not propagate down to the troposphere where we are, as hot air rises rather than sinking.”
With what sort of instrument does the ISS see the atmosphere coming up from below?
Harold Ambler (07:28:36) :
With what sort of instrument does the ISS see the atmosphere coming up from below?
‘see’ should not be taken literally. ISS feels [again not literally] the effect of a denser air as a larger ‘drag’ [air resistance] which causes it to loose altitude. Now and then small rockets must be fired to regain altitude and keep the ISS in orbit.
” September 24, 2008
Solar Winds Cooling Warmist Doomsaying
Timothy Birdnow
“…According to Anthony Watts, the Earth`s albedo reached a nadir in 1997, and has risen sharply since…”
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/solar_winds_cooling_warmist_do.html
Leif Svalgaard (07:44:16) : The ISS is seeing the atmosphere coming up from below as the upper atmosphere heats…. ’see’ should not be taken literally. ISS feels [again not literally] the effect of a denser air as a larger ‘drag’ [air resistance] which causes it to loose altitude. Now and then small rockets must be fired to regain altitude and keep the ISS in orbit.
So, Nancy Crooker’s comment below is way off the mark?
“And the second effect of reduced of solar activity is that it leads to the cooling of earth’s upper atmosphere,” said Nancy Crooker. “And if earth’s upper atmosphere is cooler, then there’s less drag on satellites up there, and this means we are left with more debris up there, which is also something astronauts have to look out for.”
hmmm. The AGW folks say that greenhouse reflection of heat back to the ground here is what leads to stratosphere cooling, since the heat can’t escape into the stratosphere to keep it warm. The NASA folks say that the stratosphere is cooling because of the damnable quiet Sun. Somebody is gonna have to concede here or make a backroom deal that both be right. At the very least, stratospheric cooling can no longer be a “Proof” point of AGW.
John-X (08:00:25) :
” September 24, 2008, Solar Winds Cooling Warmist Doomsaying
Timothy Birdnow
“…According to Anthony Watts, the Earth`s albedo reached a nadir in 1997, and has risen sharply since…”
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/solar_winds_cooling_warmist_do.html
At that URL, he quotes NASA:
“The Ulysses solar probe reports a 13% drop in temperature, a 20% drop in density, and a 30% drop-off in the sun`s magnetic field, marking this as the weakest period of solar wind on record (records go back to the 1960`s). ”
But NASA is not being completely honest here. To make such a statement one must compare data taken at the same point [phase] of the solar cycle. It is like taking two temperature measurements one in July and one in January and saying that the Earth has cooled 30 degrees.
Ulysses went over the poles in 1994-1995 and in 2007-2008. The solar minima happened in 1996-1997 [not in 1994-1995] and 2007-2008. Calculating the average interplanetary magnetic field strength [B, at Earth] for these two periods [omitting the last three months of 1997 to make the data comparable to 2008 – the new cycle had started in a big way also during those last three months of 1997], we get
1996-97 B = 5.2 nT
2007-08 B = 4.5 nT
a 30% decrease from 5.2 would be down to 3.6 nT. The 4.5 nT represents only a 13% decrease, quite within what one would consider normal fluctuation, so nothing extraordinary.
One argument that could be made is that what Ulysses observes is not what the Earth observes, except that another key finding [which is actually correct] is that if one takes into account the difference in distance from the Sun [the field decreases with distance because the number of field lines have to fill a larger volume], then it doesn’t matter where the field is measured [independent of latitude].
So I smell a little bit of ‘sensationalism’ here.
Harold Ambler (08:28:34) :
So, Nancy Crooker’s comment below is way off the mark?
No, she was talking about what would happen with less activity, I was talking about the effect of more activity.
Leif Svalgaard (09:03:36) :
At that URL, he quotes NASA:
“The Ulysses solar probe reports a 13% drop in temperature, a 20% drop in density, and a 30% drop-off in the sun`s magnetic field, marking this as the weakest period of solar wind on record (records go back to the 1960`s). ”
I think the poster, Birdnow, is mixing quotes and quoting very loosely.
(from my notes) It was Karine Issautier of Meudon who used the 13% and 20% figures when she said
“…significant drop of 20% in electron density…13% drop in electron temperature [between the two Ulysses passes] …the fast solar wind is cooler and less dense…”
The “30% drop is solar magnetic field” I don’t recall (I may have dozed off at that point).
[…] a 50 year low in solar wind plasma output. In addition to the official release linked above, here is a summary by an attendee who also blogs here at WordPress. These data fit nicely with Henrik […]
Okay, I found the 30% figure in the NASA story (PA write-up by Dr. Tony Phillips)
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/23sep_solarwind.htm
“What we’re seeing is a long term trend, a steady decrease in pressure that began sometime in the mid-1990s,” explains Arik Posner, NASA’s Ulysses Program Scientist in Washington DC.
” In addition to weakened solar wind, “Ulysses also finds that the sun’s underlying magnetic field has weakened by more than 30% since the mid-1990s,” says Posner. “This reduces natural shielding even more.” ”
So I DIDN’T doze off!
Posner was not one of the presenters! He was interviewed separately by Phillips.
Annav,
“sorry I had “tongue firmly in cheek” as the last line of the above post, but it was with < and it took it for html and ignored it.”
I think my comments are misconstrued sometimes too. From now on I will use (tfic) to indicate that my comment is in jest…
Trying…to…stop…teacher…mode…from….
Sorry, just can’t help it.
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Pamela Gray
Special Educator