The NOAA Space Weather Prediction center updated their plots of solar indices earlier today, on January 3rd. With the exception of a slight increase in the 107 centimeter radio flux, there appears to be even less signs of solar activity. Sunspots are still not following either of the two predictive curves, and it appears that the solar dynamo continues to slumber, perhaps even winding down further. Of particular note, the last graph below (click the read more link to see it) showing the Average Planetary Index (Ap) is troubling. I thought there would be an uptick by now, due to expectations of some sign of cycle 24 starting up, but instead it continues to drop.
Meanwhile, the Oulu Neutron Monitor shows a significant up trend, reaching levels not seen in over 30 years. According to an email I received from Dr. David Archibald, GCR flux has indeed increased:
Oulu Neutron Monitor Data, plotted by David Archibald with prediction point added. Data source: University of Oulu, Finland
Svensmark is watching this closely I’m sure.
Looking at the SWPC graph below, it appears that we are in uncharted territory now, since the both the high and low cycle 24 predictions (in red) appear to be falsified for the current time frame. No new cycle 24 predictions have been issued by any solar group (that I am aware of ) in the last couple of months. The last time NASA made a change was in October 08. The question now seems to be, are we seeing the beginning of a cycle skip, or a grand minima? Or is this just an extraordinary delay for cycle 24 ?
Solar cycle 24: where are you?
h/t to Russ Steele
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So, Leif is totally against the sun theory….I’ll mark that one down. Thanks for the input. I am making a serious decision on if I should move South or not.
Gore says Florida will be underwater and others say were in for a extended cold period. Who is correct? Maybe nothing will happen?
A lot of this reminds me of the search for the gene(s) for IQ. After a lot of investigation it has become clear that there is no single (or even a small number of) gene(s) that control IQ. More likely there are hundreds of genes contributing to IQ.
So it would seem that climate has multiple causes, and one cannot simply point to the sun or CO2 …
Slicer:
The spots drawn by Catania Astrophysical Obs. for 08/21, 08/22 and 09/11
were not sucessfully imaged by them. Mt. Wilson on those same dates with a seeing of 4 out of 5 on the Bortle Scale did not draw them or image them.
If the drawings of Catania from those days are expanded out, they would fill my large TV screen, and the spots drawn are pinpricks.
SIDC counted them.
Mt. Wilson Solar Tower has been at it since 1912. They did not draw them.
So, 100 years ago, those specific spots on those days would NOT have been counted.
So, what do sun spots do? Cause cancer? Radio interference? Nothing, it’s just random activity that we waste money on watching?
Lars Kamél (11:28:51) :
the fact that the combination Sun+cosmic rays have a large impact on our climate?
Is not a ‘fact’, but a weakly supported contention
kim (11:30:32) :
What’d I tell you about the shape of the peak of cosmic rays? Or did I tell you that about the solar sourced ones?
I forgot. Tell us all again.
Well thanks for the replies.
I am not sure about the explanation of winds compacting the area of ice. The area of ice is so huge that there should be an equal amount of wind and current compacting the ice as there is spreading it out.
I will ponder more on the explanations of a warm siberia.
“Lars Kamél (11:28:51) :
Many climate alarmists seem to claim that cosmic rays have no trend and thus cannot explaining climate change. The measurements show that cosmic ray intensities indeed have changed. From 1960’s to 1990’s there was a decrease. And global warming. Thereafter more cosmic rays have reached our atmosphere. And there has not been much global warming. How long will they be able to ignore the fact that the combination Sun+cosmic rays have a large impact on our climate?”
About 150 years. Any model is going to have to work through many normal oscillations in the climate to see if one cycle data holds up and was not just lucky. Accurate Cosmic Ray data is relatively new as is accurate global temperature data. Normal climate cycles appear to my untrained eye to be on the the order of thirty years. The sunspot modelers have a good length of record but they still have to match up against an iffy temperature record and have to take into account normal climate fluctuations due to the oceans.
A warm period with low sunspots may still match the model if it would have been warmer with high numbers of spots. It takes a lot of data to sort this sort of thing out.
Leif: I am trying to find some Tribal Elders in my area or No. CA who have passed down lore of what the climate was like here in the early 1800’s.
Seeing that the only ones here in that time were fur trappers and the Spanish Missions besides the Indians, it’s time to talk to them.
Early indications are that it was a LOT colder than it is now. Our records here go back to 1850’s.
“eg evidence that frozen mammoths still had food in their mouths when they froze although that may be a myth but I am open minded.”
“I remember an article about the mammoths in Siberia, may have been NG, late 50s early 60s, perhaps. An expedition had found ‘fresh-frozen’ mammoths, that had apparently been frozen constantly for many thousands of years.”
That is one of the mysteries I have often wondered about. If you look at the areas where these mammoth remains are being found, you see that they are buried in permafrost mainly in Siberia and many carbon date to 40k years ago. Now 40K ya would have been during the last glaciation. For that mammoth to be buried there, that area could not have been permafrost at the time. But 40K years ago is a time where one would expect that area to be under a mile of ice. How do you find a mammoth with undigested food in its stomach what died at a time when there should have been no food there at all? It is just another indication that leads me to believe that we have possibly seen some shifts in the geographic pole. Maybe this is due to changes in mass distribution due to ice building up or creation of large lakes or the emptying thereof or who knows what. It just seems to me that we have seen some huge swings in climate over time that may be more due to shifts in the location of the North rotational pole.
Lars Kamél (11:28:51) :
The measurements show that cosmic ray intensities indeed have changed. From 1960’s to 1990’s there was a decrease. And global warming. Thereafter more cosmic rays have reached our atmosphere.
This is what the measurements show [at a station that is not influenced by the changing magnetic field of the Earth]:
http://www.leif.org/research/thule-cosmic-rays.png
and here is another one:
http://www.puk.ac.za/opencms/export/PUK/html/fakulteite/natuur/nm_data/data/sanaenm_e.html
and this one:
http://www.leif.org/research/CosmicRayFlux3.png
I wonder if Leif Svalgaard is considering a revision to his cycle 24 predictions or at what point may that happen?
Robert Bateman (12:21:55) :
what the climate was like here in the early 1800’s.
The volcanic eruptions would certainly take a bite out of the warmth. My point was to compare the Dalton Min with the 30 years before and after, when solar activity back high.
@StevenHill:
What does your car’s speedometer do? It doesn’t make the car go fast. It doesn’t make your car stop. Why bother watching it?
It should be obvious now: Your car’s speedometer correlates very tightly with the speed of your car. Sunspots correlate very tightly with other (more important) mechanisms in the sun: When there are many spots, the sun is generally brighter, emits more X-rays, emits more 10.7cm radio waves, causes larger aurorae, repels cosmic rays, etc etc etc.
It would be nice if we had a record of all those measurements over the last 500 years, but we don’t for obvious reasons. Instead, sunspots are a handy proxy for the solar cycle because people have been noticing those strange dots on the sun for hundreds of years and writing down their observations. And we know now that sunspots correlate very well with all the other parts of the sun that have scientific value.
[CORRECTED FORMATTING, PLEASE DELETE PRIOR]
Przemysław Pawełczyk (P2O2) (04:23:15) :
You were interested in rising sea levels. This site had a good post on that recently:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/05/satellite-derived-sea-level-updated-trend-has-been-shrinking-since-2005/
edcon (12:25:17) :
I wonder if Leif Svalgaard is considering a revision to his cycle 24 predictions or at what point may that happen?
Since the solar polar fields have already been involved in making cycle 24 there is not much that can change. The polar fields have been very steady. Since my prediction [of 75] back in 2005, the polar fields have weakened a tiny bit, leading to a prediction that now stands at 71, but since that is not statistically different from 75, I do not foresee any change in my prediction. With emerging SC/24 flux, the polar fields are expected to weaken further, but that is just the normal way to their reversal, so no changes to the prediction.
If SC/24 falls below, say, 65, my method will not be a very good predictor, although one can argue that it did forecast a low cycle. We don’t really know what the ‘error bar’ is on this one. If SC/24 is high, my method doesn’t work and is useless for prediction.
If neither the Sun nor anything else affects the climate on Earth, then there is little point in making predictions, recording weather, sunspots, studying ocean currents & temps, etc.
If the only thing this is about is how long a satellite will last in orbit, then make them cheaper and mass produce them.
More cold for Europe
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp4.html
Cooling anecdote of the day
Birdwatcher makes fruitless journey to Norway only to find snow bunting in her garden
A birdwatcher who made a fruitless journey to Norway to see a rare snow bunting, returned home to Britain only to discover one of the species had landed on her garden fence.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/4060327/Birdwatcher-makes-fruitless-journey-to-Norway-only-to-find-snow-bunting-in-her-garden.html
Call it smart marketing that when I read the words: “Solar cycle 24 where are you?” that I had a very strong urge to say:
“Ohhhhh-ver heeeeere” in, if you could not tell, Scooby-Doo’s rather shaky voice. However, I doubt even a box of Scooby Snacks could coax out Cycle 24.
Ah, Dr Svalgaard, just as Al Gore gave us a timeline by which he could be totally discredited, so have you, but a much shorter one. You state that neutron counts have peaked. So if neutron counts have peaked by your reckoning, any further rise from here means that you are a discredited element, to borrow a term from the Marxist lexicon. Let’s see. The recent monthly high of the Oulu count was November 08 with 6704. We’ll give a latitude of 5, so that a count of 6710 or more means that you are totally discredited. Over the last two years, Oulu has been rising by an average of 10 per month, so we shouldn’t have to wait long.
Re your claim that it was colder 30 years either side of the Dalton Minimum, you know you are telling porkies, to put it politely. That subject was covered in my first climate paper, in Figure 2 – on my website http://www.davidarchibald.info with the title “Solar Cycles 24 and 25 and Predicted Climate Response” dating from 2006.
Robert…
Only man and CO2 is destroying the planet! In 1977 they were yelling ice age, ice age! Now they are yelling CO2 and heat wave. I wish the heat wave was here in Ky. It’s all a bunch of hype if you ask me and I’m betting on the sun activity being the driver here. I look for 10+ cold years coming to a planet near you.
How much heat would it take to cause a .34 cu mile of excess water flow out of Yellowstone Lake since Dec 27?
Solar wind flux and galactic cosmic ray (GCR) flux are not really related (except for the solar modulation of GCR due to the solar wind effect on the size of the heliosphere and heliosheath).
Solar wind particles, 95% are protons and 4% are alpha particles (electrically charged because they do not have the necessary electrons to make them hydrogen or helium atoms) are travelling at 0.1 to 0.3 percent the speed of light. This is slow enough to get trapped by the earths magnetic field, directed to the polar regions, and make a good light show called the aurora.
Galactic cosmic rays, 87% are protons and 12% are alpha particles, but are traveling at 42 percent the speed of light and blast through the earths magnetic field like a hot knife through butter. They then interact with atoms in the atmosphere and voila, we have the Svensmark effect.
Robert Bateman (12:47:26) :
If neither the Sun nor anything else affects the climate on Earth, then there is little point in making predictions, recording weather, sunspots, studying ocean currents & temps, etc.
Studying the weather and climate may teach us something about the dynamics of the climate system, so that is a valid reason [for studying the Earth, not for studying the Sun]
If the only thing this is about is how long a satellite will last in orbit, then make them cheaper and mass produce them.
There will be a human presence in space and we need to learn how to forecast space weather well ahead of that. Of course, we could mass produce humans too, but somehow that does not seem such a good alternative to me…