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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OT but another gem from the UK King of the politically incorrect, Jeremy Clarkson who puts some of the blame for increased use of ambulance services on the “politically motivated weather forecasting” of the Met Office!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jeremy_clarkson/article5374360.ece
Steven: I am feeling the cold. It’s getting into the teens here.
5 years ago when I moved here the 20s in January was the bad stuff.
Now I fully expect to feel single digit soon.
It’s been a downhill slide since 2006.
The only thing that has changed is the Sun.
The people in thier insulated cities are not yet aware of it.
The folks out in the country side are fully aware of the changes.
And the changes go far beyond just mere thermometer readings.
Strictly speaking the level depends on how long after the ice has melted. Immediately after melting the level will have fallen due to the cooling of the water by the ice. As the water returns to its original temperature so does the level.
David Archibald (13:02:23) :
The recent monthly high of the Oulu count was November 08 with 6704.
Ah, actually December with 6702.
Moscow had November with 9601 and December with 9556…
If seems to me that the statement that is discredited is your attempt at being biblical: “It is written, and it shall be: Oulu neutron count is at an all time high and going higher.”
We’ll give a latitude of 5, so that a count of 6710 or more means that you are totally discredited.
The question [which you did not answer] was when you would be discredited and if that would cause you to drop your ideas [of course if won’t]. But, I’m not making any predictions, except saying that your 6900 will not happen.
You call it a ‘prediction’. I call it a wild and unfounded guess, even above simple extrapolation: http://www.leif.org/research/DavidA16.png
Over the last two years, Oulu has been rising by an average of 10 per month, so we shouldn’t have to wait long.
Well, maybe, considering that it and Moscow are now decreasing. And it is not about Oulu per se, but about the global average cosmic ray count, which is also not rising any more.
my first climate paper, in Figure 2 – on my website – “Solar Cycles 24 and 25 and Predicted Climate Response” dating from 2006.
Was that the one that was dubbed “The Worst Climate Paper of All Time”? or is one of the later ones a stronger candidate? http://n3xus6.blogspot.com/2007/02/dd.html
Recently, according to NOAA and Hathaway,
“Evidence is mounting that the deep solar minimum of 2008 is coming to an end; we can expect a livelier sun in 2009.”
This is their evidence:
“Old Solar Cycle 23 peaked in 2000 and has since decayed to low levels. Meanwhile, new Solar Cycle 24 has struggled to get started. 2008 is a year of overlap with both cycles weakly active at the same time. From January to September, the sun produced a total of 22 sunspot groups; 82% of them belonged to old Cycle 23. October added five more; but this time 80% belonged to Cycle 24. The tables have turned.”
So, let me understand, 24 cycle sunspots, mostly invisible without a magnetogram image, are turning the tables? What about the GCR, Ap, flat 107 cm RFP and all other indications that we are experiencing unusual times with the sun? Can’t they just admit they are wrong like they were with all their projections? If they are so confident that we will be blazing into 2009, why don’t they make even more defined projections?
I know the answer to that, but it points up the fact that they really do not know much at all. They were wrong in every projection made beforehand, not candid enough to admit it, and just smart enough not to open mouth and insert foot anymore.
Without the volcanoes, the Dalton minimum would have been significantly warmer. So, the ‘folklore’ about minimal solar activity and low temperatures doesn’t hold up very well.
Historical data that seems to indicate that at least as far back as the Dark Ages Cooling, there has been significant volcanic eruptions on or about the same time as major Cooling. These also apparently coincide with Solar minima, if we use the Wolf, Sporer, Maunder and Dalton minima as references. ‘Folklore’ it apparently is not.
Dark Ages Cooling – Massive volcanic eruption of Krakatoa what was once one island (its now Jakarta and Sumatra)
Little Ice Age – Increased volcanic activity that coincides with solar minima.
http://www.ees1.lanl.gov/Wohletz/Krakatau.htm
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/206/4425/1402
One question for those of us not to informed…if this cycle doesn’t kick up again and soon, what implications will that have on Mother Earth?
ANCHORAGE, Alaska: Frigid temperatures forced organizers of the U.S. Cross Country Championship sprint race to cancel the event Saturday. Race organizers hoped to hold the sprint races on Sunday, if the cold snap that has gripped much of Alaska for the past week loosens its grip a bit. Forecasters, however, said the bitterly cold weather was expected to continue.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/01/04/sports/SKI-US-Cross-Country-Championship.php
The Mass of Humans is not going to be pleased to learn that in hard times, when cold descends around them, that science is not the least bit interested in them.
They are going to even less amused when they are handed a dog-chasing-tail story.
They will support you as long as they perceive that you truly care about them, and that you are working for the beneift of mankind in general.
Leif Svalgaard (13:53:44) :
Fixing my italics…
David Archibald (13:02:23) :
The recent monthly high of the Oulu count was November 08 with 6704.
Ah, actually December with 6702.
Moscow had November with 9601 and December with 9556…
If seems to me that the statement that is discredited is your attempt at being biblical: “It is written, and it shall be: Oulu neutron count is at an all time high and going higher.”
Dave Archibald, Hooray!
Mark (13:56:03) :
One question for those of us not to informed…if this cycle doesn’t kick up again and soon, what implications will that have on Mother Earth?
Not much, except homing pigeons and other birds will have somewhat improved navigation.
Dave (12:14:21) See also:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12394
which confirms that Siberia has been warming in recent times but discusses the role of the Arctic Oscillation as a factor.
I have also noted from the Cryosphere comparison maps since they have been including snow cover that cover over Siberia compared to Canada is very patchy. (Not sure that 2009 has been added into their year block yet)
I would also consider geothermal activity as I am sure that there is activity in Eastern Siberia which has one of the earth’s tectonic plates running right through it:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh
Also look into the Siberian Traps which refer to an igneous area of past volcanic activity running EW through the Eurasian Plate.
Actually plenty of people have been saying things to him, shouting them at him, even, he just doesn’t care.
Steve Keohane (10:49:54) :
The only decent frozem mammoth reference I’ve come across is in my 2016: The [Next] Year without a Summer. Part of what I quote is “when we dug it out still farther we found that in its fall it had not only broken several bones, but had been almost completely buried by the falls of earth which tumbled in on it, so that it had suffocated.” The food still in its mouth had autumn seeds, so it may have wound up frozen in permafrost.
There’s no need for “flash freezing” ala Whitley Streiber and the “The Day after Tomorrow.”
After watching this comedy play out since Rio and being amazed at the political manouvers of Maurice Strong (he should have got the Nobel) … and recently interested once again after the AGW crescendo reached a peak of ridiculousness last winter, I am convinced of the following.
http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/
http://ozwx.plasmaresources.com/wilson/Syzygy.pdf
We are entering a 30 to 40 year Grand Minimum, not quite the Maunder quality, maybe more like Dalton … where the barycentric tides are slightly disrupted by a couple planets not pushing us over the edge. It will still be amazing if AGW can keep the faith in the face of that. I’m sure they have a couple of political moves left but I guess we’ll have to wait and see if they are involuntary twitches or if we get a couple more years of climate comedy.
Robert Bateman (10:14:51) :
If ANYONE can tell me why I should not expect SC24 to follow in the footsteps
of SC5 as I have laid out in the graph on that page, I would really like to hear all about it.
SC4 and SC23 are indeed very similar but do differ in one major area. The amount of angular momentum for both cycles is very close as is the timing but SC5 experienced the 1st phase and was then followed up with a 2nd phase in SC7 before recovering in SC8. We are now experiencing the 2nd (optimal, SC20 didnt quite make it on phase 1)) phase and there doesnt look to be a 3rd stage of any strength as the momentum is weakening as we leave the trough of strength which ran from 1280-2010. My next project will be to graph this strength using a most aligned days of N+U+J+S, hoping that I can attain all the relevant data, which if successful should prove the theory beyond doubt.
Another area of interest that doesnt seem to be touched by science yet is what causes the “tipping point” to grand minima and why does it lasts at least 2 cycles, and what triggers the process to start back to normal. I suspect this time around it will all be unmasked expecting some unusual results in the solar polar strength and polarity.
Maybe it’s time to ponder why the Earth switched to alternating ice ages around 5 million years ago, and continues this cold-hot cycle today. If you look at the geologic temperature graphs, it’s as if the ice ages just started up, slowly at first, and with each temperature swing became more pronounced. The change in temperature has seemed to hit some sort of a limit … As cold as it gets, and as warm as it gets.
A few hundred years of man’s knowledge is meaningless to a 4.5 billion year old planet.
Could it be the sun burns so brightly that it exhausts all it’s easy to consume fuel and needs 100,000 years to recharge the reservoirs? And then uses that accumulated fuel up in the next 10-12,000 years?
All of this ice age change occurred without man being around in any significant way. If here is one thing certain in all the climate disaster sitcom, there will be another ice age, it’s just a question of when. And that’s regardless what is rationed or what the tax rates are.
Every day that passes proves what genius Landscheidt was. He freakin’ nailed this decades ago.
Leif Svalgaard (14:19:44) :
Mark (13:56:03) :
One question for those of us not to informed…if this cycle doesn’t kick up again and soon, what implications will that have on Mother Earth?
“Not much, except homing pigeons and other birds will have somewhat improved navigation.”
And the loss of accumulated heat from the oceans to a cooling atmosphere, leading to more La Nina’s and less El Nino’s, less transfer of heat to northern latitudes via oceanic currents, colder, northern hemisphere winters, generally cloudier but drier skies, cooler summers, and the increased likelihood of largescale volcanic activity.
Lunar perigee occurs Jan 10th within 16 hours of full moon, near max declination and only a few weeks after earth perihelion. About the biggest chance of some volcanic action this year. I hear Yellowstone has been pretty active these last few days.
Good thing those birds have better navigation Leif as a lot of them have been heading further south than usual.
Lief you say: “My point was to compare the Dalton Min with the 30 years before and after, when solar activity back high.”
Well how could we do that in any precise manner? If there is anything Anthony has taught us on this board, it is not to trust surface temperature measurements.
Leif
“And BTW, Oulu counts have stopped increasing:
2008 Jan 6592
2008 Feb 6576
2008 Mar 6577
2008 Apr 6586
2008 May 6578
2008 Jun 6582
2008 Jul 6598
2008 Aug 6636
2008 Sep 6658
2008 Oct 6678
2008 Nov 6704
2008 Dec 6702
I warn against based wide ranging conclusions on data from a single station.”
I’d warn you about making statements based on one month difference of a small percentage of an increasing amount, but it wouldn’t do any good.
For the Ice Age crowd out there … it looks like we have a couple millenia yet (~4000 before ice pushes the foundations out from under the Sears Tower. The Holocene looks like most other interglacials and there is a paper out there (is it on this site?) that says we have a long way to go before we hit a tipping point. Maybe as we get closer to the next Glaciation in the Ice Age (Quatenary Period) we live in that follows the Milakovitch Cycle almost in lock step … then one of these events will push us over into … repopulating the lush Sahara 😉
But not so fast. Some cycle analysis shows we will get one more Medieval Type ‘Grand Maximum’ or warming before we need to relocate. On the other hand it is something to ponder because there is some evidence that when it does turn and ‘tipping points’ are reached it is not a slow process. Maybe not as ridiculous as ‘Day After Tomorrow’ but it appears it goes from wheat fields to ice fields in a decade or so … thus some evidence that some areas experienced ‘flash freezing’ where mammoth mentioned earlier.
… every time I go through this discertation it tightens up a bit 😀
David Archibald (13:02:23) :
Thanks for the link to your paper….the Dalton temperature readings from Oberlach Station are certainly interesting. We all know there are many players that affect temperature and its not a matter of matching EVERY sunspot peak with a corresponding temperature peak.
BTW here is my prediction for the coming 3 cycles based on angular momentum….looks a lot like the graph you display in your paper.
http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/files/2008/12/ultimate_graph2all.jpg
PaulHClark: Your comments above and in a prior post said I hinted at a link between the Gleissberg Cycle and SST. I had to Google it, because I couldn’t recall making such a claim. My only use of Gleissberg Cycle was in a post “NINO SST (Not Anomaly) – Part 2”.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/08/nino34-sst-not-anomaly-part-2.html
In it, I was discussing a long-term oscillation (approximately 80 years) that appears in the difference (delta T) between NINO3.4 SST (not anomaly) and global and hemispheric absolute temperatures. An example of the graphs:
http://i34.tinypic.com/11lok5h.jpg
Note that I used the polynomial trend line to help illustrate the oscillation, not as a predictive tool.
My reference to the Gleissberg Cycle was: “The only natural oscillation I know of with a frequency of that length is the Gleissberg Cycle, a solar cycle. But I know so little about the Gleissberg Cycle I would not even venture to comment. Also, what shows in the graph could simply be an underlying oscillation with a length that approximates that of the Gleissberg Cycle. The oscillation is apparent and noteworthy, though.”
I hope that clarifies things.
Also refer to my note near the current end of the earlier thread, “PaulHClark: Thanks for the linked paper. I’ll take a more detailed look after I’m done with the post I’m preparing, but at first glance, it appears in that 2000 paper Yousef is using a version of TSI that’s obsolete.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/31/2008-ends-spotless-and-with-266-spotless-days-the-2-least-active-year-since-1900-portends-cooling/