A few days ago I wrote in State of the Sun for year end 2008: all’s quiet on the solar front – too quiet that “No new cycle 24 predictions have been issued by any solar group (that I am aware of ) in the last couple of months.” Coincidentally and shortly after that, NASA’s David Hathaway updated his solar prediction page here. He’s made a significant backtrack over previous predictions, and now for the first time he is claiming cycle 24 will be less than cycle 23, not greater.
Kudos to our WUWT resident solar physicist Leif Svalgaard for his foresight. He has been saying for many months that cycle 24 would be significantly reduced, and not greater than 23.
Here is Hathaway’s most familiar graphic, which has an active sun in the background. Perhaps it is time to update that background to something more reflective of the times…..oh wait, read on.
Click for a larger image
Here in this graphic, from Klimadebat.dk we can see how much has changed since Hathaway’s last prediction update in October 2008:
Click for a larger image
Note that Hathaway did indeed change background graphics from October to January. Its just not quite the smooth and nearly featureless ball we see today.
Courtesy of Mike Smith, here is the March 2006 prediction graphic:
Click for larger image
Hathaway’s predicted Cycle 24 maximun in March 2006: 145
Hathaway’s predicted Cycle 24 maximun in October 2008: 137
Hathaway’s predicted Cycle 24 maximun in January 2009: 104
I’d say that represents a sea change in thinking, but the question now is: How low will he go?
I was looking for a substantial quote from Hathaway in his prediction page, but it appears he is being quite conservative in his language, focusing mostly on methodology, not the prediction itself. I don’t blame him, he’s in a tough spot right now.
Meanwhile we’ve had an entertaining episode with the most recent Cycle 24 transient sunspot/sunspeck that appeared briefly yesterday then disappeared almost as fast as it appeared. See the area on the lower right of the sun:
In response to my query asking if he concurred with my assessment of it being an SC24 speck, (he did) Leif wrote to me: “Seems that it has received even a region number 11010. Somewhat ridiculous.”
Then about 12 hours later: “And SWPC has withdrawn the number. No numbered region after all.”
It will be interesting to see which organization counts this event, or not, in the month end tally. Up until this point, we had 25 consecutive spotless days. Now we have more, or not.
h/t to Frank Lansner for the Klimatdebat.dk graphic link and a bunch of other commenters who made note of the Hathaway page
“E.M.Smith (13:57:44) :
Richard deSousa (10:07:25) :
Dr. Hathaway will be more respected if he simply says he doesn’t know what the future portends… there’s nothing wrong with admitting that… to throw up numbers and constantly changing his predictions is not science.
Um, I think it is science. Make a hypothesis, test it, find it wrong, make a new hypothesis. That his prediction did not work is as valuable to a real scientist as when it does work…
Put me in the group that lauds him for putting it out there for folks to see and for being willing to change his mind when the data change. Very refreshing compared to the “cooling is the new warming” behaviour of others…”
Fair Go, all he’s doing is guessing, and then guessing again, just like me with Lotto.
If each time he were to provide a clear formula or other objective theoretical construct forecasting the new guess (er prediction), that was then subject to factual testing, then we could say he is doing science. A guess is not an hypothesis.
So far as his refreshing willingness to change his mind when the data changes, unlike the warmaholics, he simply has less freedom of movement than they. When there have been numerous days with no sunspots, and this has been widely observed, he can hardly insist those days were plagued by sunspots.
If he was being honest as a scientist, he would be saying “The theory upon which I had been working is plainly wrong. I have no sensible basis for making forecasts and will cease to do so until there is enough data to allow me to formulate and test another theory.”
Dr Hathaway belongs to an organisation that is rapidly coming to rival the UN for intellectual dishonesty and for destroying real science in favor of politics.
blockquote cite=”L Nettles (15:11:57) :
Forget Global Warming we have something new to worry about
Report: Powerful Solar Storm Could Shut Down U.S. for Months
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,478024,00.html”
__
This story in one form or another is recycled every 11± years. Typical of the alarmist MSM. I have a nutty friend who hasn’t missed the last 4 opportunities to present me a copy, expecting me, as an electroniker, to do something about it. Big, big nuke into the sun, I suggest, and he goes away in a huff.
Don’t forget today’s voting! click
We need to send a message to this guy.
[Vote page takes ~10 seconds to load.]
From http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/01/from-hansens-shop.htmlFrom
Hansen’s shop
How did this get past the clergy?:
“By examining the spatial pattern of both types of climate variation, the scientists found that the anthropogenic global warming signal was relatively spatially uniform over the tropical oceans and thus would not have a large effect on the atmospheric circulation, whereas the PDO shift in the 1990s consisted of warming in the tropical west Pacific and cooling in the subtropical and east tropical Pacific, which would enhance the existing sea surface temperature difference and thus intensify the circulation. Thus, it can be concluded that the observed 15-year trend in radiative imbalance of the tropics is probably a signature of natural rather than anthropogenic climate variations.
Anthony Del Genio
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies” “Separating the Man-Made from the Natural”
OT, but in terms of the Huffington Post business, I have an e-mail record of my dealings with Arianna Huffington. She knew who I was, and she knew what was in the piece. I had, by that time, sent several other links and articles identifying myself as a lifelong liberal Democrat and a climate skeptic. More than one pitch had skewered Gore. She had already told me she was forwarding my skeptic blog to her Green editor six weeks earlier.
We probably cannot imagine how much flak she received for publishing my article.
Everyone heed Smokey’s advice!
WUWT and CA together currently add up to 49% of the vote.
Can we get a majority?
Bill Illis (17:02:14) :
To reinforce Leif’s comments (and he is still 10 for 10 on this website), here is TSI from SORCE over the last solar cycle – maybe varying by 0.9 Watts/m2 over the solar cyle (as would be expected with Leif’s theories)
That only shows one quite weak cycle (and shows more than 1 W/m2 movement). How would it look if the reading was taken (if poss) from the top of cycle 19. We will also see in the next couple of years if we can indeed go below the “Svalgaard floor”.
Try http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2009/01/anthony-del-genio-of-nasa-giss.html for the Del Genio article
George M @ur momisugly 17:33:58,
It would have to be a really, really, really big nuke!! 🙂
Bill Marsh (13:47:32) :
“Retired Engineer (13:21:47) :
“Perhaps this is due to low solar activity, or maybe windmills aren’t that good of an idea:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/ufos/article2108149.ece
Seems that a windmill was struck by a UFO, knocking one blade off and mangling another one. With no trace of the missing blade.
So, does the lack of sunspots confuse their navigation systems, or are aliens just lousy drivers? (it couldn’t be due to any bias at the reporting source…)”
—————————
Actually it reveals the true reason that governments the world over have been pushing AGW and Windmills ….. defense against Alien invasion. Very clever of them”.
I think the wind mill was hit by lightning.
This is the main cause of wind mill failures (including fires).
The second problem is wind sheer.
As the lower blade moves through air with a relative lowere speed, the top blade moves through air with a higher speed.
This causes great stress on the blades that could result in a fatal failure of the blade.
The bigger the blade length, the bigger the torque, the bigger the risk of failure.
Have a look at youtube if you like to see some “exploding” wind mills.
It’s an expensive hobby.
Regarding Leif’s work, he is a student of the Sun. Drop by and donate: http://www.leif.org/research/ Hey, he doesn’t work for NASA or the UK Met Office.
Assuming there wouldn’t be a flame war, wouldn’t it be nice to get Theodore Landscheidt & Dr. Hathaway to contribute to the blog?
DaveE.
To: Steve Keohane,
Steve,
The purpose of the GIF animations of Dr. Hathaway’s Sunspot predictions was to provide a historical archive of predictions coming out of the NASA astrophysics department for the last several years. As such, I went to great care to not alter the contents in anyway. The images were recovered from several NASA websites, the Wayback Machine and several third party websites, including that of the Cowardly-Blogger-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. The NASA content was uploaded to Wikimedia so that it would be in the public domain and available to people such as yourself with the editing skills to display them to best advantage. I personally like a faster playback speed but every time I post a fast animation I receive complaints that it is too fast.
View my function as that of a computer forensics specialist collecting evidence from the crime scene. Your specialty is putting a face back on the skeleton so that others can appreciate the enormity of what is being done to Science. In the coming years the evidence which is now being collected will be of paramount importance, when it is asked: how did we get to this sorry state?
Given your obvious skills with a graphics editor and animator, you may be interested in the eight recovered images I have from August 2000 to December 2003 which use the same active Sun background image. These images have a form factor of 799×551; the later images have a form factor of 1024×768. If you are interested, I will forward the files to Anthony for relay to you or I could create another upload to Wikimedia if that would be more convenient.
You may be interested in the SWPC Sunspot Prediction animation which are missing the last few months of history. I understand that SWPC will be revising their Sunspot Prediction next month so I need get this file updated ASAP.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SSN_Predict_SWPC.gif
Please make sure that backup copies are widely distributed across the Internet and use the recovered content as you see fit. May I inquire as to what software you are using? Your animations are outstanding.
Mike
Edward Morgan (15:41:44) :
The same pull from the planet’s Jupiter Saturn on the opposite side of the sun explains polarity reversals.
It has been known for thousands of years that there are two tides per day, and Newton explained why. The tides are the same no matter what sides the planets are on.
Bob Tatz (15:45:59) :
Solar refers to electromagnetic radiation in the spectral range of approximately 1-9 ft (0.30-3 m)
Perhaps this should be fixed first… One foot light waves…
But if TSI means the Total irradiance [i.e. ALL wavelengths], shouldn’t their page be fixed?
The radio waves carry so little energy that they don’t matter as heat. The total energy of all the radio waves picked up by all radio telescopes in all the world in all the years we have have such telescopes is less than the kinetic energy of a single snowflake falling to the ground.
Edward Morgan (17:23:11) :
This argument, however, does not take into account that the Sun’s eruptional activity (energetic flares, coronal mass ejections, eruptive prominences), heavily affecting the solar wind, as well as softer solar wind contributions by coronal holes have a much stronger effect than total irradiance.” Theodore Landscheidt,
This is an example of the nonsense I was talking about. These things do not have a ‘much stronger effect’. The solar wind is contains 3 protons per cubic centimeter, the air you breathe contains 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules per cc, just to give you a feeling for the magnitudes involved.
George M (17:33:58) :
Report: Powerful Solar Storm Could Shut Down U.S. for Months
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,478024,00.html”
Boing, ..ing, ..ing, ..ing….
“crosspatch (09:26:56) :
The ramp up to maximum is generally faster than the tail off to minimum.”
Except for SC5, which is as symmetrical as you will find, and looks like a levee with identical plains on both sides.
If that is the case, expect SC24 to ramp somewhere around March-April 2010.
Wally (18:08:31) :
“Try http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2009/01/anthony-del-genio-of-nasa-giss.html for the Del Genio article”
Thanks for the reference. It appears NASA is starting to get it’s hands around the concept of modelling CHAOS.
I think climate modelling is still in it’s infancy. It’s similar to weather modelling of 50 years past. It took a long, long time for weather models to get enough detail to overcome the problems of CHAOS. The more information you have the better the model will be. Of course, unless you have perfect info you can never model CHAOS for very long.
That is the problem with climate models. They are just beginning to learn some of the factors that need to be considered. It’s too bad they got off track on the AGW thing. They might be a decade ahead of where they are now if they had continued to study the important factors rather than asserting they were unnecessary.
IMHO, climate modellers should be able to forecast a decade or two in the future with reasonable accuracy once they have a better understanding of climate (and this may take decades itself). I think that is probably equivalent to a couple of days in weather forecasting. Unfortunately, even short term weather forecasts are wrong now and then so we won’t even have any real guarantees no mattter what.
That darn butterfly can always mess things up.
My prediction is for Hathaway to continue this silly game of goalpost moving, thereby eventually causing great embarassment to NASA. Like they need another black eye.
Geoff Sharp (18:01:00) :
How would it look if the reading was taken (if poss) from the top of cycle 19. We will also see in the next couple of years if we can indeed go below the “Svalgaard floor”.
Here is what probably is our best shot at that cycle 19:
http://helene.ethz.ch/papers/haberreiter/Schoell_subm2007.pdf
Figure 4, heavy black line.
1366.8 W/m2 versus 1365.6 at current minima. Delta 1.2 W/m2.
DaveE (18:35:14) :
Assuming there wouldn’t be a flame war, wouldn’t it be nice to get Theodore Landscheidt & Dr. Hathaway to contribute to the blog?
Would fit in with the astrology angle. Landscheidt died in 2004.
And now the real meat: What is the effective TSI flux between minimum and maximum and how much would is deviate from the previous cycles? What’s the impact on earth, immediately and lag?
Harold Ambler (17:58:56) :
OT, but in terms of the Huffington Post business, I have an e-mail record of my dealings with Arianna Huffington. She knew who I was, and she knew what was in the piece. I had, by that time, sent several other links and articles identifying myself as a lifelong liberal Democrat and a climate skeptic. More than one pitch had skewered Gore. She had already told me she was forwarding my skeptic blog to her Green editor six weeks earlier.
—
Thank you for your Courage! Your knowledge. Your effort.
As time passes it becomes increasingly clear based on the de Vries cycle that Cycle 23 approximates to cycle 4 and 24 will be like cycle 5. On this basis it is reasonable to predict the 23 – 24 minimum for early 2010 and the 24 peak at a SSN of 50 – 60 in 2016. The 24- 25 minimum will be about 2022 and the 25 peak in 2028 with a SSN of 80 – 90.This overall would be a Dalton minimum with much colder temps. ( An even more serious Maunder minimum is also a possibility)
We should be putting as much CO2 – plant food – into the air as we can to help keep up food production in this time of crop failures and shorter growing seasons.
Just a reminder, Leif predicted a low number in 2004!!!!!!
http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf
Check out the rest of the work on his site:
http://www.leif.org/research/
Reading through this might help with those numerous disagreements. Seeing the research behind his responses can be quite persuasive!!
‘Norman Page (20:09:49) :
As time passes it becomes increasingly clear based on the de Vries cycle that Cycle 23 approximates to cycle 4 and 24 will be like cycle 5. ‘
The Sun is most assuredly not doing anything right now that would suggest or indicate otherwise. Hathaways floor joists are being gnawed by solar rats.
“Thus, it can be concluded that the observed 15-year trend in radiative imbalance of the tropics is probably a signature of natural rather than
anthropogenic climate variations.” from GISS?