Guest post by David Archibald
With respect to the month of minimum, it is very likely that Solar Cycle 24 has started simply because Solar Cycle 23 has run out. Most solar cycles stop producing spots at about nineteen years after solar maximum of the previous cycle. Solar Cycle 23 had its genesis with the magnetic reversal at the Solar Cycle 22 maximum. As the graph above shows, Solar Cycle 23 is now 19 years old. Only 9% of the named solar cycles produced spots after this.
The graph also shows the position of Solar Cycle 24 relative to its month of genesis. Solar Cycle 24 is now the second latest of the 24 named solar cycles. January is 105 months after the Solar Cycle 23 maximum. Only Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum, is later. This lateness points to Solar Cycle 24 being very weak.
This graph shows the initial ramp ups of six solar cycles that were preceded by a vey low minimum. The ultimate trajectory of Solar Cycle 24 should be apparent by late 2009. If Solar Cycle 24 is going to be as weak as expected, the monthly sunspot number should remain under 10 by the end of 2009.
Dermot Carroll (02:28:58)
Yep, it’s the Cheshire Sun. I’d like Leif’s opinion on the meaning and the possible effect of these phantoms on the climate. I realize that’s a tall order, and that my guess might be as good as his. Mine is cooling, but just why, oh, it’ll come to me soon. Or us.
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I’m not clear on who conducted the study but the sun’s relative motion within the center of the solar system has been recently and now currently moves similar to its motion prior to previous cool (cold) periods. Fact is, it is doing so with greater amplitudes in its movement away from center and then back to center than it did prior to the Maunder Minimum.
Lief can display to us his infinate knowledge of the sun’s thermo and electrodynamics yet ultimately the proof of what the sun is doing is in the spots. I think Archibald is only trying to compare past spot activity and then give us an idea about what might be going on and then based on these events we can know what will ultimately happen. Regardless of how these sunspots form as Lief espouses the truth is that the very simple scientific analysis about what do they indicate as they form (or don’t) is something we can all draw knowledge from.
As much as I have read–there’s a lot to read out there–the prediction by some which suggest a very very long period of low sunspot activity seems to be the most sensable conclusion. I don’t like to say all this because I know what it means for a lot of people but I also believe that it does no good to put ones head into a whole in the ground and pretend everything’s ok.
I’ll close with this. Before any major accident, there are a series of calamitous errors leading up to it, and that at anytime if just one error had been noticed then that accident would have been avoided. In this case humanity has knowledge of an impending natural phenomina yet policymakers and others compound the series of errors which ultimately will lead to the accident. Its simple, its been cold before and its going to do it again and there’s enough information out there that tells us when its going to happen.
MC (02:47:15) :
Fact is, it is doing so with greater amplitudes in its movement away from center and then back to center than it did prior to the Maunder Minimum.
Not sure you are correct MC. Angular momentum can be measured in different spots during grand minimum. Overall this session is a lot weaker than the Maunder, but we are at the middle optimum position right now (SC20 missed out, J+S were too inline) and we wont get more than one hit from this current alignment most likely…most people cant grasp it but expect a very short lived grand minimum.
Geoff Sharp,
That would be good news
How many of the spots we count today would have been unseen 100 yrs ago?
Just have a look at http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/latest/DSD.txt
The last day of SC24 spot 11010 (Jan 13) would not have been seen, and quite possibly the 12th.
Neither would have the spot of Sept 11, 2008.
We have more coverage, so fortunate circumstance is factored out, handing a bit more sightings.
Just to hazard a guess, 10-20% more.
Among the many lessons Leif has tried, Thor-like, to hammer into my brain is the idea that the tidal forces are too insignificant in terms of energy to be effecting any output from the sun. I’m insulated from his powers of reasoning on this subject by visions of van de Graaf generators, with the electricity being diverted by small forces. Why couldn’t the tidal forces engendered by the barycentric motion be effecting the magnetic display at the surface, and thus also effecting, somehow, the accumulation of heat on earth? Particularly if this connection is indirect, through the cosmic ray effect on albedo, rather than directly from changes in TSI, or something else like that?
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nobGS (04:01:51)
Yes, that would be good news. Furthermore, a sharp spike down and then up might make it easier to demonstrate the true solar effect on climate rather than if we indolently cooled and afterward haphazardly warmed. Oh, yes, interesting times.
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Just the fact that SOHO is showing more than would normally be spotted makes the observer try harder. Call it a persistence factor increased by technology if you will.
We are, after all, human.
For amatuer astronomers, aperture fever is a well-known draw. Because we know that more mirror gives more of the universe, we seek it uncontrollably.
A 42 meter scope comes online in few years.
Professionals are not exempt, they led the way through such fever.
MC (04:19:58) :
That would be good news
Agree…altho its important to have this experiment to end this man made warming hype and also learn the power of Sol and how its doesnt have a floor like some suggest. The graphs are saying a small grand minimum, followed by similar time to the early 1900’s but ramping up to a severe grand maximum starting around 2130 and possibly no grand minima after that…very much like the MWP. But we have to keep in mind the Milankovitch cycle…our Jovian friends doing it again.
len (23:26:34) :
Ack.. Phttt.. Btt!
When you combine programmers and n-body problems we chuck integrals (because there’s no mathematical solution to all interesting > 2-body systems) and go straight to modeling the differential equations.
When you do that, there’s no need for barycenters, as those are just a mathematical convenience to reduce a n-body problem (e.g. Earth/Moon/Sun) to a 2-body problem (Earth-Moon/Sun). BTW, not everything about a 2-body system has an algebraic solution. IIRC, given orbital parameters for a satellite orbiting Earth and a time since perigee, it requires an iterative approach to figure out exactly where the satellite is. There’s a simple integral in the way that can’t be solved. Before computers my calculus instructors just sort of ignored those. I like to think education has improved since then, though that may well be a delusion.
Modeling tides might be treated as a n-body problem (with a large n and more forces that just gravity), but given that a barycentre has no mass it causes no tides.
kim (04:42:20) :
Why couldn’t the tidal forces engendered by the barycentric motion be effecting the magnetic display at the surface
Tidal forces are weak but may have some effect on the 11 yr cycle..they are very different to angular momentum, if we look at Jagers paper trying to abolish planetary influence he even recognizes a discernible acceleration change on the Sun from angular momentum and I believe his arguments are very conservative and he doesnt provide the figures involved. This in itself leaves the door open. We can argue the mechanics, but the correlations of 1000’s of years dont lie, as will be revealed soon.
Geoff Sharp
The thing that so concerns me is the fact that we are approaching the time in this interglacial (some 12-14k years) when history gives a clue about what it may do. A mild minimum would be good and so would a grand maximum, but what is there to take from the fact we are on a slow shallow slope to cool. I don’t believe any AGW scientist or believer nor people like me who are concerned about cooling should close the door to good scientific discovery. This is what is so disturbing because if we as a global community continue to wear blinders relative to CO2 induced warming, we trevasse a slippery slope.
Thanks for the informative posts!
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. This is not possible to refute.
No one disputes the radiative properties of CO2. What is in dispute is the level, if any, of positive watervapor feedbacks. Without these the climate models fail to account for all observed warming. Thus far there is much evidence that such feedbacks are predominately negative, not positive.
If the models are wrong, then something else is driving climate.
The only thing left is sol.
Should have read “Kim you nailed it!”
Can Leif give us an opinion of the following paper by Mazzarella (which I’ve only just seen referenced (via icecap) or perhaps a link to where he discussed it previously:
http://www.meteo.unina.it/download/solar_forcing.pdf
Here is a postulated causal relationship between solar magnetic activity and length of day, LOD, (ie the earths rotation) and thence to sea surface temperature. Oddly they don’t mention the well-observed relationship between LODD and el niños but we can make that link ourselves, as well as the apparent realtionship between ENSO and the PDO. At last a unified theory – perhaps?
On the subject of solar effects on climate, has anyone seen any followup to this.
http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=3285
In particular has anything been investigated on the effect of cosmic rays on these “halos”?
len (23:26:34) :
All we need is a bit of help correlating the location of the mass and its movement over time in our solar system.
Maybe this helps?
http://arnholm.org/astro/sun/sc24/sim2/
Things like PDO will overpower any and all TSI-related changes. Folks I get what Leif is saying, though it eventually gave me a month long headache studying it. TSI does not change in any appreciable amount to heat or cool our Planet. The variables in our globe right here are WAY, WAY, WAY stronger! You are making the same kind of mistake AGW’s do with CO2. It has an effect but it is so small that a cow’s fart in the wind makes a greater impact, and the salty spray from a single wave outperforms both. I am still seeking information on why the jet stream meanders. Possibly related to oceanic currents? The only other Sun-related thing that remains is possibly cosmic rays, but even that just can’t drive weather patterns like a cold or warm ocean can. And we are only talking about weather patterns here, not climate change. The climate zone you live in will not change unless someone moves your location to a different latitude, longitude, altitude, or moves it closer or further from a large body of water. You might be a bit warmer or colder, but the overall climate where you live will remain stable. Your desert climate will still be there. Your temperate coast range forest climate will still be there. The climate you experience at your equatorial beach front vacation home will still be there. Your frozen Arctic tundra climate will still be there. And if you are a holy man on top of a mountain peak above the treeline somewhere in Tibet, your climate will still be there. The weather pattern will change, as it always does.
What’s now happening with sunspots is what is happening with hurricanes. Neither of which is doing any good for science. Both of which are easily fixed.
With hurricanes ‘tiny tims’ serves to pollute the data, increase the anxiety of the public, and run up insurance rates. Fortunately with sunspot ‘sunspecks’ the public doesn’t know, so it just pollutes the data. Both makes one of the most reliable methods of peering into the future, statistical and empirical methods, that much harder.
Both behaviors appear to be being done for the same government sponsored reason. Maybe a fork in the data, producing two datasets, are in order. One based on traditional observation methods and the other based on the latest technology? Double books anyone …
Understand, 2 of 23 have gone longer, or rounding up=9%. I’ll rephrase the question with more specificity. Assume there is a reliable pattern as we have seen in the past continuing into the future. Given a solar cycle has already lasted 18 years (n-1 years of apriori existence) what is the probability of it lasting n+?.
Not trivializing the 2 of 23 fact here. Just wondering if there is any value to already knowing the cycle has already lasted this long.
lulo (21:34:23) :
“My take on all this:
(5) This is my main point. We will soon have a much better idea of the relative strengths of the solar and greenhouse gas controls. Given that we’re coming out of a Grand Maximum into what may turn out to be some sort of period of low activity, we may have a better idea of the relative strength of solar and greenhouse controls on global climate within a decade or so. If a cooling trend occurs, this will give AGW proponents something to think about, especially if this extends through periods without cooling oceanic oscillations such as La Nina. If the reverse is true, and solar cycles fail to be the main climate driver for the first time in a very long time (an argument could be made for this for 1980ish to about 2000 or so), then many of the skeptics on this forum will have something to think about. That’s the beauty of freedom of speech. Information will get out, and debunk any false ‘consensus’ in the long run. But then again, I’m assuming that we actually are heading into a weak cycle and this assumption is based on little more than an empirically-derived hunch.”
This is an excellent comment. Mother Nature may be providing us with the evidence we need to determine whether CO2 is the forcing mechanism the IPCC believes it is.
On the subject of the sun orbiting around the barycenter, check out this web site.
http://arnholm.org/astro/sun/sc24/sim1/index.html
Download the Solar Oribt Simulator 2 and try it out for yourself. I did but to be honest I found it to be a bit confusing, that is I had a hard time figuring out when we would get increased solar activeity and when we would get a quiet period.
nobwainer (Geoff Sharp) (00:37:00) :
Email me at blcjr2 at gmail dot com. I’d like to ask you something about the 172 year cycle.
Basil
“I’m insulated from his powers”
Why not the Lorentz Force, seems like a silver bullet to me.