First this news: The Ap Index continues to fall. While the January 2009 data is not out yet, the December 2008 data is and is an Ap value of 2 according to SWPC. While this number may be lower than other sources (Leif will fill us in I’m sure), I’m plotting it for consistency since I’ve been following the SWPC data set for well over a year now.
I’ve pointed out several times the incident of the abrupt and sustained lowering of the Ap Index which occurred in October 2005. The sun has been running at a lower plateau of the Ap index after that event and has not recovered. It is an anomaly worth investigating.
From the data provided by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) you can see just how little Ap magnetic activity there has been since. Here’s a graph from December 2008 showing the step in October 2005:
Additionally David Archibald writes with a new idea on how to use the Ap Index to predict the maximum amplitude. See below.
In late January, I contributed a post predicting that the Ap Index would have a minimum of 3 in late 2009. There is a good correlation between the aa Index at minimum and the amplitude of the following solar cycle. This also holds for the Ap Index:
The Ap prediction results in a prediction of maximum amplitude for Solar Cycle 24 of 25. This would be the lowest result since the late 17th century.
>January max temps for Melbourne (for each day of January)
1 40.4 1900..
Ozzie not only are your claims about fires wrong but you make many many many errors with your tempertures.
Just a few of the obvious omissions in your post…
1 40.4 1900
– it was 41.2C in 2008
..
..
..
25 40.2 1910
– it was 44C in 2003
28 42.1 1858
– it was 43.4C in 2009
29 41.5 1898
– it was 44.3C in 2009
30 39.7 1879
– it was 45.1C in 2009
How did you manage to make so many errors? Where did you get this stuff from?
How can anything you write be trusted when you get so many facts wrong?
Anthony surely it is time to ban posters who mislead the readers of your blog.
REPLY: “DJ”, your comment is disingenuous, banning people who make a mistake or with whom you disagree, especially when you misspell the word “temperature” yourself is hardly sporting. By your rules, you’d be banned also. – Anthony Watts
Anthony surely it is time to ban posters who mislead the readers of your blog.
you mean like the posters who state that global temperatures have increased 0.4C in the last year?
or maybe the posters that state that increased CO2 will cause corals to die, in spite of the fact that coral evolved at a time in earth’s history when atmospheric CO2 was many times today’s levels.
hello, Kettle? Pot calling…
*sigh*
The last decade has been a decade degree hotter than a century ago. The sea level correct for seasonal affected reached its highest level on record. The wiggle watchers have stopped watching as global temperatures have taken off in the last year – up 0.4C in just 12 months. Watch for some really high temperatures in the coming few years.
When your economy, social structure, infrastructure, ecosystems are tuned to a certain climate and you change then you will suffer major consequences. Its the change that matters not the the average temperature.
Heh. The snowbirds that have moved to Florida certainly haven’t suffered because their climate has changed. I’m sure they would suffer a lot more if they were living up north in the winter without fuel.
Actually, the last decade in my area has been cooler than 100 years ago. The last 100 years has been cooler than 200 years ago. The only place in my state that has gotten warmer has been where the population drastically increased and so did the amount of pavement. So tell me, has the population of Melbourne increased any in the past
A warmer planet will lead to massive increases in sea level (check with your local geologists about how high sea level was 120K ago when the planet was only slightly warmer). stably stratify the oceans sending the deep ocean anerobic (as happened in the end Permian extinction evet and suffocated deep ocean life), dry out the subtropics (as is happening on a global scale right now – yep Australia, SW USA, southern Europe, northern Africa are all getting drier), increase the severity of droughts , heatwaves , flood, fires. Oh, and CO2 acidification will stop the ability of corals to form from about 2050 – already this is evident in deep sea corals in the southern ocean and in shore reefs of the Great Barrier reef. Around this time the southern ocean krill will cease to have viable shells (don’t believe me put a few in a fish tank and elevate CO2 to 500ppm like the University of Tasmania recently did).
And your point is? My entire state has been completely submerged in the past; it has also been twice its present size. The cycle is called glacials and interglacials. Glacials are drier, interglacials are wetter. CO2 (particularly human-generated CO2) doesn’t have anything to do with it. The SW USA has a history of long droughts; in fact, longer than any in modern history, so I’m impressed or fearful. Nature happens. If the sea level rises, I’ll move inland. I’ll worry about that eventuality when citrus fruit can be grown throughout Georgia to the Carolina borders (again). Oh, and Florida wasn’t underwater at the time the citrus belt was further north, either.
Allan M R MacRae
With respect to the little sub-thread you seem to have started – Peer Review strikes me as somewhat like accreditation. Let each work be judged on its merits. To say certain people have not Peer Reviewed your work and therefore it’s no good is like saying that an unaccredited school simply cannot have any smart professors. Why? Well, because it’s unaccredited…
Anthony I do like reading comments from real scientists. Thou the snipping from the green shirts rabble does add colour it does become tiresome after awhile if the same comments are repeated without presenting a sound argument with the comments.
Maybe a link to another forum that allows this kind of fighting. Is there anyway you could select who can post on this forum?
I mentioned a little further up that I think there may be some correlation of sunspots with global temperatures if you subtract out larger effects. I went back and fit the GISS temperature values with factors for ENSO (MEI) and Volcanoes (Optical Thickness) to 1958. There is a lot more noise in the GISS data (±0.4 C) than the UAH data so the match is not as good but when the difference between the model and the temperatures is plotted and smoothed there appears to be a pattern reminiscent of the sunspot cycle. See:
http://gallery.me.com/wally#100002/GISS*%20vs%20M%20O%20Difference&bgcolor=black Click my name for a explanation of the general model and data source. It looks like the cycles are out of sync a bit, Fit looks like it might be better with a 10 year shift. Speculation at this point but interesting to me.
It looks like sea level graph has been updated at:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
I’d gladly setup a forum for such a thing. And Anthony could link to it if desired. If anyone thinks such a thing would be useful, email me at alberts dot jeff at gmail dot com.
Re my comment 18:13:37:
“The SW USA has a history of long droughts; in fact, longer than any in modern history, so I’m impressed or fearful. Nature happens.” Should have read so I’m not impressed or fearful. I hate it when that happens!
While I doubt CO2 is more than a minor factor is global temperature, I consider those AGW believers who post here to be invaluable. I want to learn all the arguments.
Let us all display the maturity, comity and professionalism that Al Gore lacks.
WA (09:57:25) : Perhaps we should distinguish between:
o Those “Greens” / “Environmentalists” who honestly believe that humans are stewards of the earth,
Got me thinking… I’m an ‘old style’ ‘green’ in the sense of not wanting extinction of blue whales and thinking 50 foot visibility in L.A. in the 1950s was a bad thing and that maybe we ought to get our hands dirty and plant as many trees as we cut down for lumber and fuel. I don’t fit in the modern green fascist movement. So what to call myself?
I think I’ll try ‘olive drab’ for a while. I dig in the dirt and plant things. Mix some brown in with green and it’s a nice olive color. Olives are productive. Olives and farming go well together. And olive drab even gets along with the military and hunting just fine. Olive is not overstated nor loud in public and olives never tell someone what to do with their lives…
Leif Svalgaard (07:57:52) wrote: IMHO, the vast majority of posts on this topic have promoted pseudo-science of the worst kind.
Thanks, Leif. Your humble opinion is good enough for me to quit reading right there (with thoughts of Anthony’s Wasted effort post in the back of my mind).
E.M. Smith
So what to call myself?
“Conservationist” used to be a respectable term.
It looks like more cooling is coming to the earth. Winters are already growing longer making growing seasons a little shorter. It looks like that will be a trend, i.e., longer and longer winters, shorter and shorter growing seasons. Hopefully no crops will be ruined by hail storms during growing seasons in this cooling trend. Most of the world would be able to take that in stride. But poorer countries like the Philippines would be hurt.
————
I think all on both sides could agree the earth is in a cooling trend… no matter how angry admitting it could make some.
Yes, eucalyptol has a flash temperature of 49°C, pretty low. Almost any spark will set it off above that temperature. Its heat of combustion is 9.9 kcal/g; compare that to gasoline at 10.4 kcal/g. This stuff is very much like gasoline. (Though the flame temperature may differ slightly because of the leaf and bark matrix, plus the oxygen atom in the eucalyptol molecule. I don’t have time to calculate flame temperatures tonight.)
Without proper brush management, almost any large eucalyptus fire could rapidly turn into a firestorm, producing its own winds at up to 120 mph. Once the fire is ignited, neither the initial ambient temperature nor the drought matter.
But, in any case, wind, high temperatures, and drought are forces over which we have no control. Even ignition can’t be totally prevented (if you’re short of nutters, lighting can set the brush off). The only factor within human control was build-up of brush near homes and buildings. That control was prevented by Greenshirts.
They caused this holocaust, not AGW, not wind, not drought.
Regarding Ap vs. SC24 amplitude: I’d guess that since neither Ap nor amplitude can go below zero. the correlation (insofar as there is one) should pass through the origin. Also, since Ap leads amplitude, an assumption of linearity is unwarranted.
My guess? Maximum amplitude SC24 (not counting any SC23 rogues): 18 +/- 10.
Roger Carr (21:31:05) :
(with thoughts of Anthony’s Wasted effort post in the back of my mind).
If you are still reading, enlighten me on the ‘Wasted Effort’…
Mary Hinge.
I may not agree with the conclusions you have from the same data I observe, but I enjoy your input to the discussions.
On pseudoscience:
Man is a pattern detecting mammal. Our brains are wired for patterns. We see dragons in the sky clouds and the Virgin Mary in glass reflections.
It is not surprising that people who are scientifically bent will also see patterns. It is how our scientific knowledge was built up over the millennia.
Man is also a social animal, tending to make groups. And groups get labels.
There is orthodoxy in science, and there are the heretics.
By training I belong to the orthodoxy in science. Still. I can very well observe that all the new worthwhile discoveries come from the border between orthodoxy and heresy. Young scientists must be trained this way, as I also was in my youth: indoctrinated but allowed to press further.
In this sense “heretical” or “pseudoscientific” observations, statements, correlation patterns, are, in the words of my long departed father, the manure from which roses bloom.
I would not discourage them. They are out of the box, and who knows what the future orthodoxy will be?
They have and it’s showing the rise in sea level is continuing despite the many claims on this blog to the contrary. The continued rise is happening the way I said it would last summer when I had to wearily point out many times that the dip in sea levels was casued by the strong La Nina in 2007-2008.
You usually have some thoughts on the ssea level chart and I notice you have none here, perhaps you would like to share your thoughts with the rest of us.
How can any side admit to a ‘cooling trend’ when there is no such trend?
Please don’t take one sentence out of context. I know this is a sceptical tactic and you are so used to it the habit must be hard to break…but do try in fuure, there’s a good boy.
One reason I love this site, it gives everyone a forum to express their views with minimal censure. Debate is a great learning opportunity, especially the more energetic ones! The moderators do a great job here and I commend them and Anthony for that.
DJ
I hope your pockets are full of money. Already the AGW crowd is responsible for the ethanol lobby and the disaster in starvation it has brought to the third world. Maybe somebody will sue .In contrast to future suings you foresee for the skeptic camp this is here and now disaster.
continuing on pseudoscience:
I consider the IPCC outputs as pseudoscience. My opinion was formed when I saw that they are pushing spaghetti model graphs as if they are data, treating them statistically, without an inkling of what the statistical errors entering from the numerous parameters and assumptions would give as a statistical error around each model projection.
My opinion was confirmed when I realized that even a 1 sigma error on albedo would induce a +/- 1.0C error around each model projection.
It is an artists output, and art is not science.
Nevertheless I do not consider the models useless, the AGW theory has been responsible for an enormous amount of data that will be the fertilizer on which much better models will rise.
What is criminal is what is being pushed politically: the output of a pseudoscience to determine the fate of the world. Might as well ask the psychics, as many politicians have done in the past.
Way out of topic, but as I have been in a fire, fires are common in Greece where the pine is the culprit of huge firestorms, I will post it here.
Inferno
Gripping the wheel,
at midnight
I drive up the road
where the firestorm broke the barriers
and jumped across the canyon
to run down the hill to the sea
in a great joyful
all consuming roar,
of the pine tree’s orgasmic
moment of reproduction,
releasing a menacing
mushroom of a black cloud
over our heads
darkening the noon sun.
Left and right
the stumps of pines
outlined black
some still standing
as if whole
dried up in shock,
The whole mountain side
glows,
like a distant city,
lighted up
by the reluctant
olive trees
their core slowly
eaten away by embers.
The pines were old,
their sides gouged out
dripping resin tears
into tin catchers,
nailed to their trunks,
no young pines growing
in their stifling shade.
They reproduce by fire.
The old olive trees
have often been gutted by fire
maybe even before,
the first historic
persian invasions.
You can see them in the groves
the great great grandfathers of all,
with thick hollow
convoluted trunks.
The burned out stumps,
grow new shoots
in the spring
even the roots
throw out tender leaves,
claiming
eternal life.
It is to me
human transient
scampering away
in the small timescales
of my life
that the ecological disaster
seems complete,
as I drive through,
a walker on glowing embers
of the inferno.
Leif Svalgaard (23:56:24) :
Roger Carr (21:31:05) :
(with thoughts of Anthony’s Wasted effort post in the back of my mind).
If you are still reading, enlighten me on the ‘Wasted Effort’…
It is pity that this particular thread, meant to highlight Ap Magnetic Index prediction for Solar Cycle 24, and hopefully alternative methods, has been taken over by climate discussions, adequately and abundantly discussed elsewhere (past threads).
I hope Anthony keeps it going for a while, after the ‘climatologists’ have migrated elsewhere, so rest of us, be it experts , astrologers, ‘charlatans’ and ‘cyclomaniacs’ can freely discuss what was meant to be discussed.
Anthony keep it going, the Effort is NOT Wasted!
Mary Hinge (01:44:37)
Sorry to burst your bubble but I think you’ll find this is the latest sea level chart.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/SeaLevel_TOPEX.jpg
Mary,
Just eyeballing the Sea Level Graph, it appears flat since late 2005, despite the trendline.
Mike
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/