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.
Martin, with all due respects look at the dateline of the graph. The graph you linked to is the one cited in septic sites as proof that sea levels are not rising. This graph however only goes up to February 2008. The graph mike Bryant linked to is from the same source and is the up to date version that goes to December 2009. You must have seen that if you actually looked at the graph, or did you take at face value the usual garbage from icecap?
It also follows predicted trends of sea level rise, especially the increase in levels after the last La Nina in 2007-08
Mary Hinge (04:39:10) :
My bad. I think I need glasses. When I down loaded the image and expanded it I could see the error of my ways.
WOW thats some crazy stuff can you give me some of that info. sjkyle out
nobwainer (Geoff Sharp) (15:18:59) :
Ron de Haan (06:50:19) :
“Decreased solar radiation leads to more cosmic dust, which in turn has an effect of increasing the speed of the Earth’s rotation, creating a negative global atmospheric angular momentum. Take a look at what is going on with that. http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/map/images/aam/glaam.gif Notice how negative it has been during this time of reduced radiation
This is an interesting topic. Ian Wilson has done some work in this area and suggests the Earth’s rotation is linked with Solar rotation rates. I have been searching for months trying to find reliable current Solar rotation rates without much success. There is sketchy evidence during past grand minima that rotation rates varied.
Today I received some feedback from NASA with an email link to someone who may be able to help me, I will report back on any developments. I am surprised this data is so hard to get, you would think this is an area of high importance”.
Geoff,
Thank you for the response.
What triggered me was the link between the sun, the earth rotation speed and volcanic activity.
We must look outside the box of entrenched topics which have made a false connection between CO2 and earth climate to find the real drivers and mechanisms.
I am looking forward to your follow up.
Mary Hinge (01:44:37) :
Mike Bryant (18:40:18) :
It looks like sea level graph has been updated at:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
They have and it’s showing the rise in sea level is continuing despite the many claims on this blog to the contrary.
Maybe you are looking at a different graph? I’m looking at http://1.2.3.13/bmi/sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global_sm.jpg and it looks like levels have been generally heading downwards since the peak in 2006. This would agree with SST’s generally heading downwards
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2003
Or is Hadley data not to be trusted?
Damn those tags! :o)
Looking at the correlation between the two graphs, I’m not surprised global warming central Colorado university hasn’t updated the sea level data for the last 6 months.
If this holds, farmers in Missouri should plant winter wheat. . . The Year Without a Summer. . . and attendant famine due to crop failures in the American and Canadian midwest and high plains would be quite something, though now doubt blamed on human C02 emissions.
Of course this hypothesis is relatively new, and even though it has had a pretty good prediction rate thus far, there is still much which we do not know, and solar physics weren’t quite as advanced back in the late 1600s. . .
anna v (00:50:40) :
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…all the new worthwhile discoveries come from the border between orthodoxy and heresy.
Anna, excellent post. Interested in elaborating on what you mean between “the border between orthodoxy and heresy”?
Mary wrote:
“I visit and contribute to this site to see if any reliable and plausable alternatives to AGW can be demonstrated and tested. So far there has been nothing that can be verified and substantiated but that may change, it’s called science.”
Funny… I visit and attempt to contribute to sites like RC to see if any reliable and plausible altneratives to natural variations can be demonstrated and tested. So far there has been nothing that can be verified and substantiated but that may change, it’s called science, which few there seem to practice, at least in the classic sense that includes transparency and access to data/methodology.
But I ramble…
I think the title of this thread has to do with sun spots…and one discrepancy that seems to take place in the discussion over the past year or two is that in the “against” group, they refer to the “for” group as believing that some sunspots directly warm our planet. It seems to me that the belief is more along the lines of sunspots impact the solar wind which impacts X which impacts Y which impacts atmospheric trends “down here” that cause warming or cooling.
My point is that AGWers seem to say there is no direct link between sunspots and climate.
But when realists say there is no direct link between C02 and global warming, we’re told that it’s not that simple….it’s a very complex system that we really don’t understand. Seems a little hypocritical to me…
JimB
Allan M R MacRae (17:05:24) :
Works fine for IE and Firefox on my PC.
I’m not in the business of making stuff up. At the very least, you could have tried to find the book on books.google.com yourself, before accusing me of outright fraud.
Here’s the step by step. I hope you are able to follow:
0) enable scripting on your browser
1) Got to google’s advanced book search
2) Enter “Peerless Science” into the mask for the book title and search
3) Follow the resulting link to the book by Chubin and Hackett
4) go to page 192
5) read
A link to the book is
http://books.google.com/books?id=Xfsh6D29WoIC
You owe me an apology.
Mary Hinge (04:39:10)
That should only effect the Pacific Ocean. No sign of it here. ;^}
http://s599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/?action=view¤t=pacific.jpg
See if it works. 😉
Mary Hinge,
how about
http://climatesci.org/2009/02/13/article-by-josh-willis-is-it-me-or-did-the-oceans-cool-a-lesson-on-global-warming-from-my-favorite-denier/
Fig 1 shows no rise of the sea level the last five years, consistent with the plots above of course.
Even if you think the planet is hotter, and that that has worsened the Australian bushfires, there’s absolutely nothing about those bushfires that indicates anything about the A part of AGW; that is anthropogenic. You might want to look it up.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but you’re asking for it.
william (09:26:15) :
I am a research scientist myself, though in a field unrelated to climate research. The group I work for has been subject to peer review several times when applying for funds, I know a bit about it. Your implicitly alleged conspiracy of hundreds of climate scientists simply does not exist. When it comes to allocating funds in research, I’ll take responsible, well educated scientists over responsible, well educated lawyers any time. The latter simply lack the necessary education in natural sciences. They are not too stupid to comprehend, but they simply do not have enough formal training to tell truth from fiction in advanced areas of research.
WOW. Buried in a treatise on economics by Marty Anderson “It’s just time” , he states “that every 300 or some years the sun cycles down 15 % of its output”.
I think when a brilliant economist and brilliant climatologists agree, we are in for a COLD, COLD, spell. Get you seeds ready to plant food. YOU WILL NEED TO, SHORTLY IN A FEW YEARS OR LESS.
Hi Mary Hinge
We have had this conversation about sea levels before on another thread and I am surprised you are still trying to make too much of data that barely stretches back ten years. Like climate patterns you need to look much further back in the hope of seeing some sort of long term trend and also understand the shortcomings of the data.
Sea levels are a fluid affair (pun intended) and a rise in one place is often matched by a fall in another, so information has to be heavily averaged, smoothed, interpreted, interpolated, sent through all sorts of computer models and emerges as pretty useless. There are some obvious factors that need to be considered, such as a high or low pressure weather system at time of measuring, together with the state of the tide-both within its twice daily cycle and also within the longer lunar cycle. Add waves of varying sizes and thermal expansion, and it becomes extremely difficult to measure to the ocean surface-wherever that may be at any one time. Satellite drift and the averaging already mentioned create further problems and account must be taken of obstructions such as new docks, build up of sand bars, the nature of the sea bed and the stasis of the land-is it rising, falling, or static?
Officially satellites are accurate to within plus or minus 3-5cm (yes 30-50mm) unofficially probably double that level of inaccuracy.
Both the following two sites give a good description of the process-which is being constantly refined but doesn’t get more accurate as the inherent flaws in measuring capabilities can’t be resolved.
http://www.tos.org/oceanography/issues/issue_archive/issue_pdfs/15_1/15_1_jacobs_et_al.pdf
http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/Journal/Issues/1999/dec/abs1635.html
The following site deals with problems of the data;
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=859
The UK Environment Agency (with whom I work) where possible like to use physical tide gauges as well, which are both visually observed or can send data electronically. Best of all is gathering information from local people such as the Harbour master or those who work the fishing boats.
Sea level rises are being hugely exaggerated. In many places they are actually falling as per Newlyn
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/resids/170-161.gif
and Helsinki. http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/resids/060-351.gif
Others are rising modestly so the two above are cherry picked but show the rises and falls over decades rather well.
The following link leads to a graph produced by the Dutch Govt sea level organisation-the Dutch certainly know a thing or two about the subject and confirm sea levels are stable and are somewhat lower than during the MWP.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=61
One of the worlds leading sea level expert Professor Morner has called the IPCC figures ‘a lie.’
TonyB
Jefferson Harmen Jr. (09:53:47) :
WOW. Buried in a treatise on economics by Marty Anderson “It’s just time” , he states “that every 300 or some years the sun cycles down 15 % of its output”.
I think when a brilliant economist and brilliant climatologists agree
Except that they do not. The solar output goes down only 0.05% or so.
Just a curious side note.
Did sea levels rise during the medieval warm period and drop during the “little ice age”?
You would think they should have
Please explain the context, then, because it seemed pretty obvious to me and some other posters. You made an extremely generalized statement that simply isn’t true. Perhaps you can be more precise in the future, there’s a good girl.
Pines play with matches? Don’t many species of pines rely on fires to open up their seed cones, in order to propagate?
I submit that no alternative explanation is needed. Prove to me that we’re seeing something out of the ordinary, then we can talk about alternatives. The brief span of human memory and record-keeping isn’t long enough to establish proof of precedence or unprecedence.
A.Syme (10:34:27) : said
“Just a curious side note. Did sea levels rise during the medieval warm period and drop during the “little ice age”? You would think they should have”
If you look at my post just above your comment you will see the reconstruction of Sea levels from the MWP by the Dutch organisation-there have been others since. We also have evidence of sea castles in the UK that were at one time provisioned by ships that are now high and dry-(nothwithstanding any stasis effect) I went on a dig once at one of these castles that used to have a quay at its base and the sea is probably a metre lower today than then. The higher sea levels can also be traced in the river systems of Europe where the Vikings developed shallow draught boats to take them into areas they could raid.
So the answer is Yes, sea levels were higher than today in the MWP and tide benches cut into rocks suggest they fell during the LIA
Tonyb
Psi (06:41:20) :
anna v (00:50:40) :
Man is a pattern detecting mammal…all the new worthwhile discoveries come from the border between orthodoxy and heresy.
Anna, excellent post. Interested in elaborating on what you mean between “the border between orthodoxy and heresy”?
Well, Galileo is the text book example.
Also the new theories springing in trying to explain the photoelectric effect.
What about the special theory of relativity? Lorentz transformations were embedded in Maxwell’s theory, but nobody thought to use them in matter. Also a corresponding Heisenberg uncertainty principle exists when studying classical electromagnetic waves. It is the eye of the heretic that can use the old stuff to build on and get a new theory/view. That is what I mean the border between orthodoxy and heresy, you need a solid base in the old in order to generate the new, but you need a heretic mentality to have something new to say.
Jeff Alberts (11:19:03) :
anna v (02:13:16) :
” 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.”
Pines play with matches? Don’t many species of pines rely on fires to open up their seed cones, in order to propagate?
Yes. Most of the pines we have in Greece need the explosion of the pine cone to spread the seeds and high ground temperature for the seed to sprout.
When the forest is not pine, it is much easier to contain the fire. Pine resin is very inflamable. Olive groves with no pines in them burn only on the periphery, because the ground and the trees are cultivated and there are no shrubs, so a fire on the low grass cannot ignite the trees.
Mary Hinge!
– I enjoy reading your posts, primarily because you provide well informed balance to the debate.
– I do NOT enjoy the obvious contempt you show for other points of view!
In fact, far from adding weight to your point, it tends to make me suspect you’re being overly defensive. People who are confident in themselves and confident of their views, tend to debate with respect and with patience because their reasoning is unshakeable.
If you are so sure of your stance, surely there is no need for the defiant and contemptuous nature of your defense?
Ben