Solar Cycle 24 has ended according to NASA. Yes you read that right. Somebody at NASA can’t even figure out which solar cycle they are talking about. Or, as commenters to the thread have pointed out, perhaps they see that cycle 24 has been skipped. We’ll be watching this one to see the outcome. – Anthony
Michael Ronanye writes in comments:
NASA has just changed the name of the project from Solar Cycle 23 to Solar Cycle 24. I would love to have attended that meeting.
B.9 CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE MINIMUM OF SOLAR CYCLE 24
Clarified March 10, 2009: All references to “Solar Cycle 23″ have been updated to “Solar Cycle 24.” Reference in Section 1 to “Solar Cycle 22″ has been updated to “Solar Cycle 23.”
See the changed text here:
Causes and Consequences of the Minimum of Solar Cycle 24
Talk about Freudian Slips, what Solar Cycle is it anyway? No wonder they can’t make predications!
But it gets even better. NASA has just declared that Solar Cycle 24 is over. Read the first paragraph in the above PDF:
1. Scope of Program
In 2009, we are in the midst of the minimum of solar activity that marks the end of Solar Cycle 24. As this cycle comes to an end we are recognizing, in retrospect, that the Sun has been extraordinarily quiet during this particular Solar Cycle minimum. This is evidenced in records of both solar activity and the response to it of the terrestrial space environment.
Obviously someone made an error when editing the text of the original document and did not catch their mistake. Quick, make your own backup copy of this “Great Moment in Science”.
BTW, at least after having called them on the persistent style points; The Trolls have shifted to a slightly different fake persona / profile… The language style still needs work (still too similar to pass for a novel person) and still a bit thin on “personifying details” but at least it isn’t the same old stereotype.
Note To Trolls: Please take an acting class, preferably at the college level, where you must create and maintain a “character” complete with history. It will improve your presentation greatly (and be more amusing to watch too…) Oh, and an English Lit class where you must create a character and have them conduct dialog in a character appropriate style / slang / accent would help too.
As it stands now the name keeps changing and the mind-print stays the same (even if occasionally thinly veiled with an overacted cover story). Boring!
Just wondering if the cycles matter if there are few or no spots?
Speaking of AGW proponents, I would like to nominate Mary Hinge for “WUWT’s Favorite Warmer Award”. She/he definitely helps to keep things interesting here, but his/her pure doggedness and willingness to listen puts her/him over the top in my opinion. Now if she/he would only come out of the closet and reveal her/his true identity, she/he would be perfect in every way.
Mike
By the bye, this blog is not accessible in China (bit annoying). Though, your .org one is.
Re: E.M.Smith (04:37:59) :
Please note I was being sarcastic…
Ray:
These cycle 23 spots have lasted longer than 24 hours… solar data shows that most have lasted at least 48 hours…
I don’t really see any sense in measuring that… the current method is fine , although we should actually be counting the spots using the exact same methods done 150 years ago, to make it fair. In that case we would have a much greater spotless streak!
Robert Wood (09:29:32) :
I expect Leif will respond to Scaffeta’s paper.
I’m at my day-job the next two days so don’t have much time. In the conclusion of the Scafetta paper they say that the Krivova 2007 reconstruction doesn’t match TSI outside of the ACRIM gap, yet they use it to justify their TSI values across the gap. Too much sleight of hand for my taste.
About cosmic rays and their trend: different stations show slightly different trends [for many reasons], so never just look at ONE station only. Here is Thule: http://www.leif.org/research/thule-cosmic-rays.png
and in real time: http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu/realtime/thule.html
Hey Skeptic, as you’ve no doubt realised you’re not part of the demographic here, but I salute you for speaking up… The modus operandi seems to be “proof” via weather anecdotes, faulty logic, misrepresentation of opponents and political sour grapes. This feeds the appetites of an uncritical group of self-identified “skeptics”. Witness the comments here about something as simple as NASA relabeling a sunspot cycle.
I’ve found it particularly comical watching “Steven Goddard” demonstrate his ignorance of geology while claiming a “B.S.” in the field as I have a B.Sc. in that subject.
I follow this web-site with Edmund Burke’s quote in mind: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” The statements here aren’t evil-with-a-big-E but someone has to call them on their endlessly recycled whoppers. Of course if you really hit a tender spot you’ll simply be “snipped”. Very passive-aggressive…
Re: “Predictions” and “predications”
Good catch.
The misspellings are part of the broader (and deeper) problem of off-the-cuff commentary in which we’re all now engaged. I don’t think it’s knitpicking to hold people accountable for their errors. In for our national space agency to misplace a solar cycle, NASA deserves a serious “razzie” if such awards are still being handed out.
These mistakes are reminders how the internet breeds and then memorializes hasty judgement and hastily-written commentary (by visitors as well as proprietors of web sites) with sometimes funny results.
Nothing really excuses the Wall Street Journal. They’ve been struggling with the difference between “million” and “billion” in at least two articles I’ve seen in the last few weeks. It’s ironic that a daily newspaper covering economic and business news can be off by three zeroes.
My final razzie goes to “Marketwatch”, an online business publication with follow-on blog-commentary by readers. The headline read:
Fed will take away the punch bowl next time
Commentary: Bernanke proposes paradigm shift in bank regulation
The lead sentence was the problem:
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — In the middle of the worst hangover since the Depression, Ben Bernanke said Tuesday the Fed will take the punch bowl away if the next party gets too wild…
Makes you wonder what kind of profligate Ben Bernanke is, to suffer so many hangovers.
Hastily-written words – the grammatical and spelling stuff, and the odd(ly) misplaced modifier – are usually just funny. Hasty thoughts can be tolerated. Hasty actions, such as those now being contemplated by Congress http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123679042118496965.html are to be feared.
Alex (07:51:19) :
I know that if we want to compare apples to apples we should use the same “resolution” than that used in the past. I mentioned that a few times in the past. But it would also be good to develop new tools (physical or mathematical) to find a parameter that could be more significant as to how the sun works.
I would think that the size and lifetime of sunspots should be proportional to the strength an/or “swelling” of the magnetic field. It’s a suggestion.
Ben Lawson (08:20:13) :
“Witness the comments here about something as simple as NASA relabeling a sunspot cycle.”
Your opinions on the people who comment on this blog are yours – you are free to make them.
By itself this “cycle 24 vs. cycle 23” is for sure NOT that interesting. I think the point of this particular article (the large mammoth with flashing lights, bells and whistles in the room that you apparently missed) is that, taken in context, this adds to a l-o-n-g string of whoppers by NASA which puts them in a very questionable light when it comes to determining the quality of any data they put out.
We spotted a very obvious and trivial typo here. How many less obvious typos and data errors reach the media and “peer-reviewed” journals and are treated as fact? That is the glaringly obvious point here.
A cherry-picked snapshot will tell you nothing about this blog – much in the same way as a 100 yr biased temperature record will tell you nothing about climate…
Anthony, did you listen to Dr. Corbyn’s talk about SLAM & VIPH? Some details are on the CO2 sceptic website: http://climaterealists.com/news.php?id=2977
Can’t wait to get Leif’s take on this very important breakthrough.
Oh, and according to Dr. Corbun, it’s not only the sun stupid, but also the moon moron.
Ray (09:04:26) :
Yes, those virtual particles can cause all sorts of problems. Shame that the detail is not published, because that summary says nothing good to me. More data-mining?
Wasn’t there a reversed polarity spot recently in the cycle 23 zone that they called a cycle 23 spot. Maybe it was really a cycle 24 spot in last gasp position. Maybe spots with random polarity and location will start appearing evey so often. We may have fallen out of a stable cyclical region into a chaotic one.
Ray (09:04:26) :
Anthony, did you listen to Dr. Corbyn’s talk about SLAM & VIPH? Some details are on the CO2 sceptic website: http://climaterealists.com/news.php?id=2977
Can’t wait to get Leif’s take on this very important breakthrough.
I’m at a meeting, so can’t comment extensively, but my first impression is that this is poor, and the presentation uses many of the standard tricks for convincing the unwashed masses rather than good science, like omitting data [slide 10], like averaging over long intervals [slide 11] reducing the number of data points [if he had considered double 22-year cycles, he would have been down to two data points with perfect correlation], like stacking data that tends to give the visual impression of a peak where there is none [slide 27], like using slightly wrong but suggestive terminology [solar particles – in the press release even elevated to ‘charged particles’ – all particles in the solar wind are charged] and ‘solar particles’ are normally used in connection with ‘solar energetic particles’ which are rare events, like not knowing about the 22-year cycle in geomagnetic activity [that runs from max to max] due to geometric aspects of the Earth and not a more energetic Sun, and on and on and on. Not worth spending much time on.
Wow, thanks Leif for this quick analysis and for your time to respond.
Do you really think that the 22 year cycle always been a constant in the history of our sun? What about the fact that the moon was closer to the earth in past times, how does that fit with his theory?
I dislike when someone comes here like Ben Lawson, hurls a couple of unfounded insults and gets me distracted from thinking and enjoying.
This was a humor post on a very funny and obvious mistake that led to comments about skipping cycles, a pregnant sun and various pretty darn funny stuff.
Your claiming, without evidence, that someone is “ignorant of geology” doesn’t make it so.
In case you are clueless you may want to investigate the “demographic” here that you pretend to know. It appears to be a wide variety of veteran physical scientists. Your claimed B.Sc. would not put you on the expert end here. The folks who can publish their name here are generally people with pretty solid credentials so far as I can tell, and I have checked out a number of them.
Because climate change has become a political football we do sometimes get sidetracked, I will give the critics that.
Ray (12:10:27) :
Do you really think that the 22 year cycle always been a constant in the history of our sun? What about the fact that the moon was closer to the earth in past times, how does that fit with his theory?
‘past times’ is a bit slippery if we want to compare with modern times. Billions of years ago the Moon was MUCH closer, and the Sun was MUCH more active. The 22-year cycle has always been there, but its length has almost certainly varied from what it was billions of years ago [it was likely shorter then].
Corbyn doesn’t have a ‘theory’ in any scientific sense, just some loose speculation supported by clever presentation, but not by the facts.
Al Fin (20:30:21)
Please forgive me for “skeptic.” We forgot to lock the door of the asylum after visitor’s hours. He must have snuck out for a night of trolling. So sorry.
That’s ok Al, no real harm done. In the future, though, please be more careful.
Funny how he sneaked in incognito-like, thinking his “skeptic” name would disguise what he was – a kamikaze troll on a mission. Hopefully, he’s safely back in his Cuckoo’s Nest.
Leif, Anthony, Watts up with that?
http://climateresearchnews.com/2009/03/new-paper-demonstrates-anthropogenic-contribution-to-global-warming-overestimated-solar-contribution-underestimated/
Ron de Haan (13:20:45) :
Scafetta and Willson use the KBS07 data the justify their interpretation of the ‘ACRIM-gap’ TSI, then in their conclusion confesses that:
“[23] On a decadal scale, outside the ACRIM-gap period, KBS07 fails to reproduce the satellite data pattern and trend.”
So, it seems to me that it is does not make much sense to use KBS07 to justify the data during the ACRIM-gap.
Wondering Aloud: “I dislike when someone comes here”… …”hurls a couple of unfounded insults and gets me distracted from thinking and enjoying.” Sorry to disturb your self-satisfaction, but I stand by my opinion of the discourse here. The rants that have flowed from this “humor piece” are just a handy example of the “critical thought”. No cherry-picking required.
I claim no direct expertise in the field of climate change but when I can spot the faulty logic and misleading data so readily, I know the claimed “science” is working backwards and just hoping to avoid examination (and maybe that readers won’t bother to follow the comments). I can roll my eyes and move on, or I can call it out.
Steven Goddard’s geological knowledge has been revealed as wanting in other posts here and his real credentials are still not known. There are authors here with credible qualifications, as often as not they’ve come here to try and explain a concept or fact to their critics and are hit with a barrage of hostile comments.
Ben Lawson (08:20:13) : Of course if you really hit a tender spot you’ll simply be “snipped”. Very passive-aggressive…
That’s a hoot! All that gets “snipped” here is insult and bad language as near as I can tell (and yes, I got snipped once for casting aspersions of too strong a sort at the character of Hansen and friends after shoving my brains through GIStemp and recoiling in horror at how bad GIStemp is.)
There is nothing passive-aggressive about the moderators here. They are equal opportunity enforcers of polite decorum no matter whom, or which side, steps “over the line”. If you got snipped, you deserved it.
I have seen no suppression of any politely presented arguments pro or con AGW, so just clean up your act and you’ll be fine…
Ben Lawson (08:20:13) :
Of course if you really hit a tender spot you’ll simply be “snipped”. Very passive-aggressive…
For the record, this is a gross misrepresentation of the moderating style on this site, unless by “hitting a tender spot,” Mr. Lawson means vulgarity, ad hominems, calls to violence etc. I have never in several months of reading almost daily here, seen any evidence that points of substance in real arguments were clipped by moderators. Perhaps Mr. Lawson is confused about the difference….
-psi