Usually, and that means in the past year, when you look at the false color MDI image from SOHO, you can look at the corresponding magnetogram and see some sort of disturbance going on, even it it is not visible as a sunspot, sunspeck, or plage area.
Not today.
Left: SOHO MDI “visible” image Right: SOHO Magnetogram
Click for larger image
Wherefore art though, cycle 24?
In contrast, September 28th, 2001
To everyone responding to my post. I don’t deny that the sun is a factor. But it is not a strong enough factor with only SC variation. There are a lot of other factors involved. That is why weather and climate are chaotic. Warming trends tend to increase convection which increases energy transfer. Cooling periods have the reverse response. If you think that you can predict climate based only on solar cycle variation you are on a fools errand.
Low solar TSI plus a cool oscillation phase will enhance cooling. But only until the overall system reaches a point of reversal. There are roughly 25 to 30 years climate cycles that vary based on the whims of nature. I use whims of nature because the driving forces are not fully understood. Though Tsonis has shed some light on the effects, the causes are still mysterious.
It is better in my mind to look at the complexity of the big picture instead of grabbing a small snippet. As a captain, I don’t believe everything weathermen or climatologists say. I look out the window.
I really was a bit surprised to see the retired orbit specialist scientist so quickly muzzled. We may not think much of barycentrism, possibly we need to think of it some. Many of us non-scientists need to know that it exists. I too tend to welcome input from our fathers and grandfathers, with respect.
It may be an insignificant part of the whole picture, but someone has devoted a lifetime of work doing the math and at least laying some more groundwork on our feeble understanding of the solar system.
We refer to Chicken Little and Lazarus stories of the past, let us watch ALL the “Blind Men and the Elephant” as they each explore their own little part, lest we lose faith that we are honestly trying to see the big picture.
Lee (23:56:04) : and everybody else with barycenter motions
The idea that the earth and moon are ‘coupled’ while the sun is not doesn’t make sense to me. The effect may be small, but all the larger planets, particularly Jupiter must raise a tide on the sun.
Leif is right and we have been through this in all threads that mention the sun.
Here is a summary:
1)The only viable coupling in the solar system, i.e. with some energy to create tides, is gravity. The effect of the planets on the sun is tiny tides, of the order of milimeters.
2)The barycenter of the earth moon system is 1700 km under the surface of the earth and moves continuously synchronously with the tides, but does not create the tides as the barycenter has no mass and therefore no gravitational force. It is the moon earth system that have both the mass and the gravitational coupling.
3)Barycenters are mathematical points useful for calculating what the solar system does with respect to the galaxy and other bodies outside it, with an effective mass.
It is the only use of the barycenter that I know. Similarly the barycenter of the earth moon system is useful for the trajectory of the earth moon system about the sun.
Nobody worries that the barycenter racing in the crust of the earth will stir it up like mayonnaise, because it cannot, it has no existence except in our heads. (coordinate systems)
4)Correlations of planetary motions and the sun are interesting, but correlation is not causation. In addition, in the chaotic dynamics of the solar system there will be sinusoidal dependences that can correlate, or +/- some hundred years when they do not. It is inevitable. I give the example of waves in two different oceans. It is easy to find correlations in their space and time sequence (+/- something), but can anybody seriously think that it would mean anything except similar dynamics (solutions of similar equations)?
In conclusion, if a dynamical mechanism can be shown much stronger than the gravitational coupling to introduce spin orbit or orbit orbit couplings, I would be one of the first to applaud, and look at putative correlations with another eye. At the moment nothing is being offered.
Science fiction: I have suggested before that maybe it is the famous dark matter, which has been postulated to be 9/10ths of the mass of the universe that will be introducing these couplings. If so it will be the second confirmation of dark matter.
This suggestion shows how desperately in need of a coupling force any spin orbit etc mechanism is. ( barycenter movement is irrelevant and a red herring, one needs forces).
Great to see censorship has not stopped people thinking……
Gerry (18:02:00) :
I hope your still around, if so your comments would be very welcome at http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/
We have several projects I am sure you could help us with. We are a community forging ahead with new research into Planetary Influence. Dr. Ian Wilson is a contributor and great support and I have my own work as do others, with mainstream science ridiculing, but failing, its time for a different approach based on scientific principles but prepared to look outside the square.
One thing about the sun most people don’t know or follow and I certainly don’t understand is that certain “outputs” (radiation, winds, magnetic storms) appear to make seizures worse. For the past 9 years seeral of us been following it a a special web site (http://weather.alcollier.com) and have found when certain parts peak, seizures are more prone and when the same factors are low people wh cronically suffer from migraines find them worse. There appears to be a relationship to the sun and the increase in pain leels for folks with fibromyalgia (sp?).
There is much, much more to the the sun’s affects on the human race other than just light.
For all interested, here’s a ranking of the spotless days (includes March 22, which just came out about 20 minutes ago!)
#1) Solar Cycle B, 1689-1706, 5847 spotless days (Maunder minimum)
#2) Solar Cycle E, 1642-1661, 5524 spotless days (Maunder minimum)
#3) Solar Cycle D, 1661-1677, 5521 spotless days (Maunder minimum)
#4) Solar Cycle C, 1677-1689, 4272 spotless days (Maunder minimum)
#5) Solar Cycle A, 1706-1720, 3579 spotless days (Maunder minimum)
#6) Solar Cycle 6, 1810-1823, 2236 spotless days (Dalton Minimum)
#7) Solar Cycle 7, 1823-1833, 1533 spotless days (Dalton Minimum)
#8) Solar Cycle 5, 1798-1810, 1358 spotless days (Dalton Minimum)
#9) Solar Cycle F, 1626-1642, 1149 spotless days
#10) Solar Cycle 12, 1878-1889, 1028 spotless days
#11) Solar Cycle 15, 1913-1923, 1019 spotless days
#12) Solar Cycle 14, 1901-1913, 938 spotless days
#13) Solar Cycle 13, 1889-1901, 736 spotless days
#14) Solar Cycle 10, 1856-1867, 647 spotless days
#15) Solar Cycle 1, 1755-1766, 638 spotless days
#16) Solar Cycle 24, 2009-20??, 580 spotless days
#17) Solar Cycle G, 1614-1626, 574 spotless days
#18) Solar Cycle 17, 1933-1944, 568 spotless days
#19) Solar Cycle 8, 1833-1843, 563 spotless days
#20) Solar Cycle 3, 1775-1784, 536 spotless days
#21) Solar Cycle 16, 1923-1933, 534 spotless days
#22) Solar Cycles 9 and 19, 1843-1856 and 1954-1964, 446 spotless days
#23) Solar Cycle 11, 1867-1878, 406 spotless days
#24) Solar Cycle 2, 1766-1775, 349 spotless days
#25) Solar Cycle 23, 1996-2009, 309 spotless days
#26) Solar Cycles 21 and 22, 1976-1986 and 1986-1996, 272 spotless days
#27) Solar Cycle 18, 1944-1954, 269 spotless days
#28) Solar Cycle 20, 1964-1976, 227 spotless days
Limitations: Spotless days for Cycle 4 could not be estimated due to excessive missing data. Some might argue I should throw out the Maunder minimum.
Hope you all find this ‘enlightening’,
Paul
OT/Heads Up:
CBS Sunday Morning is about to visit the “Arctic Ice Melt”.
VG (19:35:10) :
Another a MAJOR paper published. Surprised when the first version came out year ago I think, some attacked is as quackery so now it has definitely been published in a major Physics Journal http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161. This debunks the WHOLE concept of AGW and the physics behind it
While I’m supportive of the purpose of arxiv.org, and not impressed with the quality of peer review in the so-called peer reviewed journals, you apparently do not understand what arxiv.org is. It is definitely not a “major Physics Journal.” There is very little screening done to what gets posted on arxiv.org. That doesn’t mean that good stuff doesn’t get posted there. But it does mean that stuff that would not normally make it through any kind of normal peer review might end up there as well.
Before you make any further references to arxiv.org, read up on it. The Wikipedia article on it is informative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv
Where’s Terry Wogan when you need him? (In blankety blank terms of course).
Paul Stanko (01:33:45) : “For those who would prefer a ranked list…
Thanks Paul for putting the “11 year average” into perspective. Too many forget that 11 years is just the average. According to your list 9 of the 23 cycles are outside of the 10-12 year range so while it is quiet it is not yet what could be considered abnormal. That said, you may want to consider a long term stategy of buying property in Florida now before the rush starts.
Glenn (00:10:11) :
Your prediction was for maximum around 2011. If your prediction is not a failure, and you knew that the Sun would be doing “just what it should”, do you still expect a maximum of what was it, 72 in 2011?
Good question…I have another. Will the predicted 72 SSN max that will happen within 2 years, be based on how we count spots today or as we counted them during the last grand minimum? Its getting into a gray area, perhaps giving you a weak legout…lowest in a 100 years is quite different to grand minimum?
Leif Svalgaard (22:41:47) :
[quoting Bill]I think it is evident that there is no VISIBLE TSI influence on temperature. However there are apparent peaks at 7.8 years approx and possibly at 2.3, 3.5, 13 and 19 years.[end quote]
You are perfectly correct. Although I have come across the argument that eye-balling with an open mind and a willing heart beats hard-nosed FFT and statistics every time.
Leif,
This isn’t quite consistent with what you said to me a few days ago. You said you would expect there to be variations in temps attributable to TSI within the limits of an absolute variation of 0.07K. That’s not the same as saying that there is NO influence attributable to TSI. Now maybe you are reading something out of Bill’s no “visible influence” that is different than what I took Bill to mean. I think he was saying “no influence at all” visible in the evidence he presented, and that he was implying that it was demonstrating “no influence at all, period.”
So let’s just be clear. The 11 yr cycle in TSI cannot explain the long, century long rise in temperatures seen in the data, but it can explain more modest cycles in temperature on the order of ±0.02C over decadal time periods. At least that is what you acknowledged a few days ago.
Idlex,
Very eye-opening look at the ethics of GW.
the summation:
“That so many academics, scientists, journalists educators and policy-makers have allowed ideological bias to determine where they stand on a matter requiring clear-eyed and unbiased science is a disgrace. Their biased attitudes make it nearly impossible to reach coherent and responsible decisions on matters that have long-term implications for world poverty, health, quality of life and survival. The only ethical way to approach climate change issues is to be honest about what we know, to be clear about what we don’t know, to admit what we can’t know, and to make intelligent choices among options determined by facts and analysis rather than manipulation and bias.”
Well, wuwt is Anthony’s “house,” and on a fundamental level the rules of the house are none of my business.
Even I, with my limited knowledge of physics (one of the top 150 high-school-level physics students in California in 1983, and that’s about it), agree with Dr. Svalgaard that the distances involved in the solar system make meaningful tides seem unlikely.
And yet there is this problem of the jovian-planet theorists being on to something.
I may as well come out and say what I think here, which is that there is more about the workings of the Universe (at the level of the large and the small) that we don’t know than there is that we do know.
If you visited the average astrophysicist 30 years ago and asked him how large of an effect star formation in the Milky Way had on cloudiness on Earth, he likely would have sent you out of his office. And yet it turns out that there is a mechanism that seems to have an important influence of this kind.
What if what has been described as barycentric coupling, with gravity as the central feature, is really a coupling involving dimensions to which we remain blind, or nearly so? In other words, what if the gravity component is just the outermost (and one visible) feature of a set of complex processes that we won’t be able to witness for generations?
(If ever…)
I’m pretty sure Anthony knows the respect that I hold for him, but just in case, let me say here that I think that his intellect, courage, and energy are all admirable in the extreme. He is, simply put, a leader.
Basil : point taken you could be right but having read the article itself, I think it stands. Time will show. the other articles published seem robust as well?
Ohioholic (15:21:29) :
Well, I know Leif will be by, so one question I would love to pose is as follows:
If the sun’s effects are minimal on temperature, why the difference in day/night temperatures?
Now, now, let’s not get “unscientific”! 🙂
E.M.Smith (01:58:29) :
As near as I can tell, angular momentum conservation requires that as the solar position vector shortens with the sun center approaching the barycenter, the solar orbital angular momentum (r x p or: position vector crossproduct linear momentum) approaches zero, so the angular momentum must go somewhere. There are not a lot of choices.
Solar spin. Planet orbit. Planet spin. Two out of the three ought to have significant effects on the sun or the oceans, and planet orbit might well effect seasons. Is it enough? I don’t know, someone better with vector calculations and with all the relevant orbital mechanics knowledge needs to do the math.
But the mass of the sun orbiting at 2 solar radii is not a small r x p and that must be conserved as r approaches zero. That is physics, not opinion. So where does it go?
The only forces are gravitational forces, and those are too small to do anything fancy.
Conservation of angular momentum of a mass means that it does not change unless a force is applied to it. The barycenter is not applying any forces. The planets are, and they do exchange angular momenta between the sun and them through their gravitational forces, but the effects are very small.
Have a thought experiment. Instead of the barycenter, calculate the angular momentum of the sun with respect to a comet falling into it. Distance 0 at time t0. Does the sun feel anything with respect to angular momentum while this is happening, except a tiny impact?
The barycenter has 0 mass so does not even have any impact.
Lucy Skywalker and E.M. Smith,
Thankyou for your kind words about my 2008 presentation. My solar paper published in PASA:
Wilson, I.R.G., Carter, B.D., and Waite, I.A., 2008, Does a Spin-Orbit Coupling
Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle?, Publications
of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 2008, 25, 85 – 93.
http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=AS06018.pdf
provides reasonable support for a spin-orbit coupling between the
Sun’s motion about the Barycentre and its equitorial rotation rate,
at least for the period from 1874 to the present.
The problem is that we have not been able to come up with a plausible physical mechanism that could explain why this spin-orbit coupling takes place. So, in a way Leif is right in saying that until someone comes up with
a resonable mechanism we need to have a skeptic filters on full. However, he
is wrong in saying that there is little or no evidence to support the existance of a spin-obit coupling. All he has to do is look at figure 8 of our paper to
see the evidence first hand.
I have data that is even more compelling than that shown in figure 8. Indeed, the spin-orbit coupling is so evident that I have made the prediction that by ~ 2010 to 2011, we should see a higher equitorial rotation rate on the Sun [provided that the trend seen since 1874 continues].
Leif is correct in pointing out that the chief problem with any planetary tidal or gravitational mechanism is that the forces (tides) involved fall magnitudes
short of what is required to produce the required changes in the Sun’s internal motion. Effectivey the Sun’s mass is distributed in such a perfect sphere that the already miniscule tidal forces of the planets have nothing to latch onto in order to speed up or slow down the Sun’s rotation rate.
Unlike Leif, I have not blocked off this area of enquiry because I cannot [currently] come up with a plausible mechanism.
One possible mechanism that I am persuing at the moment is the possibility that the extremely weak tidal force of Jupiter is able to see a dynamically distinct torus or ring of matter in the Sun’ convective layer that is tilted at 7 degrees to Jupiter’s orbit. This torus of matter is formed by the differentially rotating equatorial regions and it appears to rotate with respect Jupiter once every 0.8 to 1.3 years. This is pure speculation at present, but I am persuing the idea that the tiny tidal force of Jupiter actually causes this torus of matter to begin to precess, taking about 100,000 years to slowly build up a precession speed of ~ 6 m/sec (seen in the torsional oscillations). Of course,
these are sort of ideas that it is only safe to discuss with the fairies at the bottom of the garden rather than is “serious” scientific circles.
Basil again: Re major Physics Journal http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161. Again considering that the journal Nature actually published a complete load of B…… Steig et al as a major cover story ect…re fabricated/made up/”modelled” antarctic temperatures (see climate audit), I take back what I said before and support the major Physics Journal http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161. ie: it appear’s that one may be as credible as the other!
Leif Svalgaard (22:55:56) : The problem with your picture is that there is a coupling [namely friction] between the rotating table and the liquid in the bowl, but there is no coupling between the rotating Sun and its orbital movement. It has been suggested many times that as a planet goes around the Sun in an elliptical orbit, i.e. changing its orbital speed that it would rotate slower or faster depending on its orbital speed. This doesn’t happen either, again because there is no couple between the two.
I can understand why some people think there’s a coupling. And I can also see why Leif is saying there isn’t one. Myself? I don’t know.
I built a simple orbital simulation of the solar system a couple of months back. It calculates the accelerations, velocities, and positions of the Sun and planets every few seconds. And it works quite well, with the planets going round the Sun in more or less the time expected. It also demonstrates the cycloidal orbital motion of the Sun, agreeing with published results.
It occurs to me that I could use this simulation model to see how the Sun behaves, by replacing my current point mass Sun with a spinning circular chain of masses – the circle radius equalling the radius of the sun, and rotating once every 25 days like the Sun -. And then I’d run the orbital simulation and see whether this new “Sun” changed its behaviour at all as it followed its cycloidal path.
But I suspect that Leif Svalgaard is right, and that my “Sun” won’t change its behaviour at all. And it won’t demonstrate any spin-orbit coupling. But then, I haven’t tried it out yet…
The theory that solar/planetary orbit pattern variations (causing changes in gravitational “tugging”) are a 1st order climate driver is very appealing to me because of its simplicity. This theory also says that the Sunspot variations are the Sun’s response to those same “tuggings”, so climate and sunspots may be correlated, but they’re both correlated to the “tuggings”. Other sunspot/climate correlations exist but are likely 2nd or 3rd order. (except maybe the Cosmic ray piece- which maybe a 1.5th order) Didn’t someone say that simple is “better”?
Jan Janssens on today’s small sunspot:
” 22 March 09 – New SC24-group has reversed polarity… – The new sunspotgroup that is visible in today’s SOHO-images, has -according to the corresponding magnetogram- a reversed polarity (SC23/25). Though on itself this is not so peculiar (every solar cycle has about hundred such groups, or about 3% of the total), it is already the second SC24-group showing this “aberration”: NOAA 1003, visible for just one day (04 October 2008) on the southern hemisphere (-23°), had a polarity equal to that of a unpair solar cycle too (see slide 4 of my presentation). That makes 2 out of 13 (15%), if this group gets a NOAA-number. ”
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Engnieuwtjes.html#Zon
So not much talk on the polarity of this SC24? spot. This latitude and polarity would be rare?
Re: major Physics Journal :: citing wikipedia information as a criticism of an academic publication is amusing. A lot of wikipedia is good, but it can also be completely hijacked by people with an agenda, especially when it comes to the AGW discussion — the watchers of wikipedia never sleep it seems…
Check out their article on the medieval warm period, especially the graphic on the right
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
If you look at the logs: it kept getting criticized, edited, and then reverted. Eventually the objectors just gave up.
There are many other examples of this.