By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
The sun remains in a deep slumber.
Today we are 15 days into April without a sunspot and with 603 sunspotless day this cycle minimum, 92 already this year. 2009 at this rate, is likely to enter the top 10 years the last century along with 2007 (9th) and 2008 (2nd) this summer.
If it stays quiet the rest of this month, the minimum can be no earlier than November 2008, at least a 12.5 year cycle length. I believe January 2009 is a better shot to be the solar minimum as sunspot number would have to be below 0.5 in June 2008 to prevent the running mean (13 month) from blipping up then. April needs only to stay below 3.2 and May 3.4 to get us to January. This would be very like cycles 1 to 4 in the late 1700s and early 1800s, preceding the Dalton Minimum. That was a cold era, the age of Dickens and the children playing in the snow in London, much like this past winter.
THE ARCTIC AND ANTARCTIC ICE STORY
As for the ice, we hear in the media the hype about the arctic and Antarctic ice. The arctic ice we are told is more first and second year ice and very vulnerable to a summer melt.
Actually the arctic ice is very 3rd highest level since 2002, very close to 2003, in a virtual tie to last winter and the highest year according to IARC-JAXA. The anomaly is a relatively small 300,000 square km according to The Cryosphere Today.
There was much attention paid in the media to the crack in the Wilkins Ice sheet bridge. It was not even reflected as a blip on the Southern Hemisphere ice extent, which has grown rapidly as the southern hemisphere winter set in to 1,150,000 square kms above the normal for this date and rising rapidly.
The net GLOBAL sea ice anomaly is also positive, 850,000 square km above the normal. See full PDF here.
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An article warning that the planned Geo-Engineering during a period of cooling will cause cooling much more severe than it would otherwise be
http://www.iceagenow.com/Playing_God_with_the_Weather.htm
Man may not be causing the world to warm, but the next little ice-age being worse than the last could be man-made if this really gets going.
According to another article the Sun apparently affects Earth’s climate via the oceans, and the oceans have been cooling since not long after Sun activity started winding down to the current extreme quiet.
Get rich . . . . go long on Long Underwear futures and wheel in the dough.
Personally, I’d be fascinated to see this minimum continue and watch cooling come crashing down on Earth. That’s my scientific interest.
Realistically, I don’t want to see this. I’ve grown addicted to, you know, EATING, and crop failures for several years in a row would be very bad for that particular addiction. Also, the increased weather volatility that accompanies cooling (contrary to the popular myth of “warming causes bad weather”) would be particularly harmful in my area, where the coolest years historically have the most catastrophic hail events.
Can we do a pool for sunspotless days for 2009? I would like to reserve 307.
It doesn’t get richer than this!
http://newsminer.com/news/2009/apr/15/rural-alaska-villages-face-messy-breakup-year/
The article is summed up with the following:
Why all the chatter about warming and melting in Alaska? Well, reading the beginning of the article might clue us in.
Yes, that’s right. 40% thicker ice and 3-5 degrees below normal temperat…ohhh…hmmmm…
I guess we couldn’t just report on ice being 40% thicker and temperatures that are waaay below normal without having to insert global warming into the topic of conversation.
Basing the ice on only 6 years of data is a little short-sighted, especially with the many variables that are involved. The recent trend is for loss of ice over the past 30 years.
And no refutation of the loss of multi-year ice? Why even bother mentioning it?
So what are we supposed to make of these facts?
What is the actual change in solar irradience that goes along with the sunspot decrease? How much of a temperature effect should it have? The years 2007 and 2008 were low sunspot number year, ranking ninth and second in number of sunspotless days. Yet both were among the top 10 years in global temperature average in the last century.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
Calendar year 2008 was the coolest year since 2000, according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies analysis [see ref. 1] of surface air temperature measurements. In our analysis, 2008 is the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880 (left panel of Fig. 1). The ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008. The two-standard-deviation (95% confidence) uncertainty in comparing recent years is estimated as 0.05°C [ref. 2], so we can only conclude with confidence that 2008 was somewhere within the range from 7th to 10th warmest year in the record.
Based on recent history, this will be a natural fluctuation in radiative forcing that will have a modest cooling effect even if it persists.
Let’s hope it’s only a Dalton Minimum and not a Maunder Minimum arriving. The latter will really be disastrous for our planet as many will perish from starvation due to the lack of temperate land in the northern hemisphere to grow food and raise cattle.
There is an interesting article on spaceweather.com:
CMEs are so weak (240km/s) that they are actually been pushed away from the sun by solar wind gusting at 300km/s!
Taken from the site with an attached video clip of a slow 11 April CME:
“The most powerful solar explosions are now moving in slow motion. “Lately, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have become very slow, so slow that they have to be dragged away from the sun by the solar wind,” says researcher Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Lab. Here is an example from April 11th:”
[ see video on http://www.spaceweather.com/ ]
“Each second in the SOHO animation corresponds to an hour or more of real time. “The speed of the CME was only 240 km/s,” says Vourlidas. “The solar wind speed is about 300 km/s, so the CME is actually being dragged.”
Vourlidas has examined thousands of CMEs recorded by SOHO over the past 13 years, and he’s rarely seen such plodding explosions. In active times, CMEs can blast away from the sun faster than 1000 km/s. Even during the solar minimum of 1996, CMEs often revved up to 500 or 600 km/s. “Almost all the CMEs we’ve seen since the end of April 2008, however, are very slow, less than 300 km/s.”
Is this just another way of saying “the sun is very quiet?” Or do slow-motion CMEs represent a new and interesting phenomena? The jury is still out. One thing is clear: solar minimum is more interesting than we thought.
It seems that the author has some confusion about the Wilkins ice shelf, or is engaging in a straw man argument.
There is no expectation by anyone that I have read that the Wilkins ice shelf will impact the Antarctic Sea Ice Extent. The crack in the ice shelf will have no effect whatsover in sea ice area.
The idea is that such events result in a mechanical speedup of the rate of travel of land glaciers toward the ocean and ultimately cause an increase in the rate of rise of sea level In the particular case of the Wilkins ice shelf itself, this is not expected to happen, but it has had that effect on other Antarctic land glaciers.
sp *being not been
end quotation…….”
Anthony
Did you note the plage of last month which was not given a sunspot number but has now been counted as the last sunspot to appear. Ie they reset the count of days at spaceweather.com.
Do you know what that was all about?
I’ve seen a lot here about the arctic and antarctic, but nothing about the situation in Greenland. This past Sunday on PBS there was a program centering on Greenland (plus some other areas), showing a large quantity of melted water going down a very deep hole in the ice. Of course, it was full of the usual AGW pessimism. But is the ice mantle on Greenland any different from other areas in that part of the world?
Are the years right in the opening statement?
Or am i reading it wrong?
Quote:
If it stays quiet the rest of this month, the minimum can be no earlier than November 2008, at least a 12.5 year cycle length. I believe January 2009 is a better shot to be the solar minimum as sunspot number would have to be below 0.5 in June 2008 to prevent the running mean (13 month) from blipping up then. April needs only to stay below 3.2 and May 3.4 to get us to January.
This is all in the past
Steve Kopits,
You beat me to it. I, however pick 304 spotless days for 2009. This is the number that jumped out at me as I reviewed historical data a few days ago. No hard analysis, just a strong feeling, really.
You’re watching the same thing I have been. I keep wondering when the solar quiet will manifest itself in something obvious/measurable like the polar ice. Since the media is focusing on arctic ice, that seems as good a canary as anything. Since the sunspots are, more or less, the second derivative of temperatures, and temperatures directly drive the first derivative of sea ice, some serious lag might be in order. However, the clouds/albedo would have a direct first derivative effect (giving the sunspots a second derivative term in the diff. eq.)
Anyway, this is worth a lot of attention. Also check the weather forecast for Barrow, AK, for a view into how cloudy things are (in one spot). This had been consistently very cloudy (over the whole 10 day forecast) until very recently. This summer’s ice melt will have more to do with this than the temp.
http://www.weather.com/outlook/tenday/USAK0025
Our italian friend posted the following yesterday.:
ice2020 (08:43:43) :
http://209.85.129.132/translate_c?hl=it&sl=it&tl=en&u=http://daltonsminima.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/buchi-coronali-e-ciclo-solare-ce-qualcosa-di-molto-strano-proprio-come-durante-il-minimo-di-maunder/&prev=hp&usg=ALkJrhh-V-HHHW2heXunnqAZ_ngfc0ervQ
I find it quite interesting and it can raise many questions.
There have been very few solar cycle 24 sunspots since the first one appeared in January 2008. The last few sunspots have been from solar cycle 23. So solar cycle 23 will be thirteen years long in May, and solar cycle 24 is almost non existant.
Looks like we are headed into a long solar minimum. Explains why global temperatures and the seas are cooling. Expect less Arctic sea ice melting this Summer, contrary to what the global warming alarmists say and want to believe.
eric (12:12:19) :
Would you like to name the Antarctic glaciers that have been shown to speed up their rate of travel due to the loss of sea ice? Who did the study?
If you want to learn more about the sun and the climate, read the sun-earth publications by Prof dr C de Jager:
http://www.cdejager.com/sun-earth-publications/
It was mostly warmer than today the last 10,000 years and Greenland’s ice didnt melt then, so it won’t melt now either.
While it could melt around the edges some it is building up snow in the center.
Just wait till they blame the lack of sunspots on human caused CO2 …
@Tom Woods
There’s an awful lot of ‘could’s in that quote. I counted 4, plus one ‘might’.
Are you referring to this video?
That sort of surface drainage of melt water is a well known and common feature of large glaciers and is nothing new. Very dramatic so it plays easily into the AGW scare tactics but artifacts of such drainage are found all over the world as the surface melt water drains to the bottom of the glacier and eventually forms streams under the glacier to carry that surface melt water off the glacier.
They form Eskers which are the signature of these under glacier streams.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esker
Larry
It’s pretty optimistic to think the minimum would be Jan 2009. We may already have seen the last true solar cycle of our lives, and this minimum will stretch out virtually unchanged until 2080 or so. Total spotless days this year considering how microspots are counted 340. A Maunder type minimum is due and the extreme and deepening solar quiet suggests it is here.