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.
Paul Vaughan (19:47:46) :
but I want to verify that the same 1-day-resolution time-series was used (minus a few years, of course).
The time resolution is 1 day.
I see the ~28.5 day signal in a few panels of the Br(-1)^N column of Neugebauer et al’s (2000) Figure 6, but they don’t give it much special mention. I’m wondering if there are any good works on the intermittent 28.5 day pattern?
The 28.5 day is the synodic rotation period of the solar interior.
see also: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1990ApJ…360..296A
Paul Vaughan (19:47:46) :
but I want to verify that the same 1-day-resolution time-series was used (minus a few years, of course).
I misunderstood, but, yes it is the same data [with perhaps a few typos corrected here and there].
Leif Svalgaard (20:01:51)
“The 28.5 day is the synodic rotation period of the solar interior.”
Ok, now the whole-picture is starting to make a lot of sense. Thanks for the responses Leif. (I continue to read….)
‘Quiet Sun’ baffling astronomers
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8008473.stm
BBC finally gets around to talking about the quiet sun: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8008473.stm
Interesting point talking about the Maunder and the Little Ice Age, but dismissed by one interviewee by saying that if the quiet Sun was linked to temperature, we would have noticed a global cooling by now.
I was interested to note that there was no link to the earlier ‘Global Warming has paused’ story.
It’s even got on the BBC although with quite a few errors and the global warming spin http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8009492.stm
As Oldjim and Watson point out, BBC1 television news today at lunchtime reports for the first time of the ‘quietest solar activity for 100 years’. This may offset the warming caused by burning fossil fuels. Apparently. Aren’t we lucky people.
It seems the largest effect, so far, has been a drop in UV values of “6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996” (NASA report).
If this number is valid, it would seem to be a huge change in our environment. Can you imagine a 6% change in global temperatures or oxygen conc.?
If one considers the multiple roles of UV on our planet, this seems incredulous. Photochemistry, ionization, sterilization of exposed pathogens, photosynthesis, sea water chemistry and algae/bacterial/fungi populations, must all be affected.
Could an increase in algae “blooms” also be a result, or increased disease epidemics? Insect populations?? Temperatures may not be the major effect, but will certainly be measurable.
Of all the parameters which affect global temperatures, received radiation (light) is the most complicated. This is so, due to the immediate. bio feedback involved.
Sit beside a calm pond, on a partially cloudy day. When the sun is behind a heavy cloud, the pond is inactive, nothing of note occurs. As soon as the sun comes out, instantaneous events begin to occur. Gas bubbles start coming up from the algae and plants, indicating an incredible increase in photosynthesis has been activated. Chemistry explodes in the pond.
The Earth is somewhat like the pond. A slight increase in received light has a tremendous chemical effect on the atmosphere, ambient energy levels (of the ocean’s surface tension layer) and evaporation. Land and vegetation chemistry explodes. All of these reactions feedback into climate.
Maximum effort should now be exercised, to record and analyze this solar minimum effects. Global warming is rapidly becoming the least of our worries. I do not envy the “AGW convinced” position, in the coming decade. Yet, everywhere I look, their alarm bells are ringing louder than ever. We are all going to pay for this misdirection. GK
CO2 is good, not bad. We all benefit from more of it in the atmosphere, especially farmers and foresters. Why?
Plant growth stops at 200 PPM in the atmosphere.
Plant growth is optimized at 1000 PPM; commercial greenhouse owners invest good money in CO2 generators to raise greenhouse concentrations toward the optimum to increase the productivity of their fixed growing area.
In particular, increased levels of CO2 enable plant growth in drought conditions.
150 years ago CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was 285 PPM, now it’s 385 PPM. It’s like free airborne fertilizer in the atmosphere.
Increased levels of CO2 have significantly increased crop and forest yields over the last century. If environmentalists truly wanted a greener planet they would want more, not less, CO2 in the atmosphere.
Warmer temperatures are generally good, not bad. Most of us benefit from warmer temperatures, especially farmers and foresters. Why?
Warmer temperatures increase growing seasons and produce more consistently successful crops from year to year.
Warmer temperatures reduce heating fuel consumption in the winter. This is a very big deal today because world oil production peaked three years ago and will begin a permanent decline in two years. That is why the cost for all fuels is going through the roof. Fuel costs will only decline during economic down turns, like we are experiencing now.
Warmer temperatures two thousand years ago enabled the rise of the Roman Empire. The subsequent cooling period resulted in the fall of the Roman Empire and the social and economic decline into the Dark Ages. The next warm period one thousand year ago ushered in the Renaissance. Today’s warm period enabled the rise of the United States. The Dalton (type) Minimum the sun is now entering will dramatically affect us all by virtue if it’s impact on crop yields in the northern and southern hemispheres.
The cooling we are now experiencing, together with declining availability of carbon based fuels, will dramatically affect our lives and our economy. Taxing the use of carbon based fuels will make matters much worse. Taxing carbon is like leaning into a right hook. It’s a quick way to end the fight.
Warming is caused principally by the sun, not by elevated levels of CO2.
Energy from the sun drives our climate, not CO2. Energy from the sun is modulated by the oceans and the atmosphere to produce our weather. Changes in climate are driven by long-term changes in the sun’s radiative output and magnetic field strength. Google: Fairbridge Solar Inertial Motion (SIM) for a sense of how this works physically.
The principal green house gas is water vapor. It provides 95 percent of our greenhouse warming effect. Without it the earth would be a ball of ice. As a greenhouse gas, CO2 is a distance fourth behind methane and nitrous oxide, which produce most of the remaining 5 percent of greenhouse warming. CO2’s concentration in the atmosphere is four one-hundredths of one percent (.04 %). That’s roughly equivalent to the thickness of the floor wax on your community’s high school basket ball gymnasium, compared to the distance from the floor to the ceiling. The quantity and warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere is negligible.
The two trends described above have done more to “GREEN” the planet over the last several decades than anything humans have done to motivate that change. Both trends are now headed south, naturally. Solar activity is declining and will continue for the next few decades, cooling the earth about 2 degrees (C) in this quiescence period. The sun has just emerged from several decades of very high activity, which has warmed the earth by about one half degree(C). CO2 levels will naturally decline as carbon fuels production, particularly oil, begin their long decline. World oil production has been flat for three years. We are all going to meet our Kyoto targets whether we plan to or not. The environmentalists should be pleased. The rest of us won’t.
Thank you for this topic