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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@grayuk
Solar minima are like economic recessions : you don’t know when it was until after it’s past. We can’t know when the minimum was until the sunspots start ramping up again.
I pick 290 spotless days for 2009.
Frightening things are already beginning to happen. These are the warning waves. The worst is still to come.
Hope not the sun is turning into a white dwarf 🙂
Another warming-based (-biased?) story about Alaska:
“Though rapidly retreating sea ice makes it easier and more cost-effective to drill in the Chukchi Sea, it also means the area is more fragile. Just about every marine mammal and seabird in the Chukchi Sea is already endangered or a candidate for listing.
…
In 2007, there was no ice at all near the shelf.
“As a result of [ice shelf melting] we saw upwards of 6,000 walruses hauling out along the shore of northwest Alaska, which is the first ever,” Jay says. “It means that a greater number of animals are using a smaller space to forage in and to haul out on — probably not a good thing.”
But the very thing that is cause for concern with regard to walrus and other species in the Arctic is what’s made drilling in these waters more attractive to industry: less sea ice.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103119177
Less sea ice the only, or even most important, factor? I think probably not.
Solarcycle24.com has an interesting graphic showing spotless days averaged over 100 days. The correlation between our current minimum and the minimum of cycle 6-7 is uncanny.
go to:
http://www.solarcycle24.com/
Re: Alex and Adolfo
I thought there was a paper or two out there about a unipolar field. Tallbloke, et al., have discussed hemispheric asymmetry(wasn’t attending closely).
We do know the earth’s field (from models, sorry) tries and fails to reconfigure and flip far more often than sucessfully accomplished. Perhaps we are seeing the sun struggling in this now.
Can someone please explain what this fascination with the age of the ice is, apart from it being a media scare-mongering talking point?
AFAIK, ice does not “age”, it does not anneal over time as might be expected from metals. “Old” ice does not have a fundamentally different crystalline structure from “new” ice. Doesn’t it all come down to thickness? “New” ice is assumed to be thinner, and hence there is less of it (volume).
REPLY: Pick a new name please (SPAM is not acceptable) and provide a working email address for continued access. – Anthony
‘January 2009 is a better shot to be the solar minimum’
Lately there’s been a rash of predictions\suggestions of early solar min!
WHY…??? Can’t help feel it’s a concious but unspoken community effort to let Svalgaard down gradually and gracefully from his wild prediction of August 2008.
Summer 2009 is the min, you know it! The top guys were saying so in 2007 and before that even.
They say leif has modded his solar min assertion forward abit recently in light of current spotless rampage.
eric (12:02:25)
The oceans have significant thermal mass, the temperatures do not turn on a dime.
@ur momisugly Tom Woods (11:58:04) :
So Alaska will experience snow pack melt earlier than ‘normal’ but the rivers and streams will melt on a different schedule? Now that’s climate change you can believe in!
AKD (13:10:20),
That NPR link is filled with anecdotal “evidence.” NPR has a major credibility gap. So let’s look at some real facts: click
Fourteen up years; sixteen down years. And the most recent trend is down. Like the rest of the planet, Alaska is cooling.
““Old” ice does not have a fundamentally different crystalline structure from “new” ice. Doesn’t it all come down to thickness? “New” ice is assumed to be thinner, and hence there is less of it (volume).”
Old ice has a considerably lower salt content and therefore it melts at a higher temperature than “new” ice. Old ice is also more dense. As ice ages … and it is the exposure to sunlight that really does it … the salt works its way out and it becomes fresher so new ice that might melt at -3C will stay solid at that temperature when the salt has worked out of it.
Martin Atkins. Here is something that light interest you:
“One warning sign that a dangerous warming is beginning in Antarctica, will be a breakup of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula just south of the January 0C isotherm; the ice shelf in the Prince Gustav Channel, and the Wordie Ice Shelf; the ice shelf in George VI Sound, and the ice shelf in Wilkins Sound.”
Mercer, Nature, 1978, v271 pp.321-325
Guess what happened to all the mentioned shelves?
REPLY: These couldn’t possibly be anything else but AGW, you are 100% sure?
Flanagan:
Those ice shelves have “collapsed” and regrown countless numbers of times during the 12 million years that Antarctica has been glaciated. The ice grows until it breaks off … then it grows again and breaks off, then again and again and again.
Temperatures were MUCH higher down there during the last interglacial and for 10 of those 12 million years, global temperatures were MUCH higher than now and there was no ice at all at the North pole.
put this another way, Flanagan. For something like 248 of the last 250 million years the North Pole has been ice-free. Having any ice at all there is abnormal.
meemoe_uk (13:23:07) :
‘January 2009 is a better shot to be the solar minimum’
The real issue is that there is no one definition of ‘minimum’ and you can get answers that can easily differ by six months or more.
If you chose F10.7 radio flux as minimum, see http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
a good number would be September 1st, 2008. If you use SSN, it may be later, depending on when the new cycle takes off [if ever 🙂 ]. Here is a Science Nugget on the minimum
Well gee… if the sun really is settling in for a long nap, we’ll just have to fix it. After all, we are Mankind! We destroy Ozone layers and recklessly heat our planet!
Since we don’t have any nuclear devices of sufficient size to even be noticed by the sun, we’ll have to throw something in to it. Mercury? Nah, too small. Jupiter! Yeah, we can do that. All we have to do is swing a few asteroids past it to slow its orbit down enough, and that sucker will just fall inward to the sun. It might even make a splash! Heh, and we thought Shoemaker-Levy was cool to watch!
Hmm… there is absolutely no possibility of unintended consequences, right? I mean, after all, it’s a simple slam dunk. Sun slows down, sun gets gas giant. No problem!
(a note for the humor challenged: yes, it was intended as humor… mostly)
Adolfo Giurfa (13:05:45) :
“Hope not the sun is turning into a white dwarf :)”
Or even worst….., a Blue Smurf
Leif: Hope you will tell us when to panic 🙂
I have been watching the magnetograms closely for a while and I have noticed, a flurry of cycle 23 plages.
Is it possible that cycle 24 maximum was reached in October 08 and cycle 25 may be starting? Is it possible that the sun has decided to “scrap” the 11 year cycle system??
The Italian blog linked above did raise an interesting point…. look at the current coronal holes, they are often occuring on the equator which is a typical of a solar maximum.
We only have solar cycle data for 300 years whilst the sun has been burning for 4.57 billion years! So perhaps this is just a blip? 11 year cycles could just be a random event.
What was the sun like during glaciations and ice ages???
Is there any way to determine this?
“Hope not the sun is turning into a white dwarf”
It is, but it’s gonna take a looong time.
Leif has a good pdf for solar observations
http://www.leif.org/research/Most%20Recent%20IMF,%20SW,%20and%20Solar%20Data.pdf
The interesting thing about this cycle is that usually the new SC exceeds the old cycle when the decay of the previous cycle gets to about ssn=10. For some reason this did not happen in SC24. It’s as if there is insufficient MF strength to generate the new cycle sunspots.
If August 2008 was the minimum why is there still no ramp-up for sc24 ?
MartinGAtkins (12:44:07) :
eric (12:12:19) :
“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.”
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?
Here is one example:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WilkinsIceSheet/
An ice shelf collapsing does not by itself raise sea level because the ice shelf was already floating on the ocean surface and displacing its own weight.However, the loss of an ice shelf can “release the brake” on the flow of glaciers that feed the shelf. Increased glacier flow can raise sea level by introducing the weight of the glacier onto the ocean surface, just like adding enough ice cubes can raise the level of your drink. In the wake of the Larsen B Ice Shelf Collapse in 2002, a research team led by Scambos found that the glaciers feeding the shelf accelerated up to six times their original flow speed.
eric (12:02:25) :
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.
If you walk to the top of a mountain and then down the other side. As you come down you are still near the top.
The current cooling is being measured against a recent peak. Hence we will be 10th warmest year, 11th warmest, etc…
Have a think about it.
Leif:
“If you chose F10.7 radio flux as minimum, see http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
a good number would be September 1st, 2008.”
In years prior to satellite technology, past minimums were computed based on ground-telescope (counted) sunspot data, thus surely sunspot data from earth observatories should be used for the determination of this minimum instead of radio flux. It would only be fair.
I think we will have to wait for cycle 24 (25?) to ramp up and then decide what the minimum date is. As was seen with 23 max, there was a double peak, and perhaps there could be a double minimum, which could be interpreted as a dwarfed “pseudo-cycle”. Who knows..
With only 300 years of ss data (out of 4.57bil) anything could happen.