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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The real reason for the Orange color:
http://pixdaus.com/single.php?id=146287
eric (15:00:47) :
…
I already have. Solar irradiance has been cyclical with sunspots over the past 50 years, and the average actually has been declining slightly. It has not been the dominant driver of global warming which has just reached a peak.
As a result a drop in solar irradience will not likely create a new “little ice age”, (assuming there was such a thing globally) but will likely create a slight temperature drop.
Eric – I hear where you are coming from – however are we sure that “solar irradience” (as heat and light) are the only solar emissions that impact on the Earth’s climate.
I’m fairly sure of the following two points.
[1] The jury is still out on cosmic ray effects on Earth’s climate, and
[2] We don’t understand the Sun, and are unable to predict it’s behaviour.
Given that – then ruling out the Sun as a major climate influence is premature .
The +ve upshot is that we are currently well placed to examine all this over the next decade or two.
Pamela Gray (17:46:18) :
Okay. I fricken give up. It is the Sun and the fact that I get up every morning at 5:30 AM (some kind of damned internal clock I cannot shut off) every single morning since I was 4 years old. Given this correlation, I cause the Sun to rise. Therefore I cause the Sun to cycle between cold Earth and warm Earth. I will be setting up a website for sacrifices. My suggestion is that you donate once per month. Or else the Sun will stay asleep and you will all die. Do not think it is Mother Earth. Do not study the oceans. Look only at the Sun and lack of sunspots. If you do not donate enough, I will not bring sunspots back, and the Earth will not warm.
WOW – Can you predict the future too!
I could care less about educational opportunities, all I want to see is the white-light facular measurements from 2007 to present. If only the largest ones, that would be great also. The count of magnetic pixels in plages might be also be a substitute.
It works for all the SC’s I’ve tried so far (12-21).
Help me out here.
I’m fairly sure of the following two points.
[1] The jury is still out on cosmic ray effects on Earth’s climate, and
Not from what I saw last summer as the cosmic rays held the smoke on the ground for weeks at a time and sent it all the way down to Sacramento, choking half the state. The Fire Information Officer was well aware of it, and said in no uncertain terms “We were briefed by NASA on this effect”.
Firefighting aircraft were mostly grounded. They prayed for wind.
Lee Kington (15:24:49) :
In the meantime there was an article today which conveyed what I call irresponsible comments by a scientists.
Catastrophic sea levels ‘distinct possibility’
…
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.72971d0d0ab6d933e237108c5a05b3c8.421&show_article=1
And of course the actual study will be published in Nature tomorrow.
Just anyone – If someone says “if X happens, then Calamitous Y will happen in Z years from now”.
Why are we as a culture besotted by such statements? I just don’t get it – it seems to be no better than getting your palm read at a travelling carnival – pure superstition.
Can all those people who can reliably predict the future please come forward…. gahhhhh.
If X happens, then Calamitous Y will be predicted to happen in Z years from now. When Calamitous -X happens instead, the predictors of X will be thrown under the bus by the politicians who just last week did photo-ops with the X-fanatics. That’s what happens when one drives the wrong way on the freeway.
It’s thrilling, it’s heady and it’s downright deadly.
Graeme Rodaughan (20:34:06) :
Given that – then ruling out the Sun as a major climate influence is premature .
[2] We don’t understand the Sun, and are unable to predict it’s behaviour.
We normally do this the other way around. We only ‘rule something in’ if there is good evidence for it. And ignorance is a poor reason for not ruling something out.
John Egan (16:26:23) :
Did anything happen in 1912 connected with ice?
Well, Robert Falcon Scott and his team froze to death on an Antarctica ice shelf in 1912…that’s something.
Leif Svalgaard (21:07:15) :
Graeme Rodaughan (20:34:06) :
Given that – then ruling out the Sun as a major climate influence is premature .
[2] We don’t understand the Sun, and are unable to predict it’s behaviour.
We normally do this the other way around. We only ‘rule something in’ if there is good evidence for it. And ignorance is a poor reason for not ruling something out.
Leif – Thanks, So… Just reason from the evidence, and don’t draw conclusions in the absence of evidence. – is that it? If it is, I get it.
We certainly live in interesting times – given your profession, it must be a very exciting time?
savethesharks (19:51:51) :
Pamela Gray wrote: “Do not study the oceans. Look only at the Sun and lack of sunspots.”
“WRONG answer. Look at BOTH.”
Did you somehow miss the humor? It’s Goddess Pamela that causes climate change!
Don’t you just love how the Sun is displaying behaviour we haven’t seen in almost a century, and scientists are falling all over themselves to tell us that ‘everything is normal, the Sun has done this many times before’, which, of course, is true.
But if we have a WEATHER event that hasn’t happened in almost a hundred years, why that’s incontrovertible evidence of climate change and anyone who disagrees has their head stuck in a bubble of denial.
With my “gut feel”, whenever I look at the sunspot cycle and climate patterns, it seems that there is a three-five year time lag with the sunspot peak and temperature peak. Assuming that the sunspot cycle is directly/indirectly related to the suns heat output, my thoughts are that the time lag is the time that it takes time to heat up the huge heat sink earth. The mass of earth so grossly dwarfs the thin film mass of where humans live that it seems to be the dominate factor. (It seems Global Warming is should be called thin film warming?)
Conversely, assuming the recent unusually long days without sunspots is an indication of lower sun heat output, it should be interesting what three plus years on my assumed “earth’s temperature lag”.
JLKreuger:
97 years and one day ago in 1912, Ice bergs were seen floating un-usually far down in the Atlantic, cosequently hitting the Titanic and killing 1513 people.
In 1911 Niagra Falls completely froze over (I found a nice picture of a group ladies in some rather heavy Victorian clothes inspecting the top of the frozen falls, on a site which has “photos that changed the world”.
In response to the colouration of the sun : A coincidence; When viewing through the black glasses (filters) used in viewing an eclipse, the sun appears orange as in the images on the solar websites.
JLKrueger:
Yes, Scott and his men did die then due to extreme cold:
“No one in the world would have expected the temperatures and surfaces which we have encountered at this time of the year…”
– Robert Falcon Scott, March 1912
Alarmist Susan Solomon’s 2001 book “The Coldest March” essentially uses the unusually cold weather that year for the demise of Scott and his team. No mention that he was largely unprepared and Amundsen was.
That would also make 1912 a great year to show how warm it is today. Hmm…
“eric (19:30:04) : If you are referring to the hypothesis that cosmic rays influence cloud formation,… ”
It has proof. Can you call it a hypothesis? You need to study it more so you can speak with knowledge. You have to see that the people you are trying to debate here are not novices.
Does the hypothesis that co2 controls climate have proof? No it doesn’t. All evidence shows that it doesn’t. So you must discard that hypothesis.
If you would have watched the video I linked before you would see that clouds and cosmic rays are linked, has evidence :
Perhaps and I stress perhaps, perhaps ‘the powers that be’ the ones who are pushing the AGW theory so hard, actually have known for some time that we are in fact heading into a maunder minimum?
It seems very strange to me that we are in fact as a world preparing for and expecting the very opposite of what is actually going to happen, why would this be?
Our civilisation is supposed to be the most enlightened,brightest and scientifically skilled in history and yet there does seem to be a deep seated ignorance and highly selective amnesia at play within the highest circles of govenment and academia, what on earth is going on?
Evidence ignored, scientists ignored,reality ignored,common sense ignored combined with a type of hysterical fear of the future and our place within that future, do we strike out with confidence and self belief to construct an industrial based modern society reaching out to the stars OR do we revert to a pastoral and pre industrial society where the iron hard laws of fear and ignorance reign? Do we as a species run toward the light of progress or cower back toward the comforting darkness of our past?
We seem to be at a crossroads/fork in the road of our evolution and there seems to be a collective uncertainty affecting us, a fear of what the future holds, a crisis of self confidence, rather as though we are experiencing the growing pains of a child, concurrent phases of fear/depression/anger/over confidence/pride/guilt.
I hope and pray we choose to shed our collective fear of growing and evolving, we have much to look forward to!
No mention that he [Scott] was largely unprepared and Amundsen was.
Margins of error are perilously slim for human survival in polar regions and the poles are rather unforgiving toward the unprepared.
We humans tend to base our decisions on what we have observed in our lifetimes, often forgetting that Earth’s “memory” is far longer and includes extremes beyond our imaginings. Scott’s quote is a perfect example.
braddles (18:37:27) :
Anyone know why the images of the sun we see are coloured orange?
The sun is not orange. It is not yellow. It is white. Sunlight is the very definition of white.
REPLY: I’ve wondered that myself, and I have two possible answers:
1) It was an arbitrary choice, as colors often are, that looked “nice”. For example:
http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/weather/icons/1.GIF
2) The Florida Orange Growers Association lobbied NASA heavily to make it this way to promote their brand.
Maybe Leif has a third option.
– Anthony
Ah, there is a better explanation if you live in Greece. The sun at sunset is orange , if it is not red, before dipping in the sea, probably due to all that Sahara dust that honors us when the winds are right. Probably this is true in many other places.
Sunset is when you can observe the sun with naked eye and see the sunspots if they are huge enough. I remember once returning from Crete seeing the setting sun in the Aegean and puzzling how a seagull could keep such a steady course towards the sun, until I realized I was watching a huge sunspot. Must have been around 1981.
The literature tells of times where folks were not so lucky. Like England after the Medieval Warm Period ended. Greenland turned blue.
Graeme Rodaughan (20:34:06) :
eric (15:00:47) :
…
I already have. Solar irradiance has been cyclical with sunspots over the past 50 years, and the average actually has been declining slightly. It has not been the dominant driver of global warming which has just reached a peak.
As a result a drop in solar irradience will not likely create a new “little ice age”, (assuming there was such a thing globally) but will likely create a slight temperature drop.
Eric – I hear where you are coming from – however are we sure that “solar irradience” (as heat and light) are the only solar emissions that impact on the Earth’s climate.
I’m fairly sure of the following two points.
[1] The jury is still out on cosmic ray effects on Earth’s climate, and
[2] We don’t understand the Sun, and are unable to predict it’s behaviour.
Given that – then ruling out the Sun as a major climate influence is premature .
I want to add to the soup the UV sun cycle effect possibility in affecting albedo. There was a recent article that connected plankton and UV, the plankton generating dust to reduce UV and thus raising albedo; it was discussed a few threads ago.
In contrast to the 0.1% solar irradiance change from minimum to maximum, UV changes a whopping 6%.
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/0702_planktoncloud.html
I agree that the jury is out and that
The +ve upshot is that we are currently well placed to examine all this over the next decade or two.
Lee (12:59:17) :
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.
Actually we are not due for a Maunder type minimum. This type of grand minimum is quite rare although recently we had 3 in a row (Wolf, Sporer and Maunder) but if we look over the past 11000 years the Dalton type grand minima is far more prolific.
http://users.beagle.com.au/geoffsharp/c14nujs1.jpg
The Jose Minimum we are entering now will be Dalton like, although some parts of science do not recognize the Dalton as a grand minimum because it gets in the way of their “random number generator” hypothesis….if so we shouldnt notice any changes of significance with the upcoming grand minimum, if we can call it that?
From the original blog entry:-
“That was a cold era, the age of Dickens and the children playing in the snow in London, much like this past winter.”
That’s a bit of a stretch isn’t it? Only last year children were playing in the Kent snow at … Easter !! This year we spent it on the beach paddling and eating icecreams, even though no sunspots….. it’s called Englands changeable weather !
Regards
Andy
Craig Mooe (17:54:25) :
We’ll have to cancel on the virgins. One of them is too sick and the other refuses to go it alone.
Goats it is.
Leif Svalgaard
Leif, three questions if I may:
1). Adolfo Giurfa (12:35:33) : posted a link to an interesting analysis about the sun – do you have any thoughts or comments on this?
2). Also as, P. Hager (13:13:03) : posted that the folks at http://www.solarcycle24.com had an interesting analysis suggesting things were shaping up much like cycles 6&7. Do you think this could be shaping up like 6&7?
3). Do you think there is anything unusual about this cycle change at the moment?
Sorry to bombard you again! But this looks pretty unusual to me and I was wondering whether you were feeling the same way? Thanks as ever.