Although we’ve been covering this quiet sun issue for over a year on WUWT, the light bulb seems to have gone on for mainstream media right about now.
There is growing press coverage about the current state of the sun, most recently from Charles Osgood of CBS News as well as the BBC and other major outlets. While the sun slumbers deeper and has missed its cyclic snooze alarm, our media is finally waking up to the solar somnolence.
Here is a short roundup of news articles on this subject today:
‘Still Sun’ baffling astronomers
Scientists warn sun has dimmed
Sun ‘at its quietest for 100 years’
Has the sun gone in? Earth’s closest star ‘dimmest it’s been for a century’
So the question arises, now that this has been identified, what should we call it?
There have been some good ideas, such as naming it after Jack Eddy, who coined the phrase “Maunder Minimum“. There’s been some discussion of a “Gore Minimum”, but I don’t like the idea of giving Gore credit for something he has nothing to do with, or even likely understands. There’s been suggestion of “The Hansen Minimum” which makes a little more sense, since he’s an astronomer by training. On that note, Leif Svalgaard predicted this, so maybe it should be his honor.
So, I’ve decided to have a poll, and I’ll take suggestions for other names than what I’ve listed.
Eureka!
The Mooning Minimum
This has:
Alliteration and lilt (very important, because they aid memorability);
Descriptiveness (the image atop this thread looks like it’s a bald-butt “mooning” the viewer);
Sting (Nature is expressing its contempt toward its shallow and simplistic diagnosticians with a visual “raspberry”)
I voted for Eddy Minimum, but I am pleased to see Dr. Svaalgard’s name on top.
He stays with us, even though he gets a devil of a time here & there.
Gore already has his reward.
I suppose watermelon minimum would be to obvious.
Landscheidt was predicting this back in the 90’s
Livingston-Penn minimum. If their work is confirmed by observation over time, who can say how long sunspots will remain invisible.
Could that be what happened during the Maunder minimum? If so, and if we’re entering another such phase of that cycle, then they should get the credit for spotting it.
Dim Sun? Is this a new type of Chinese food?
(Sorry)
Just wait until somebody digs up those Heirogyphic SOHO magnetograms from the big plage of March, 2009. You could easily sell 100 million the idea of The Handwriting on the Sun. AGW would find it’s soapbox unattended, it’s thunder stolen, in a heartbeat. Or, it could be seen dodging rotten fruit instead of shoes.
Tim F: Thanks for the pat on the head!!
However, although I invented “The Inconvenient Minimum” on my own, somebody else deserves equal credit, because two weeks or so ago we both submitted it at about the same time, on another thread on this site. It was during a period when comments were piling up in the moderator’s in-box and so neither of us saw the other’s submission. I was astounded and dismayed to discover, that he’d beaten me to the punch, once my comment was out of moderation. (I felt like the guy who lost out to Alexander Graham Bell by an hour at the patent office.)
Anyway, I’ve made lots of other little bits of wordplay to console me. Here’s one we can toss at the AGWAns outraged at our heresy: “Your ox is not a sacred cow.”
The WUWiT Minimum
So funny that CT doesn’t support the Comparison Product any longer. Also so very far behind on the seasonal graphs that are fatally flawed. Their website is so shabby and falling apart like the AGW hypothesis itself…
Interestingly they mentioned the dim sun on the Communist Broadcasting Corporation news here in Canada tonight and even had there science guru in to talk about it. But to no surprise, they made the mandatory comment at the end that this does nothing to prevent the dreaded global warming! Pathetic!!
Geoff Sharp (19:19:55) :
This is not hard to understand
Indeed, it is easy, as we here have typical examples of ‘explanations’ of the type “the stock market failed to rally in spite of the good employment figures”. Descriptive after-rationalizations with no predictive power or understanding of the reasons behind what happened.
the 172 year pattern has a centre with usually 3 opportunities for solar downturn. The Wolf, Sporer and Maunder looked to use all 3, the Dalton used one and a bit (the centre is 1831) and this time around we are right in the centre after SC20 didn’t quite make the grade.
No explanations of why some used all three, one only one and a bit, and one that didn’t make the grade.
Specifically, the angular momentum graph from 1800 to 2060 includes the Dalton minimum and our present time:
http://www.leif.org/research/Angular%20Momentum%201800-2060.png
If you shift the modern data left 172 years, you see that the angular momentum [AM] graphs are identical:
http://www.leif.org/research/Angular%20Momentum%201800-2060,%20shifted.png
If the AM is the controlling factor we should therefore expect identical [to the same degree – unless the Sun does some crap-shooting] sunspot numbers, and clearly we did not see that:
http://www.leif.org/research/Sunspot%20Number%201800-1850%20and%201978-2028.png (cycles 24 and 25 predicted)
In the 1831-case, the low cycles were before 1831, in the present case the low cycles will be after 1831+172= 2003. There is nothing in the AM graph that explains or hints at this. It is in this sense that your empirical method fails.
Now, it is perfectly OK to say that something other than AM is driving the cycle and producing the correlations so fervently believed in, but it is not OK [and that is my only problem with this] to say that everything is explained by the run of AM, because clearly it is not.
You comment on intelligence and grasping ability is a disgrace.
And with this, it is time for you to return to your sandbox.
This post MUST have set a record for the most comments in one day…
Mike
Reply: Funny, you posted this just as I was counting YOUR comments today, which also may be an individual record. 52 and rising with 3.5 hours to go. ~ charles the moderator
If the MSM et al had kept on hiding their head up their bottoms, we could have called it The Missed Minimum… Now it’s just The Dismissed Minimum.
I was going to suggest the Deniers minimum but will vote for the Inconvenient minimum. Need to start a new poll with this added to the list.
Let’s see how this minimum plays out. If it’s the “Maunder” type as Landscheit has forecast (http://bourabai.narod.ru/landscheidt/new-e.htm) , then it should be named for him.
The very warm minimum.
Maybe it will cool down next year?
On third thought.. maybe “Modern Minimum” is exactly what is needed to remind future generations of how self-centered “Modern” scientists were. Now to go see if “Modern architecture” means what I think it means…
The name should depend on how long the minimum lasts and how severe the consequences. If it ends real soon, it shouldn’t even be called a minimum. If it lasts a very long time, it’ll be known as “The Modern Ice Age”.
One in between possibility: “The Mini Minimum”
It’s not a minimum yet — it appears to be just a really long cycle 23 (complete with its rare double peak)
The problem with all of these suggestions for this Minimum — or even the existing “Named Minimums” is that we don’t really have enough data to accurately even define what is normal behavior — let alone what is unusual and how unusual that Cycle 23 or 24 might be. Outside of the direct observations of the predecessor 23 cycles the rest is anecdotal or proxy data with insufficient time resolution to enable reliable time series analysis.
When we are given the task of doing signal processing on a time series data set — the first thing we like to is what is the “signal bandwidth” so that we can decide on the size of the appropriate sample and the type of window which should be applied in order to extract a reliable principle period (or frequency). Only, then can we start to analyze the power spectrum and how stationary the spectrum is or how it evolves with time and the relevant statistics related to principle frequencies, etc.
Unfortunately, we have only have 23 “cycles” since the rules for collecting the data were codified by Wolfe. Also unfortunately, these “cycles” are all different enough in shape (some feature a sharp rise, some are nearly symmetrical, some rarely feature double peaks, etc.), that even the canonical 11 +/- 2 years is just a crude guess for an average period and an even cruder measure of variance.
After all of the spectral shape-related debate — then we need to talk about how the currency which we use for accounting (i.e. the “Sunspot Number”) has changed — is a 54 in 2009 the same as a 54 in 1856 or 1798? — let alone what Galileo or Heavalius might have reported in the 17th century? — we just really don’t know
Looking at the best data which we can look at — we are limited to about 4 cycles where the comparison can be made with some degree of fidelity and where we have a good supply of high-quality space-based data to correlate with our larger supply of less reliable ground-based data.
So — I would just say at this point (somewhat poetically) — “the sun seems to be resting is in the arms of Morpheus and Hypnos” — let’s just hope for our sake that its not the prelude to a longer and deeper rest with Thanatos
It’s amazing how climate change even affects the sun!
The “Awe Heck There Goes Our Grant Funds” Minimum
Way back in this thread, someone asked if the speck (1015) was SC 23 or SC 24. Spaceweather (see http://www.spaceweather.com/ ) tagged it as 24, based on magnetic polarity. The specks on the magnetogram
( http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html ) were even tinier than the visible seck, so I guess I’ll have to take their word for it.
Nahle’s Minimum sounds well… doesn’t it? No, I’m joking. Svalgaard’s Minimum or Watt’s Minimum, one of these two names would be ok.
Jeremy (16:37:33) :
The Mote in Gore’s Eye
Brilliant, but you know, the original was actually good science-fiction. Not to much handwavium (waving at physics, saying “get lost”) and loads of unobtanium (we can’t do that).