WUWT Poll: What should we call the current solar minimum?

Solar state: cue ball quiet

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.

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Ray
April 23, 2009 11:56 am

In a world where up is down, left is right and warming causes cooling, I think “The Bizzaro Minimum” is more appropriate.

SteveSadlov
April 23, 2009 12:14 pm

The “Age of Migrations” is a euphemism for “The Dark Age.” 🙂

Allan M R MacRae
April 23, 2009 12:19 pm

Ken (07:18:16) :
Name for the Minimum (Other): The Fairbridge/Shirley Minimum
REASON: They predicted it in 1987, based on objective analysis, via their paper, “Prolonged Minima and the 179-Yr Cycle of the Solar Inertial Motion.”
After all, isn’t it the actual discoverers of a thing that get the name…or…get to name it?
**************
Good point Ken!
I vote for Fairbridge.
One other good reason – Rhodes was a Queen’s man.
Believe it or not, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario did not know that Rhodes did his undergrad there.
When I mentioned Rhodes’ connection to Queens, Alumni Affairs first suggested I was mistaken. Imagine their delight when, upon further investigation, they found that I was correct.
A recent article in the alumni paper corrected this oversight.
Rhodes Fairbridge is now recognized as one of Queen’s most illustrious alumni.
Oilthigh! (Secret cult language, dedicated to Leif)
8^)

Ray
April 23, 2009 12:29 pm

About that picosunspot… it seems it is the wrong polarity and could be a SC23… or SC25?

Garacka
April 23, 2009 12:43 pm

Sol’s Revengimum

Linda B.
April 23, 2009 12:59 pm

Dang! Hit the wrong button.
The Oh Scheidt Minimum. (apologies if this one has already been proposed).
On a more serious note:
1. The Eddy Minimum
2. The Landscheidt Minimum (b/c as I understood Eddy to have inferred, it is not always the discoverer who gets the credit. It oftentimes, and rightfully so, goes to the person who is responsible for shining the light of day on that discovery).
3. The Jose Minimum

Ray
April 23, 2009 1:04 pm

[snip]
(p.s. my appologies to all women reading this blog)

A Lovell
April 23, 2009 1:06 pm

How about the Ad Ho Minimum?
[REPLY – Har! Har! ~ Evan]

John Cooper
April 23, 2009 1:17 pm

Coming late to the thread, but when I read the title, the first thing that immediately popped into my head was “Gore Minimum”. LOL!

Robert Wood
April 23, 2009 1:17 pm

Pearland Aggie 10:21:15
I saw that on the magnetogram earlier today but nothinmg optical. Perhaps it is; but is it 24 or 23?

April 23, 2009 1:30 pm

Since this is ‘fun stuff’, just a heads-up: tomorrow is World Penguin Day. Followed by Hug an Australian Day. click
And on April 30th, Al Gore’s head explodes.

Ray
April 23, 2009 1:40 pm

Robert Wood (13:17:31) :
Look closer, close to the equater, on the left, between 9 and 10 o’clock. That little pico spot corresponds to something on the magnetogram. It’s not what could be a burnt pixel.

Ron de Haan
April 23, 2009 1:43 pm

A Russian Scientist, Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of the Space Research Lab at the Pulkovo Observatory believes this Solar Minimum will last much longer!
If he is right, shall we name it after him? I think not, who in the world would be able to pronounce his name, let alone write it down!
This article appears in the April 17, 2009 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
GOODBYE, GLOBAL WARMING
Deepest Solar Minimum in Nearly a Century
by Gregory Murphy and Laurence Hecht
The authors are editors of 21st Century Science & Technology magazine.
[PDF version of this article]
April 9, 2009—A continued low in solar activity, as measured by the appearance of irregularities on the Sun’s surface known as sunspots, may be responsible for the recent phase of cooling experienced in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere. In the opinion of many specialists, the downturn in solar activity likely marks the beginning of a prolonged cooling period.
The expected cooling will produce many hardships for a human population already stressed by a prolonged downturn in global physical-economic productive capability. But the bright side may be that such bloated windbags as Al Gore and his leaner companion James Hansen, who have led Royal Consort Prince Philip’s genocidal global warming promotion, will finally be silenced.
For students of the Sun, the length of the solar cycle, which lasts an average of 11 years but may go longer or shorter, has proven the best historical indicator of short-term climate. At the ends of these solar cycles, sunspot activity first declines, and then picks up markedly, indicating the beginning of a new cycle. The precise relationship between the sunspots, which are thought to be determined by magnetic activity within the Sun, and the energy output of the Sun, is not known. However, long-term studies of the historical record have shown that when the minima in sunspot activity extend beyond the average 11 years, significant declines in temperatures on Earth are experienced. Regular records of sunspot activity go back to the 17th Century.
The current solar cycle, numbered 23, began in 1996, and was expected to reach minimum and transition to solar cycle 24 in January 2007.
It did not. Instead, a prolonged period of excessively low solar activity has continued to this moment. In 2008, there were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year’s 366 days (73%). “To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913,” NASA reported in a press release. Since the beginning of the current year, sunspot counts have dropped even lower: As of April 9, there were no sunspots on 89 of the year’s 99 days (90%).
The Schwabe Cycle
The approximately 11-year, or Schwabe cycle, was discovered in the mid-1800s by Heinrich Schwabe, a German astronomer and collaborator of Alexander von Humboldt. Schwabe saw that peaks of solar activity were always followed by valleys of relative calm—a pattern that has held true for more than 200 years. The association between longer solar cycles and cooler climate was first demonstrated in 1991 by two Danish researchers, Egil Friis-Christensen, the director of the Danish Space Center, and Knud Lassen, a solar scientist at the Center, in a paper published in Science.
Other researchers, including the Australian geologist David Archibald, have confirmed this relationship, and have also found that for every one-year increase in solar cycle length, there is a 0.5° Celsius decline in surface air temperature during the following cycle. Archibald points out that the end of the current solar minimum associated with solar cycle 23 could occur in July 2009, but may continue until January 2010, which agrees with NASA’s latest estimate. This means that solar cycle 23 will be 13 years in length and, using the relationship that Archibald found, there would likely be a 1.0-1.5°C (1.8-2.7°F) decline in temperature over the next solar cycle. This possible temperature decrease may not sound like much, but it is twice as large as the 0.6°C increase in average global temperature during the 20th Century. (That small average warming trend was already eliminated by the cooling that occurred in the decade after 1998.)
During the last Little Ice Age, which lasted from the 14th to the 19th centuries, a period of prolonged cold known as the Dalton Minimum (1796-1824), began with a solar cycle that lasted for 13.6 years. That solar cycle, numbered 4, was then followed by two very inactive solar cycles. During this time period, there were reports of wide-scale crop failures and food shortages. If similar conditions occur after this present, ongoing, deep solar minimum, and there is a large drop in temperature due to an inactive Sun, the world could see further stress on the food supply. Areas that had become available for growing food during the recent short period of warming, may become too cold again to grow food over the next two cycles.
The Russian Forecasts
The continued solar inactivity is consistent with forecasts from Russia’s Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg, over more than a year. On Jan. 22, 2008 senior scientist Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of the Space Research Lab at the Pulkovo Observatory, said in an interview with RIA Novosti that, “temperatures on Earth have stabilized in the past decade, and the planet should brace itself for a new Ice Age rather than global warming.”
Abdusamatov warned correctly, at the beginning of 2008, that global temperatures would drop slightly that year, rather than rise, due to unprecedentedly low solar radiation in the past 30 years, and would continue decreasing, even if industrial emissions of carbon dioxide reach record levels. According to Abdusamatov’s 2008 forecast, “By 2041, solar activity will reach its minimum according to a 200-year cycle, and a deep cooling period will hit the Earth approximately in 2055-60. It will last for about 45-65 years and by mid-21st Century, the planet will face another Little Ice Age.”
Belittling the global warming scare, Abdusamatov pointed out, “According to scientists, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has risen more than 4% in the past decade—but global warming has practically stopped. Had global temperatures directly responded to concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they would have risen by at least 0.1°C in the past ten years—however, it never happened.”
Over a century of climatological studies has demonstrated that longer-term climate is driven by changes in the Earth’s orbital relationship to the Sun. Over the past 2 million years, cycles in orbital parameters lasting 20,000, 40,000, and 100,000 years have combined to produce glaciations lasting from 100,000 to 200,000 years over the Northern Hemisphere. The last glacial advance, which ended approximately 12,000 years ago, covered North America, down to the latitude of New York and Chicago, with a blanket of ice estimated to be 1 to 2 miles thick.
The present Earth-Sun orbital relationship is such that the onset of a new glaciation is to be expected at any time soon. The Earth, indeed, has been in a prolonged cooling since the Holocene climatic optimum of 3000 B.C. A descent into a new Little Ice Age, triggered by such short-term variations in sunspot activity as are reported here, is thus a scientific likelihood. For a variety of reasons, the increase in carbon dioxide from human industrial activity has not been able to change the direction of climate dictated by the Sun’s output of energy. Carbon dioxide has been much exaggerated as a greenhouse gas. It is not out of the question that the coming Little Ice Age will mark the beginning of a prolonged period of continental glaciation such as the Earth experienced for the 100,000 years prior to the beginning of our current interglacial, about 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.
The immediate possibility of cooling over the next two decades is going to add more challenges in the face of the onrushing global economic crisis. But it is also in times of crisis, that mankind’s gift of creativity is of the greatest importance. When mankind uses its creativity, there is no problem or challenge so great that it cannot be solved.
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2009/sci-techs/3615solar_min.html

gary gulrud
April 23, 2009 1:43 pm

Adolfo, how do you do Greek script? It should come in handy nearing the end.

Mike Bryant
April 23, 2009 1:45 pm

Since Islam is the fasting growing religion, and since muminim is the transliteration of the word believer in Arabic,
Maybe The Muminim Minimum…
actually only picked because I like palindromes… Feel free to delete if you wish…

April 23, 2009 1:47 pm

Muminim Minimum. Let’s hear you say that three times, fast.

Randy
April 23, 2009 1:51 pm

Simple. The “AGW Minimum”.

Robert Wood
April 23, 2009 1:52 pm

Ray, my Q is whether it is a 23 or 24? In fiorget which way the S/N have to be for a 23 (N is leading) but it is right on the equator

Editor
April 23, 2009 1:52 pm

The Politically Incorrect Minimum. If you order now we’ll include for free a Gulag Archipelago Climate.

Ray
April 23, 2009 1:53 pm

The Dynamic-Duo Minimum (i.e. Gore-Hansen)

Mike Bryant
April 23, 2009 2:03 pm

I Lucy Skywalker suggested The Untaxable Minimum… I like that or The We Didn’t Do It Minimum or The Don’t Blame Us Minimum or The Devil Made Me Do It Minimum or The There’s Plenty of Blame To Go Around Minimum…
Or from the AGW contingent The We Know Man Is Responsible And A Study Will Prove it Soon Minimum… or The CO2 Negative Correlation Connection Minimum…

Mike Bryant
April 23, 2009 2:06 pm

Or we could name it after Smokey and call it The Hammer Minimum…

Shane
April 23, 2009 2:09 pm

I like the ad ho minimum
Shane

Rog
April 23, 2009 2:13 pm

Come on….it’s obvious that the sun is dimmer because of CO2 and global scamming. That’s why it is such a disaster. Next thing you know, the galaxy will stop spinning because of “man-made” global warming.

Editor
April 23, 2009 3:33 pm

http://astronomynow.com/090422sun.html
Lockwood is continuing to play the Wizard of Oz card.