Guest Post by David Archibald
This is a plot of three year windows on the Maunder and Dalton Minimum and the current minimum:
What it is showing is how the start of the current minimum compares with the starts of the Maunder and Dalton Minima. The solar cycle minimum at the start of the Dalton was a lot more active than the current one. If you consider that very small spots are being counted now, the activities are very similar. This is how they look without the Dalton:
If you consider the [current sunspot] counting problem, they are actually a pretty good match.
David Archibald
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John, I thought the Archibald paper was good because it was informative and data based. I am not qualified to comment on the science behind it.
Adolfo, agreed.
Ron, I’m not a scientist, but being a skeptic has helped me in my approach to global warming, so I would be skeptical on the downside risks of cooling also. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be watching and prepare. My example may be simplistic, but I can’t see why you wouldn’t be able to replace grapes for potatoes, even with a 6C temperature drop, I know how to grow both. My point was that there is a substantial amount of land available that could be planted if prices rose. Thanks for the thoughtful interaction.
I don’t think critically assessing AGW theory and proposing alternative hypotheses are mutually exclusive, but it would be nice to see some discussion of neglected (?) papers like the one Gilbert cites, which seems to have smartly deflated the CO2-filled balloon.
It looks to be maybe 10 years old. Does it stand up today? Might be worth a separate post.
/Mr Lynn
evanmjones (07:08:55) :
I so enjoyed your verse, I couldn’t help but add a bit. I hope you’re not offended.
(To tune “A modern major general”, Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert and Sullivan).
It is the very model of a modern Maunder minimum
(I wanted to be plainer but I couldn’t find a synonym)
And thanks to modern media it’s not believed by anyone
The sun has done a bunk and we will freeze for a millennium
and all the fossil fuels that we’ve been burning to keep warming us
they haven’t cooked the planet like the IPCC’s been warning us
the temperature’s not rising but our greenhouse gas emissions is….
… Perhaps it’s time to stop and re-examine the hypothesis.
The models are misleading us, and that’s becoming very clear
the hotspot has gone missing from the middle of the troposphere
the poles that should be melting seem to each contain a lot of ice…
… and yet we’re getting ‘cap and trade’ regardless of the global price.
So isn’t this a smoking gun?
There should be spots, but there are none.
It is the very model of a modern Maunder minimum.
(chorus)
And so I’ll see you later;
I am off for the equator
For this is the very model of a modern Major-minimum
Anthony,
I had to post here to be in line with the topic.
There are now appearing a couple SC24 magnetic areas on the Sun. Funny thing is they are not strong enough to blacken the Sun surface to appear as spots. This is a very interesting phenomenom in that Livingstoon & Penn have forecasted the disappearance of spots all together. This area rotates into view just a few days after you post Archibald’s graphs. The event we are seeing now may be exactly what happened during the Maunder and may explain why few spots were counted during this time.
Since there are so many new viewers to your blog you may consider a post relative to L&P and this spotless spot on the Sun we now see with the magnetogram.
Thanks for hard work.
Doug (16:07:58) :
“Ron, I’m not a scientist, but being a skeptic has helped me in my approach to global warming, so I would be skeptical on the downside risks of cooling also. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be watching and prepare. My example may be simplistic, but I can’t see why you wouldn’t be able to replace grapes for potatoes, even with a 6C temperature drop, I know how to grow both. My point was that there is a substantial amount of land available that could be planted if prices rose. Thanks for the thoughtful interaction.”
OK Doug, I understand.
It’s the same in Europe.
Farmers get paid for not using their land.
Everything is politicized now.
DaveH (06:16:53) :
evanmjones (07:08:55) :
Bravo! W. S. Gilbert would be proud!
/Mr Lynn
LOVE the G&S ! It’s been too long since I saw Pirates…
ralph ellis (08:11:21) : Of these, I think that food production will be the greatest problem. We are highly dependent on higher latitude crops, rather than the efforts of African and South American farmers
Um, I think you will find substantially the same major crops grown in Brazil as the USA for global trading. Soybeans, corn, wheat (though more in Argentina), Heck, the USA even grows sugarcane in Florida and Hawaii… It’s not a latitude specialized crop thing that’s the problem. Now the SURFACE AREA in Canada and Argentina that might get shut down… that’s a problem.
Especially drought issues, but exacerbated by The Ministry of Stupidity:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/argentine-drought-crop-failure/
pyromancer76 (13:04:12) : 835 was higher. And its IVI (Ice Core Volcanic Index) is greater than all others. Climate and weather sure are complex. Makes one want to look very seriously at E.M. Smith’s advice at chiefio.com on food storage.
Thanks! But I think you meant chiefio.WORDPRESS.com :
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/food-storage-systems/
FWIW, there is about a 10:1 ratio of probability of reason for use in the following list. It’s roughly what I’ve experienced (the first few) and expect to be rare (the last few). So about 1 / week I use stored stuff because I’m too lazy to go the the store. After that, I’d put it as:
Lazy – 1/week
store closed (night / holiday bad planning on my part) – 1/month or 3.
feeling cheep – save money, want new toy. (about once / year or 2)
economic “issue” (job loss, or just more month than check – about once in every 5 to 10 years)
rock from space (small weather changer: 50 to 100 years estimate)
climate collapse (that I’d guess is about 1 in 1000 year event)
BIG SPACE ROCK! 10,000 years, but food won’t be the issue …
So while I’m all for food storage systems, the climate catastrophe reason is at the end of my list of probabilities for need…
Mark Hugoson (13:39:06) : It does give one pause about the current “fetish” with peer review.
Sadly, yes it does. But one can hope that the internet has provided a countervailing power to the ingrown process that “peer” review has become.
Jim Papsdorf (06:59:43) : Does anyone think this is a good time to buy Bordeaux futures ?
I do, but every time I’ve added a case to my “food storage system” it’s suddenly a week later, the wine is gone, and I’ve got a headache 😉
Gilbert (07:56:34) : all that has been apparent ever since the New Left found out that a minnow could be used to block industrial development.
And now, food production, with a major chunk of Kern County and some other parts of the Central Valley of California shut down for the “Delta Smelt”. Yup, “fish bait” (or “bait fish”) have caused water to be shut off completely this year to a very significant part of where you get your food from. Orchards, (even export crops…), salad greens, you name it. Dustbowl courtesy of The Ministry of Stupidity… Pumps shutdown while folks count minnows… and the crops die…
Adolfo Giurfa (09:37:21) : Why is it so that a http://www.madscience.org/ AD has appeared on top of this David Archibald´s post?? What is it happening?
The ads are selected based on the key words in the article TITLE as near as I can tell… So to test this I still think Anthony needs an article on antarctic map color bias titled “Halle Barry Hot Antarctic Images” … 😉
crosspatch (16:49:43) : As far as I know, no government on the planet has a plan on the shelf waiting to be enacted should something like a major volcano erupt that will impact a growing season.
Russia has an ongoing very good program to provide stocked facilities underground for emergencies (i.e. nuclear attack) and the elite will do OK. Switzerland has whole cities underground, and stocked. Not exactly a growing plan, but if they are focused on preparation in one area …
Ron de Haan (06:07:29) : It not a matter of replacing grapes with potatoes. We will lose a whole stretch of land in the North and the South as low temperatures make it impossible to plant crops.
Well, it’s both better and worse than that 8-0
We won’t have the 2 or 3 years it takes to produce all those “seed potatoes” you want to plant. We only have a few months of food, at most. So you have to plant the seeds you have; and they are not cold biased seeds.
This is why I have kale, peas, favas, radishes, spinach, etc. in my seed freezer…
But we eat, globally, one heck of a lot of meat. In a real food crisis, we’ll eat the cows and pigs AND the grain that we would have fed to them. It’s a 3:1 up to 10:1 ratio of feed : animal weight, so every pound of cow we don’t feed (and instead eat) means we have 10 lbs of corn and soybean too! You can live 10 days on 10 lbs of dry grains… so for each lb of hamburger we don’t eat, you get 10 days of food. That’s a lot of food…
You may not LIKE eating home made tofu and corn grits, but you’ll survive…
A colder climate in general will reduce agricultural output by 30%.
And since most of the corn and soybeans we grow are for animal feed, we can absorb that easily via reduced meat consumption.
crop loss due to extreme weather events.[…] like droughts,
The biggie is drought. Cold we can adjust to. Different varieties or slightly less yield. Planting barley a bit more south, and then shifting everything else a bit more south… But a ’30s style drought is not going to work well…
Doug (16:07:58) : My example may be simplistic, but I can’t see why you wouldn’t be able to replace grapes for potatoes, even with a 6C temperature drop, I know how to grow both.
Knowing how and having 100,000 acres worth of seeds available from the seed vendor for commercial sale are two very different things. Seed crops are on a several year cycle. Foundation seed is grown out one season to make the seed crop. THAT crop is grown out for a season (or two! depending on quantity needed!) to make the commercial seeds that are sold the following year. You don’t just suddenly have 20% more seed potatoes because you want them this year …
If you have 5 years, yeah, doable to adjust. 5 months? Nope. 2 years? Partial at best (and folks won’t notice what’s going on for a year or 2 anyway… so the lag is potentially quite long).
The only really good news here is that each crop can just shift south a couple of hundred miles per year (once it’s realized that you need to do it!) so Canadian barley and rape seed shift to Nebraska. Nebraska corn and soy to Mississippi. Florida sugar cane to Brazil 😉 So it’s really just at the marginal couple of hundred miles where you need a bunch of new seed; but the rest still needs to shift markets and that isn’t as clean as you might like.
A Sorghum farmer in Texas may know how to grow corn too, but maybe not so much rape seed or barley. AND is likely to be resistant to suddenly growing a whole new crop without ‘trialing’ it first in a small field.
The whole question just comes down to “rate of change”. 1 year? Toast. 10 years? Cakewalk. 2 to 3 years? Hard times. 7-9 years? Interesting weather with some small challenges. 4-6 years? A bit of a dice roll…
But the big killer is drought. IFF you don’t know it’s going to be different, you won’t be planting things like millet and sorghum that are drought tolerant. You just plant corn and wheat and expect the rains… and the crops fail. And you do it again next season… And exactly when do you give up?… When do you place the order for millet seed?
So it’s is something that we can handle… unless it happens “suddenly”. That’s what the food storage system is for, to get you past the “suddenly” part. I can have radishes up in 25 days any time of the year and some kind of bean / pea / lentil / favas / tepary beans anywhere from 6 weeks to 8 weeks after that. Green bean LEAVES are edible in an emergency… Spinach is cold tolerant and Orach is drought tolerant and both have nutritional FAST greens (related to each other!). Kale grows in light snow, cabbage in cool, and collards in summer warmth – all ‘cabbage family’ plants. A nice example of how to adjust. BUT you have to get through that first 3 to 6 months AND you must have the seeds in your freezer…
Now I fully expect that it will barely get colder enough to prove it in the record (with lots of analysis), and it will be like 1977 on temps (i.e. not crop threatening). But I’m prepared for much worse and hope the preparations will only be used to avoid putting on slippers to run get milk. (Canned milk works fine in tea, baking, packed meal prep, etc. Certainly enough to tell family THEY can go buy milk or I’m using the canned stuff 😉
On stocking for food: Greece has passed through a lot of wars and dictatorships, and each triggers the hoarding instinct. The last dictatorship in 1967 had people falling on the shops and supermarkets like locusts, buying everythin. In front of me was a gentleman who found nothing on the shelfs except vinegar and salt, he stocked on it, 7 bottles of vinegar and seven packets of salt!!
I also have that mentality since then, so my larder and freezer always have a rotating month’s stock and I would probably survive for six months on flour spaghetti tomatoe sauce and olive oil. Is six months long enough for potatoes to grow?
what worries me about a Maunder, is “Be Afraid, Be very Afraid” comment, whats it going to be like, if its cold
its likley Western Europe has not enough power to keep warm
In the Uk power outages have been predicted for even a slightly cold winter, due to non investment in electric power station..combine that with a demand for LPG worldwide then…. ice on power line, electric grid collapse transport system in chaos, supermarkets out of stock of food
so what could i do….opening up my auxillary fireplaces to burn wood and coal, buy a small generator to maintain the gas heating circulation pump when the grid is out, install a wind turbine, insualte the house with 300mm of insualtion..and stockpile rice andv pasta….use the 50 war time glass preseving jars in the loft to preseve glut in summer food..anything else
It looks like our last sunspot cycle was quite typical until mid-2007. To date, the current deep solar minimum resembles those of 1811, 1823, and 1856. In 1859, the most intense solar storm ever observed took place. It is feared that a similar storm today might destroy all unprotected electronic devices and our global power grid for years to come. It is estimated that these storms occur, on average, about every 500 years.