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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Posted on 05/08 at 07:18 PM
>>If indeed we are heading towards a Maunder
>>type minimum, the die off of humans will be severe.
Why? We survived the Maunder Minimum in good shape, ready for the coming Enlightenment Era. Why will our age be any different?
D Archibald Totally agree.. Sun has no effect whatsoever on climate…However L Svaalgard seems to be coming round.. by default LOL
John Finn UK Met office not a credible source me thinks due to its offficial AGW commitment… LOL.. anymore anyway.. used to be a very professional body about 20 years ago
Ralph
Wouldn’t it be survival of the richest?
>>In my experience, a rising column of air is doing to
>>form a cloud with 100 percent certainty
Not necessarily so, you can have a super-saturated body of water vapour that does not condense out – and ionisation most certainly assists condensation.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007JChPh.126c4701C
Yes water vapour will generally condense in the ‘violence’ of a cumulus cloud, but I don’t think that this is what we are talking about here. The idea is that humid layers in the high stratosphere are more likely to saturate given the ionisation of cosmic rays. Thus we will have more high altostratus, cirrostratus and mare’s tails in the high atmosphere that will reflect the Sun’s radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrostratus_cloud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altostratus_cloud
.
I think the INCONVENIENT MINIMUM!
My research in the mid 90’s showed that this upcoming minimum will be slightly stronger than the Dalton, as it was to Maunder and so on. And this rising pattern of the 180-200 year double Gleisberg Cycles will continue up until around 2500 AD. Then they start to decline in numerical value.
And I continue to like what I am seeing space weather wise in regards to my forecast for a June 2009 increase. Which is supposed to be the highest level of activity since March 2008.
ralph ellis (04:38:57) :
>>If indeed we are heading towards a Maunder
>>type minimum, the die off of humans will be severe.
Why? We survived the Maunder Minimum in good shape, ready for the coming Enlightenment Era. Why will our age be any different?
***************************
What worries me Ralph is that the scoundrels and imbeciles of the global warming cult are driving society in the wrong direction, and wasting trillions of dollars in scarce resources to fight their favorite fantasy – global warming.
If this foolish and destructive direction is not reversed soon, I fear that humanity will suffer greatly.
We are completely unprepared if severe global cooling happens.
We are absolutely seeing and counting spots today that would not have been seen or counted 350 years ago. Apples to apples, we appear to be Maundering.
What did Landechidt predict again? A Maunder or Dalton-type minimum?
Commenting on…
David Archibald
This is a plot of three year windows on the Maunder and Dalton Minimum and the current minimum
David,
It might make your comparison even more compelling if you plotted a couple of typical (recent and historical) solar minima on the chart of the Maunder, Dalton and Modern minima.
The major reason will be starvation. Under a Maunder Minimum, there will be significant reduction in growing season in the northern latitudes. Countries such as Canada that are major food exporters would become food importers. There won’t be enough food to feed the masses.
“The dearth of faculae at present is somewhat remarkable.”
Good info, thanks.
ralph ellis 04:38:57
An excellent question. I agree with Richard de Sousa that we face a holocaustic die-off of humans if the cooling is dramatic and lengthy. The primary reason will be widespread crop failures, followed by plagues and wars. A mere 5% die-off of the human race is 350 million people. The first world societies cannot be completely insulated from the consequences of such a catastrophe.
Also, society is much more highly structured today than in the past. Consequences of cooling are all pretty speculative at this point except for crop failures, and of course, will depend on the magnitude and length of the cooling. We are an adaptable species, however, and may do better than I expect.
Leif 01:36:06
Sorry to bore you but I’d like you to go through something from another thread, again. In one thread I speculated that if the sunspots go away, and if there aren’t any other changes in the known manifestations of the solar dynamic, then any global cooling, barring volcanoes or anthropogenic albedo change, might be attributable to the lack of spots or some unknown manifestation of the sun. Your answer didn’t make any sense to me
==================================
John Finn (04:26:11) :
So I’ll ask again. Is there any evidence that temperatures during the Dalton minimum (1790-1820) were significantly lower than the 19th century average.
See Minard’s diagram of Napoleons March on Moscow in 1812
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
“Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales.”
High-res diagram with temperatures & dates at bottom
http://mingo.info-science.uiowa.edu/courses/org_info_1/readings/chapter_1/NapoleonsMarch1.gif
There are two things that might or might not be connected, the cold, and the heat minima.
Once more one should emphasize that the game of correlating highs and lows in sun data sequences is thankless if there is not an underlying physical connection with the climate on earth.
It may be that there is a connection not discovered yet. In my opinion it would be something that changes albedo, like the proposed cosmic ray connection . I think we will have to wait through, to see if it is really a very low low we are living through , and if the cool persists even when the PDO flips to warm. Patience, this is a one off experiment and it takes a long time to develop.
I wouldn’t put too much stock in a comparison like this. Comparisons of just three minimal onsets seems rather anecdotal. It would be nice if we had a few hundred over a few million years, but we don’t.
This is almost the same trap climate modelers get into when testing their models. They test them over past climate cycles (even using relatively reliable, recent data), adjust them, tweak them and add additional factors until they track the actual observations. Then, they assume they are reliable predictors of the future. And they wonder why they continually diverge from actual observations year after year.
No two cycles of any system containing chaotic factors are the same.
Gotta…get…that…greenhouse…finished…
correction to my anna v (05:48:12)
The two things of course are the cold and the sun minima, not heat minima.
I wonder whether the faculty we all have of being able to read if the first and last letters are correct even though the insides are scrambled works in this case too!
In answer to the question by John Finn–” Is there any evidence that temperatures during the Dalton minimum (1790-1820) were significantly lower than the 19th century average ” is yes, we have a very good record of lower temperatures during both the Dalton and the Maunder in the glacial record, both in terms of the downvalley extent of alpine glaciers and in the isotope record of the Greenland ice cores.
Don Easterbrook
ralph ellis (04:38:57) :
But things happen so much faster now. The new enlightenment is already here. I read it in Science Magazine, so it must be right.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/323/5921/1538
John Finn (04:26:11) :
…
So I’ll ask again. Is there any evidence that temperatures during the Dalton minimum (1790-1820) were significantly lower than the 19th century average. Here’s the CET record for starters …
Look at the graph you provided a link to. Think about what you’re seeing.
BTW, thanks for providing some evidence to disprove your own assertion.
Ralph Ellis:
There was a lot of blood, crop failures, revolution, disease and other weather induced phenomenon leading up to and during the enlightenment. The end result was good for mankind overall. As for the individuals living during that period.. not so much.
I think we have to be careful about applying apocalyptic scenarios to reduced solar output. The world today is much different from even that of the 1930’s. Consider: In the ’30’s we saw pictures of hungry babies clutching to forlorn women. My enduring vision of this recession will be my trip a few weeks ago from downtown Houston to the airport there, stuck in traffic, fuming that I would miss my plane. That’s my takeaway from the recession described as ‘the worst since the Great Depression’.
I appreciate the contributions of learned and articulate contributors here at WUWT. I hope we don’t lose participation because the discussions turn personal. As to what will happen, let’s prepare to thrive in the inevitable change, whatever that may be. Shouldn’t large scale policy choices be focused on that?