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
I’ve asked this on other posts. I hope someone can give some kind of answer. Do we have reliable time temperature data for parts of Mars, the moon?…. If so, a comparison would be most instructive. I see all the efforts assessing calorimetry factors of the oceans, satellite temp measures of sea surface and ground and troposphere and stratosphere, drilling holes in trees and kilometres of ice, albedo effect measurements and estimates.
The billions spent on research, data gathering, data fiddling – scientific conclusions that can’t seem to be trusted, or at least can’t seem to resolve the questions to any satisfactory degree, could and should be spent on an array of temperature guages on the moon and on Mars if the climate question is so important. We would comparatively cheaply answer the question: ” Is the sun’s behaviour a significant driver of climate?”
vg (04:53:05) :
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
Are you saying they’ve fiddled the 19th century temperatures to show that the DM wasn’t particularly cold? Ok – find some other data which shows the cold Dalton Minimum.
Jim Hughes (07:58:10) : “The developing El Nino…”
Good post. We need to remember, though, that an El Nino is a heat shedding mechanism, not a source of heat. Heat is lost from the size 1200 heat sink and sits in the atmosphere, the size 1 sink, only for a while.
evanmjones (07:08:55) : “It is the very model of a modern Maunder minimum…”
Catchy tune, LOL. I hope it’s still funny in 10 years.
John M (06:54:34) : “…The new enlightenment is already here. I read it in Science Magazine, so it must be right…”
John, that’s even funnier than evan’s song!
Has anyone been monitoring the temperatures at Thule, GL? The temps have barely gotten above 20F and projected to be in the teens this week, With a short Summer season and the amount of ice expansion this winter, ice melt may be at a minimum.
kim (05:35:07) :
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 …
Perhaps the problem lies in ‘go away’. If the magnetic field of the spot is 1510 Gauss the spot is visible and all the ‘other manifestations’ have a certain set of values. If the magnetic field is 1490 Gauss, all the ‘other manifestations’ have a certain set of values that are just slightly smaller [or for your hypothetical case not even smaller] than for the 1510 Gauss case, but the sunspot is no longer visible [has ‘gone away’]. What you are assuming is that if all the ‘other manifestations’ [which the heliosphere and the Earth are reacting to] are the same and the only thing that has changed is the contrast of the spot in white light [controlling whether we humans can actually ‘see’ the spot] then that change in contrast is driving the Earth’s climate [if I understand your question]. We may note that even if the spot is invisible in white [or actually ‘green’ light where most the emission takes place] it is still visible in other wavelengths [e.g. in ‘yellow’ light]. you can see this clearly in the images from Mt. Wilson: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/intro.html
Look at the plage just arrived on the East limb. The magnetic field there is under 1500 Gauss, so on the 5250 image [in the green] you see a brightening, but on the 5896 image [in the yellow] you see a darkening. So, the plages would look like a spot in yellow light, but there would be no spot [rather a brightening, so spot has ‘gone away’] in green light. And you are saying that that drives the climate? even if all other properties of the active region remained the same.
Alex says:
You know, it is funny, but a little thought reveals a few interesting things. For example, the power supply in my amplifier ultimately controls the volume at the speakers, but then again, there is a knob on the front of the amplifier that allows me to adjust the level, so who really controls the volume?
If the Earth’s climate system is as sensitive as many people claim to the teeny-weeny fluctuations in TSI I suspect we would not be here. A system with the hundreds of millions to billions of years of stability the system has shown does not react the way some people suggest it does.
The degradation of the English language as spoken in one of the former colonies is to be deplored. What did he pass? Wind? Oh, you mean passed away. I tend to have a problem with the incorrect use of adverbs as well.
It is interesting that much scientific progress seems to be made when the old guard passes away.
Here is a 4 May comment on NSIDC Web site: “Arctic sea ice extent declined quite slowly in April; as a result, total ice extent is now close to the mean extent for the reference period (1979 to 2000). The thin spring ice cover nevertheless remains vulnerable to summer melt.”
Here is the 6 May graphics: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
It is clear that the 2009 line is moving ever so slowly closer to the 1979-2000 average. If the ice is really so thin as they infer why is it so slow to thaw? Just a question from a layman.
With the coming El Nino-with a cool pacific,-is there any indication of the involvement of increased South Pacific (i.e.Indonesia) Volcanic activity being a factor? Possibly undersea volcanic activity? Something that has been mulling around my head for years….
BTW I predict this is not going to be a very large Nino….
But I’m not a Scientist-just a speculator with a little,possibly
dangerous knowlege :-)..
Where? And I mean specifically the Dalton minimum. I’ve seen lots of evidence for generally lower temperatures in the 17th and 19th centuries but nothing that suggests the 1790-1820 period was particularly unusual.
Thanks, Walt, but 1779 was a bit before the Dalton Minimum and if my memory serves me correct (I will check), solar activity was pretty high in 1779.
Come off it, Basil, your link just shows the temperatures from the DM. It doesn’t provide a comparison with other periods. There’s a much longer record from the same site here:
http://www.kolumbus.fi/tilmari/gwuppsala.htm
The DM looks pretty average. In fact, temperatures appear to drop after the Dalton minimum. There’s quite definitely a cooling trend from ~1820 to the 1860s. Not a good example.
Why? I’m referring specifically to the Dalton Minimum. A period between 1790 and 1820 – though I’m not sure why it starts as early as 1790 since the first of the ‘weak’ Dalton cycles didn’t start until 1798.
I am still amazed at how few here focus on what our own highly variable atmosphere is capable of producing regarding long term trends. Here we sit on a globe that has far greater potential in terms of mechanisms for global cooling and warming that are completely natural, cyclic, solidly based in physics, and defendable. Yet we continue to focus on the minutia of “unknown” solar and barycenter mechanisms just waiting to be discovered and explained. It is the age old argument between “the first encountered pathology” and “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” found in medical dialogue.
Which brings me to a current train of thought regarding colder air but lots more snow and water equivalent in the mountains here in NE Oregon. Where is this moisture coming from if colder air means dryer air? I am following the trail of water vapor that is coming over us to see where it is sourced. It seems that the warm surface water that is being blown into the east part of the Pacific kicks out moisture into the atmosphere over the ocean and then swirls back towards the northern west coast in globby swirling bands which is loading the atmosphere with enough moisture to fall as wet snow as it is picked up by the jet stream. My hunch is that this will continue until the warmed concentrated waters packed against the eastern part of the Pacific have mixed with cold lower layers or expanded their heat. Eventually this source of moisture will dry up and we will start to experience cold without snow. My hunch is that this persistent very dry cold air will result in less summer melt of Arctic ice leading to an ice advance that eventually goes past the average extent.
I follow the trail of first encountered pathology. And spots or no spots will likely have such a small affect that the weather noise and standard error will completely obscure the effect of such a small solar influence relative to what the vast oceans are capable of producing.
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 …
My great-grandfather migrated south after the summer of 1816 in which there was a killing frost each month of the year. He had been farming in northern New York. Killing frost in every month that year is well documented in states from NewYork to Ohio:
ARTICLE from The Decatur County Journal, June 9, l892
“The year without a summer, l8l6, is now being quite generally recalled.
According to the records, January and February of that year were warm and spring like. March was cold and stormy.
Vegetation had gotten well along in April when real winter set in. Sleet and snow fell on seventeen different days in May.
In June there was either frost or snow every night but three. The snow was five inches deep for several days in succession in the interior of New York and from ten inches to three feet in Vermont and Maine.
July was cold and frosty, ice formed as thick as window panes in every one of the New England States.
August was still worse; ice formed nearly an inch in thickness, and killed nearly every green thing in the United States and in Europe.
In the spring of l8l7, corn, which had been kept over from the crop of l8l5, sold for from $5 to $l0 a bushel, the buyers purchasing for seed … ”
Pamela-also things tend to dry out in the NW in an El Nino-in the winter.Interesting thought about the latent heat….
David Archibald:
If you consider the [current sunspot] counting problem, they are actually a pretty good match.
Why don´t you make a third graph not taking into account those “ghost spots”, conveniently generated at that “parallel universe” which intersects ours in the so called “Boulder Triangle”? 🙂
It would be very interesting to see a graph including volcanic activity in those years.
You can get an even higher-level overview of SSN activity in the naked-eye sunspot records.
Again, still done today. Think of it as a Maximum Smoothing Filter.
Here’s a little more food for thought:
For the last 250 years or more, science has been trying to answer the question of whether the universe is expanding forever or will eventually collapse in on itself.
You know that condenstation in the very early universe took place by expansion lowering the temperature state.
Look at Earth’s Ice Age record. Goes back to 4 billion years ago.
Does it say the Earth is cooling, or warming?
Does the Sun go up in the Main Sequence giving ever more output or is it the opposite?
Is the Universe expanding and therefore dropping the temp of Space Environment around Earth or is it contracting and raising the temp?
For one of the references on the Dalton, check out
‘A Perspective of Wages and Prices’ – Henry Phelps-Brown and Shiela V Hopkins
London, 1981 – pg 59
Pierre Gosselin:
How sure can we be of the sunspot numbers from a technically primitive era?
I totally disagree. Just compare it to this era of Gores, Hansens, fake Nobel Prizes,etc.
“Steven Kopits (07:06:15) : I think we have to be careful about applying apocalyptic scenarios..”
It’s the better part of wisdom, IMO, to not underestimate human inclination to superstition. Watch this video featuring Sallie Baliunas to see what has happened in a previous cooling period. I don’t have any evidence to think human nature is any different now. The only difference is we’d be seeing it live streaming on CNN or the internet :
Paul Stanko (03:20:33) :
Be careful not to say anything against “The Gospels of Warming” 🙂
jorgekafkazar:
Yes, in fact I was about to write “plage”, but then I thought that “plague” sounds more poetic and thus I decided to create a new word… Oh how Shakespearian of me…
Richard Sharpe:
“The degradation of the English language as spoken in one of the former colonies is to be deplored. What did he pass? Wind? Oh, you mean passed away. I tend to have a problem with the incorrect use of adverbs as well.”
Having trouble reading posts that have certain words cut out to prevent clutter and the creation of a boring, long thesis? Perhaps next time I shall spell out every single word, as it seems that not all have the ability to apply language skills to deduce that “passed” is a short version of “passed away”.
Before you criticise, I suggest that you polish your punctuation skills:
( “in TSI I suspect” –> in TSI, I suspect ).
TSI is not the only factor that can be discussed as having some effect.
In fact, it is more often the changes in the magnetic field that are of interest rather than TSI. I guess that my comments have been brushed aside by Mr. Sharpe as they do not fit the consensus that the idea of a climate driven largely by solar factors is a belief for amateurs, astrologers and people who have dreadful language skills. Oh well.
To call this Maunder it is OT. For Maunder SSN see here:
http://www.geocities.com/vukcevicu/MMB.gif
http://www.geocities.com/vukcevicu/MaunderSSN.gif
This does not look like a start of a new Maunder.
http://solarcycle24com.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=629&page=8
Another Maunder type minimum due around 2150-80
Where is there indication of an El Niño developing in 2009?
Apologies, Last paragraph should read : ” as they DO fit the consensus” … – my bad, LOL. 🙂
Watch Out,
Blogging could put you in jail!
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/05/linda-sanchez-d-ca-coming-after.html
evanmjones (07:08:55) :
That poem looks like the quote of the week!
Last link for:
This does not look like a start of a new Maunder should be:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/eit_195/1024/latest.jpg
“DR (08:02:58) : Isn’t the internet great?”
Yes it is!!
And I am SO GLAD WattsUpWithThat exists!
vukcevic (10:37:29) :
Another Maunder type minimum due around 2150-80
Very interesting Vuk, the AM graph also shows the next downturn after this one at 2150, not perhaps of Maunder status but indeed a slow down. Maunder type minimums look to be very rare events going by history according to Solanki and Usoskin.