Ken Tapping: One year on into the minimum
From John A’s solarscience.auditblogs.com
I’ve just been in e-mail correspondance with Dr Kenneth Tapping, asking him to comment on the progress of the solar minimum and his opinion on the likely size of SC24 when it does deign to appear.
Dear Dr Tapping
After you published your rebuke to Investor’s Business Daily, I put your entire reply onto my blog (see http://solarscience.auditblogs.com/2008/04/22/ken-tapping-the-current-solar-minimum/ ) which I notice is the second listing when anyone googles your name. I hope you didn’t mind.
Since that reply the Sun has appeared to have gone into an even deeper slumber than it was when you wrote your article, more than a year ago. You ended that article with a statement
AT THE MOMENT IT IS UNJUSTIFIED TO ASSUME THE SUN IS UNDERGOING A SIGNIFICANT CHANGE IN BEHAVIOUR. ON THE BASIS OF SUNSPOT NUMBER DATA, WE CANNOT ASSUME ANYTHING ODD IS HAPPENING UNLESS THE NEXT CYCLE DELAYS ITS START INTO 2009 OR 2010
Well it’s now nearly mid-2009 and the only spots to be seen very very occasionally are SC23 polarity.
Do you have any further comment on the Sun’s (lack of) activity? Are we close to unusual times in solar activity? Is the sun undergoing a significant change in behaviour?
Best regards
John
He replied [with my emphasis]
Hi John,
I’ve just got back here from the Space Weather Workshop, which was held in Boulder, Colorado. The opinion there is that the next cycle is coming, although forecasts are for a low cycle with a late start.
Our radio telescopes have detected no sign of the new cycle yet. However a statistical study of indices that I have been doing suggests the Sun did show a significant change in behaviour over the last few years, but that things are starting to slip back towards the normal situation, which could suggest the Sun is at least showing signs of waking up again. It’s deciding to take an additional lie-in cannot be ruled out.
Activity is certainly very low.
Regards,
Ken
When I asked for that “statistical study of indices”, Dr Tapping replied that it was being submitted to a journal and he’d let me know when its in pre-print – which is fine by me.
I think it’s fair to say that all solar scientists have been caught out by the length of the solar minimum and the delay to SC24. In subsequent posts I’ll be reviewing the prognostications of solar models, in an effort to understand what exactly goes into predictions of solar cycles.
In other news, as reported on Watts Up With That:
NOAA/SWPC will be releasing an update to the Solar Cycle 24 Prediction on Friday, May 8, 2009 at noon Eastern Daylight Time (1600 UT) at a joint ESA/NASA/NOAA press conference
I can hardly wait.
[The wait is over, and the announcement was made Friday, which you can read here – Anthony]
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I obviously simplified.
Also: “Those who disagree on the hypothesis of solar forcing will take lack of cooling as evidence; those who agree with the hypothesis will take lack of cooling as evidence against the hypothesis.”
Should read: “Those who disagree on the hypothesis of solar forcing will take lack of cooling as evidence against the hypothesis; those who agree with the hypothesis will take lack of cooling as evidence supporting the hypothesis. ”
(MS Word is acting up on me.)
Of course, this does not prevent Discovery Channel from continuing the fear mongering! http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/05/08/sun-sunspots.html
idlex (05:04:12) :
You are absolutely right. Metric system, though I was born with it, has no relation whatsoever with reality.
The biggest stupidity was a circumference of 400 DEGREES !!!!
All this was made during the FRENCH REVOLUTION with the purpose of secularizing the world. The same institution that was behind it now it is behind the GREEN REVOLUTION.
http://www.gap-system.org/~history/HistTopics/Decimal_time.html
bill (07:23:24) :
An FFT will show periodicity in data. If the 11(ish) year solar cycle had a significant effect on temperatures it should appear on all temperature records (sometimes swamped by other effects perhaps)
This is a bit of a strawman. It may not be the 11-year-ish cycle directly, but some other signal that exerts some measure of control over the cycle, e.g., the low frequency change in average (rms?) cycle intensity. If so, it will likely be too small to show up on an FFT, particularly if it is not a strictly periodic function. Furthermore, an FFT analysis must be done with care when the sufficient conditions for convergence are not known a priori to be satisfied.
As for your scatter plot, that’s a joke, right? ANY rising data set will compare to another in such a manner. The scatter plot is a thoroughly meaningless way to view the data (and it is not nearly as clear what, if any, relationship exists in that plot there seem to be several if you look closely). Why not compare them over time? Probably because it doesn’t look nearly as good.
Mark
bill (07:23:24) :
Do you have a ratio of the Dow over CO2 time series?
Unless a causal root is clearly identified, all this is numerology.
And clearly in all indeces, long range ( Ice core records) and short range, trends of CO2 versus trends of temperature, CO2 lags temperature, which is evident when we see CO2 rising merrily and temperature in stasis the past ten years.
bill (07:23:24) :
I think I’ve challenged you to do this before: do your spectrum analysis (fft) on HadCRUT3 and tell us what you find. CET is not useful for this purpose, as it is strongly affected by natural climate variability on a regional scale that may well obscure the solar signal.
Or, you might consider reading
http://www.isac.cnr.it/~climstor/michele/publications/NC_26C_2003_287.pdf
This is regional as well, but they think they see a solar signal in the data.
Link for short term CO2 lag from temperatures
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/co2_and_temperature_relationship_shown_questions_flat_ice_core_co2_graph_du/
Arthur Glass (07:24:25) :
The Sun has been observed for thousands of years by many cultures.
Just not with telescopes, photographic plates and eletronic detectors.
Ditto for climates and grain harvests.
Isaac Newton was not a nice person at all.
Michael Spencer (04:29:43) :
If you want the best graph money can buy, you make it yourself.
Sunspots!! indeed.
What you ask for has hardly had it’s surface scratched.
You have literary record, observations going back to ancient times, and the opportunity to look for yourself and come up with your own conclusion.
I highly reccomend it.
It looks like even if we don’t see dark sunspots, we may see these large lighter colored areas (faculae) indicating quite active regions.
My questions are these. During the Maunder minimum, were these bright spots noted? were they more noted at the times one would have anticipated cycle maximums? was it possible to see them with instruments of the times? indeed, just how much brighter are these areas (compared to how much darker sunspots are) how much difference in contrast do they really represent? could you see a really bright facula at sunset? was a really bright event like the Carrington flare noted by naked eye anywhere (it had to be sunset or sunrise somewhere when it happened).
It looks to me like L&P are right and we are headed for no sunspots, but it also looks like no-sunspots does not equal no-cycle, just lowered magnetic flux. So Maunder minimum now seems to me to have been somewhere in a large range between the two, and the appearance of faculae might have indicated just how low or high was solar activity during the decades long period of no virtually no sunspots.
Dumb question: How did observers assign cycle numbers to sunspots before we had magnetograms? Right now, we see 23’s and 24’s. Determine just by latitude?
Les Francis (17:13:30) :
“Don’t recall hearing about impending ice age after 1914 – the story might have been buried with the outbreak of European hostilities.”
http://www.digital-almanac.com/digitalalmanac/2009/?folio=68
down at the bottom of the pages
Anna V: Regarding the Dow: the link below shows that there is a possible connection between geomagnetic storms and the stock market. It is from the Atlanta Fed and actually quotes psychology research which explains it.
http://www.frbatlanta.org/filelegacydocs/wp0305b.pdf
Lee,
What to look at is the radius of the sun and its temperature/brightness. During minima, the radius of the sun expands and the surface cools/dims to a degree greater than the percent of the sun covered by spots at maxima reduces the overall lit area.
“The average gas temperature of the solar surface is about 6050 K, but inside a sunspot, the gas temperature is only 4200 K. The reason a sunspot appears dark is that the gas inside the spot where the magnetic field is strongest is only emitting about 1/4 as much light as from the rest of the solar surface. If you were to rip a sunspot out from the solar surface and put it in the night sky, it would appear as a bright, orange gas, not a dark void. ”
Note the areas immediately around a sunspot are brighter than average so they tend to cancel out the darkness of the spot.
During the Maunder era, solar telescopes were not developed enough to see these brighter faculae areas.
You should read the wikipedia article on solar variation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
Retired Engineer,
The cycle number is based on when Greenwich Observatory started counting sunspots in the mid 18th century. Thats all.
Retired Engineer (09:24:53) :
Dumb question: How did observers assign cycle numbers to sunspots before we had magnetograms? Right now, we see 23’s and 24’s. Determine just by latitude?
The magnetic determination goes back to 1912. Before that, the latitude is a good indicator. because when you some spots at 10 degrees and at the same time some at 30 degrees, it is a VERY good bet that they are from different cycles. Even with magnetograms you’ll find that some 3% of spot groups have reversed polarity from what they should have according to their cycle [because the rotate]. Since there are thousands of spots in a cycle, misclassifying a few doesn’t matter.
A by far dumber question: In what cycle are we? 23, 24 or 25th?, or just reset to zero?
Leif,
thanks for the reply.
A small objection, any curve can be made up of straight line segments, it is the extrapolation to 2015 that is dubious, imho.
It would be good if you could put up a post from the data you were given.
jack mosevich (11:26:26) :
Thanks for the interesting reference, but we are back to problem number one being reduced to problem number two, which is not yet solved. It is the temperature and the Dow that look similar, and the connection of temperature to sun cycles is still not proven.
Solar flux appears to be relatively constant, but there has been a slow increase in spot activity, mirrored by a creeping rise in Planetary A-Index (http://www.solen.info/solar/). A highly reliable source tells me that Arctic aural activity is at it’s lowest in a century, too. This solar minimum is very interesting.
anna v (13:17:16) :
it is the extrapolation to 2015 that is dubious, imho.
Everybody knows that so that is not a problem. L&P says “If the trend were to continue…”, not that it would. Going to zero in 2015 [and negative thereafter] is just a handy way of remembering their result.
Mark T (08:33:20) :
Using the co2 vs temp to produce a curve fit then plotting this against time is shown in the las graph I referenced i.e.
http://img2.imageshack.us/img2/81/hadcrut3vsco2timeseries.jpg
Scatter plot will of course produce the t vs cco2 plt from any 2 rising data sources. However, there is no such organisation in TSI vs CO2.
anna v (08:45:00) :
And clearly in all indeces, long range ( Ice core records) and short range, trends of CO2 versus trends of temperature, CO2 lags temperature, which is evident when we see CO2 rising merrily and temperature in stasis the past ten years.
I’m pleased you brought this up. Most anti AGW will point at ice cores and say “this is absolute evidence that CO2 follows temperature” . They will then point out that the lag is of the order of 700 years. Now this is interesting for CO2 to be reacting to the temp rise since the 60’s is therefore not possible. The CO2 should be reacting to temperatures of 1300’s. So which is it to be – Ice Cores 700 years or a new theory of near instant CO2 response to Temp?
The reference you gave does a scatter plot of 2 variable of the type youo complain about in my posting!!!
Oh yes
Slight errors due to finger trouble: hypothesis terrible early morning caffiene imbalance due to kettle not boiling quickly enough.
As for joules and mangoes I don’t know but remember being taught, a long time ago, that the force to raise an eyebrow was about1000 dynes.
And it is amusing to work out my average horsepower as I walk up the hill and such like.
But the point is serious. When I was very young I was shown how to calculate in both electromagnetic and electrostatic units: one thousand centimetres is one Jar etc. Not beause this is useful today or even back then but because the difference between the two turned out to be the speed of light: the first real clue that electromagnetic radiation was just that.
Today it is usual, it was when I took my first degree, to use vector notation for the Maxwell equations: and very handy vector notation is too.
But of its nature it also obscures fine detail. In classical form the Maxwell equations take about four pages of close argument, in vector notation four lines.
But the vector notation does not deal with time beyond the arrow of time: whereas the classical solution does.
Yet the second law of thermodynamics itself depends upon the arrow of time: or we assume it does. And if this universe is a naked singularity we do not need Hawking’s law of cosmic censorship. As indeed thanks to IBM etc. it has now been shown we don’t. Even black holes are subject to the second law of thermodynamics.
Yet I am told on this board that T&S have abused the second law in what it is said is mere polemic. Which it is: but the paper is much more interesting for what it does not say. I do not know why, than what it does. True T&S have an ecletic view of the second law but frankly no more so than others who advance their views here: and more importantly what appears to be orthodoxy.
I wouldn’t know but if that is so it is a mad, mad world my masters.
Kindest Regards
Passerby (13:44:55) :
Solar flux appears to be relatively constant
No, it has been rising since November of last year. The various plots you see often do not show the ‘real’ flux that the Sun puts out, but what is observed at the Earth, and the Earth’s distance from the Sun is not constant. The further from the Sun we are, the less flux do we observe. Since January, we have been receding from the Sun, just canceling out the real increase there has been. Here is a plot of the real flux: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png , the pink curve.
but there has been a slow increase in spot activity
Hardly [look at the green curve]
mirrored by a creeping rise in Planetary A-Index
The increase is caused by the changing angle between the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic axis through the year, that leads to a 25% increase of A-index every equinox even if the solar wind was absolutely constant.
A highly reliable source tells me that Arctic aural activity is at it’s lowest in a century, too.
That is correct, activity now is where it was back in 1901.
This solar minimum is very interesting.
no doubt about it. You must, however, in spite of your enthusiasm [that we all share] still learn how to interpret the data correctly.
– – –
Re: Basil (09:04:41)
Global annual averages mask signals – and regrettably, for anyone investigating more thoroughly, the monitoring network is sparse & clustered. Also, averages are not the only summaries to investigate – particularly if one gets the huge clue that climate modeling suffers serious unknowns with respect to water & albedo.
– – –
Comment on bill (07:23:24):
This glance, while worthwhile, comes nowhere near warranting a final judgement.
– – –
anna v (08:45:00) “Unless a causal root is clearly identified, all this is numerology.”
Causal roots are not the only targets of relationship studies.
– – –
Re: Geoff Sharp (04:34:46)
Geoff, I imagine you found the following “interesting”:
Axel Brandenburg (2005). The case for a distributed solar dynamo shaped by near-surface shear. The Astrophysical Journal 625, 539-547.
Kenneth H. Schatten (2009). Modeling a Shallow Solar Dynamo. Solar Physics 255, 3-38.
Excerpt from the latter:
“In Babcock’s (1961) original dynamo ideas, however, he advocated a shallow dynamo at the beginning of his abstract: “Shallow submerged lines of force . . . produce a spiral wrapping of five turns after . . . three years.” Leighton (1969) considered both the possibility of a shallow dynamo as well as deep dynamo models.”
bill (14:25:26) :
Scatter plot will of course produce the t vs cco2 plt from any 2 rising data sources. However, there is no such organisation in TSI vs CO2.
Given that I never said there is, or should be, any such organization, your point is… pointless. Your scatter plot, as I stated above, is still meaningless.
Mark