The sun is blank–no sunspots.
Several WUWT readers have inquired about why the SOHO MDI and magnetogram image has not been updated in several days. The last update was on July 28th.
Here is the reason:
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is having a minor problem. SOHO’s white light solar telescope is temporarily offline while new commands and data tables are uploaded to the spacecraft. Normal operations are expected to resume in a few days.
h/t to:
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A good time for maintenance, indeed.
Correction here.
So called greenhouse gases make up only 2% of total atmosphere
Total CO2 makes up only 3.62% of total greenhouse gases.
“Anthropogenic” CO2 makes up 3.4% of the total CO2 inside the total greenhouse gases.
Insignificant.
“”” MikeW (12:54:45) :
This would be somewhat OT in most threads here (this one, hopefully not so much), but I have a rather fundamental question about the basic mechanics of AGW theory.
Even if this extra warming is taking place, wouldn’t it just all radiate to space every night as the atmosphere returns to an equilibrium in that area? With the exception of cirrus type clouds, pretty much everything else is below 6 km, so the heated air might be considered to be ‘outside the blanket’, so to speak. “””
Mike, I would like to personally ring the neck of whoever it was who started the mythology that the earth absorbs solar energy during the daytime and radiates thermal energy at night to cool down.
The earth that I live on absorbs solar energy 24 hours per day, 365 1/4 days per year, non-stop; and it also happens that it radiates 24 hours a day 365 1/4 days per year; but whereas the incoming solar energy only falls on about 1/2 of the total earth surface at any one time; the outgoing radiation occurs from the entire surface continuously without stopping.
And just for good measure it does its best radiating in the mid day to afternoon peak sunlight, and from the hottest tropical desert areas of the earth. That also includes Urban Heat Islands which are also excellent thermal radiators and cool fastest during the daytime high temperatures.
There isn’t any on-off switch that tells the earth that the sun has set, and it is time to fire up the radiator, and start emitting thermal radiation in the long wave IR band.
It is true that during the peak daylight hot hours, it might be somewhat difficult to measure the thermal radiation against the background of incoming solar radiation; but it is there none the less.
The earth’s polar regions are by comparison pikers when it comes to cooling the earth, and radiate as little as 1/12th of the peak sunlight tropical rates.
George
“”” Ron House (16:38:03) :
MikeW (12:54:45) :
>>>
I think the main thing is that solid objects tend to absorb and radiate at almost any wavelength, whereas the atmosphere only does do at certain wavelengths. Most of the contents of the air (N2, O2) cannot radiate or absorb at all in the relevant range, so unless they can get rid of heat by convection or conduction or giving the heat to a CO2 molecule, say, that can radiate, they just keep their heat. (In fact, the air as a whole convects nicely and cools as it rises.) “””
So who gave the atmosphere a special dispensation to not radiate the same as the solid surface does; or are you saying that the incoming solar spectrum proves that the sun is a solid object.
The thermal continuum spectrum of radiation that is emitted from ALL bodies that are at temperatures above zero Kelvins, does not care what the materials are. The source of that radiation is believed to be due to the acceleration of electric charges which all materials contain,a nd since they are thermally agitated at temperatures above 0 Kelvins; they most certainly contain accelerated charges.
Nobody tells the sun it cannot radiate thermal radiations until it decides to solidify.
And I note once again that materials never stop radiating; they do not wait till sunset to decide to radiate; and they do their best radiating during the hottest daylight hours.
George
Or put another way.
If the total atmosphere depth was represented by a 110 story building, the “anthropogenic” CO2 would add up to the thickness of the polish on the linoleum on the basement floor.
Not much of a blanket for you.
I wonder how much longer SOHO will last. And is there a direct replacement in the pipe or once gone it gone and will have to uses different sources. I use it as a homepage.
The missing holographic image is like the loss of a sonogram.
That is true, but the amount of absorption or emission is moderated by the closeness of a body to a black body. Shiny aluminium, for example, reflects well and emits poorly for this reason: it doesn’t resemble a black body. If you look at, e.g. http://www.williams.edu/astronomy/research/PN/nebulae/legend.php you will see that typically discrete emission lines very much dominate over continuous emission. If you had looked back at the post I was answering, it should have been obvious I was simplifying to make the case in the ordinary Earth atmosphere intelligible. You will be aware that absorption and emission are symmetric processes. Therefore the relative transparency of O2 and N2 to continuous radiation in the infrared tells us that continuous emission is going to also be a minor player at these temperatures. However, pretty much every solid substance comprising the surface of the Earth absorbs infrared, and therefore must also radiate it equally well. That was the basis of my simplified comments: continuous emission from the Earth’s atmosphere can be ignored compared with the discrete emissions of the greenhouse gases or continuous emissions from the surface. It is not normal to write university-level lectures on blog comments in answer to questions from laypeople struggling to understand basic issues, so I do consider your comments on my previous comment to be nitpicking.
Perhaps there wouldn’t have been so much global warming if Mike W hadn’t been putting all these red-hot bricks on his porch.
“Even if this extra warming is taking place, wouldn’t it just all radiate to space every night as the atmosphere returns to an equilibrium in that area? With the exception of cirrus type clouds, pretty much everything else is below 6 km, so the heated air might be considered to be ‘outside the blanket’, so to speak.”
A very good point, the heated air rises (if not already in a large height) and radiates the heat (or a part of it) into space. These radiation takes only place because of the greenhouse gases! No greenhouse gases -> no radiation to space of the atmosphere! The mechanism is just neglected by the climatists!
Prof. Teuschner (one of the first sceptic scientists) gives a good example for such a mechanism:
You have a very hot hotplate on your stove, beyond is nothing. Then you take your kettle with the “greenhouse-fluid” water and put it on the hotplate. What happens? The hotplate cools down!
” By dawn, the two bricks will both be at the ambient temperature. In fact, I could have warmed the second brick in a kiln and it still wouldn’t have made any difference the next day. I would not have any residual Anthropogenic Backyard Warming by cooking the bricks, even if I did it every day.”
You are right, but the earth is not a brick, the water is storing the heat very well (high heat capacity). E.g. on the moon behaves like a brick, in the “night” the surfaces cools down much much more than on earth
I think the point with GHG warming is not just that that CO2 absorbs IR energy, but that it gives an opportunity for that energy to become thermal (i.e. mechanical energy). If all that were to happen with the photon was that it was re-emmitted or reflected when it hit a molecule, then the temperature of that molecule would change only for the brief second it had absorbed the energy and then return to normal when re-emitted.
However, as someone correctly pointed out above their are multiple modes by which this energy can be re-emitted. It can be as IR or in the case of two molecules colliding, it can be mechanical. If a CO2 and O2 molecule collide, at least part of that energy is transferred to the O2 molecule. The O2 molecule now has a higher energy state than it did before and so does our atmosphere (of two molecules in this example) as a whole because the energy coming in was not re-emmitted.
Now with GHG warming, the other thing that is important is concentration of molecules. Lets take a box of 100 O2 molecules and 1 CO2 molecules. There is a lot of empty space between those molecules. If IR hits the CO2 molecule, but is re-emmitted before the CO2 can transfer that energy to an O2 molecule, then the energy state of the box will not go up. Now lets say that I add anothe CO2 molecule to the mix. I have just increase my chances of that energy being transferred to an O2 molecule because one, I’ve double the chances of the initial IR photon of striking a CO2 molecule and I’ve infinitely increased that chance that a re-radiated photon might hit another CO2 molecule (before there was not a second one to hit). So as you increase the concentration of GHG the amount of heat lost from the system in the form of re-radiated IR will go down.
Now here’s the final thing. The first time you added one molecule, you greatly increased your chances of the IR photon being caught by the system. When you add another one, you will also increase the chances, but not by as much as the first time. In order to increase your chances by the same amount as the first time, you will have to double the concentration of CO2. So to get the same amount of warming of the system from 1–> 2 molecules you will have to go from 2 –> 4 molecules. Then from 4–>8 and then 8–>16 etc… This is why you see metrics like 1.2degrees warming/doubling of CO2.
There is not really a question as to whether or not CO2 affects the temperature of earths atmoshpere, or whether or not we have added to that CO2. It does and we have. To suggest otherwise is silly. The main argument that many people stress is that runaway warming (i.e. castastrophic warming) relys on strong positive feedbacks, which to this date have not been proven (or disproven for that matter).
” apb (16:47:54) :
…
In my simple way of thinking, we’re looking at 3-4% CO2 in the atmosphere. Imagine a blanket 4′ x 8′ – with only 1 square foot of material spread out over the 32 square feet of the blanket. Pretty crappy blanket – so what’s the real theory on AGW?”
” Les Francis (18:11:50) :
…
So called greenhouse gases make up only 2% of total atmosphere
Total CO2 makes up only 3.62% of total greenhouse gases.
“Anthropogenic” CO2 makes up 3.4% of the total CO2 inside the total greenhouse gases.”
So…the technical word for this fabric analogy might be…LACE.
🙂
“Illusion” might be a better word (the descriptive name of veil netting). Lace can be pretty opaque. So says the seamstress.
@ur momisugly L. Bowser
The Greenhouse-theorie doen’t claim a direct heating of the atmosphere, i.e. this is only a small part of the claimed heating. It says, that most of the absorbed energy is re-emitted. Because half of the re-emitted radiation is towards the surface of the earth, the surface is becoming warmer.
But here is a tricky point: The radiation is not heating up the surface (not possible because the emitter is colder than the surface). The surface is radiating less energy, because of the incoming radiation of the GHGs. So the GHGs act like a insulation to the surface.
I wonder, has anybody thought to observe the sun both the old technology way, and the new way and see what happens to the tiny-spots? Can the tiny-spots even be observed with the old way technology?
Would be interested to find out. Like with hurricanes, the new technology often completely shifts the data and makes it very hard to compare past data to today.
All you really have to do is count sunspot groups rather than sunspots. Those supposedly relate somewhat consistently to total number of spots and they are observable by both old and new technology.
Trevor (tjexcite) (19:57:30) :
SOHO falls along the same lines of Hubble vs the new Infrared Telescope (James Webb).
Both the Scientists who use Hubble and the public were aghast that NASA was going to scrap visible light imaging in favor of IR only.
We need a simple, reliable, easily replacable imager in space to keep an eye on the Sun free of the atmosphere. The last aspect of SOHO, free of seeing constraints, is it’s biggest asset.
tarpon (07:56:14) :
I wonder, has anybody thought to observe the sun both the old technology way, and the new way and see what happens to the tiny-spots? Can the tiny-spots even be observed with the old way technology?
If you mean project instead of observe, the answer is yes, there are those of us who have thought about it and attempted to address it.
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/DeepSolarMin5.htm
In the days of speculum mirrors and pre-achromat, that’s a big no on Tiny Tim detection.
In the days of the early achromats, still no, as today’s cheap achromat will run the originals off the road, and the Tiny Tim’s are not projectable. Even today’s eyepieces are a critical component. Ramsden, Kellner and Huygens eyepieces, but no Plossl, Erfle, Orthos.
Today, with the advanced optics and or imaging trains, it’s very easy to pick up a group of spots so weak that they were invisible 150 + yrs. ago.
Leif, what about the size of the sun? Does it change over time and are we able to measure it precisely?
@ur momisugly Johnny Honda
I’m no expert in GHG theory, but I’m pretty sure that it happens roughly the way I am saying, otherwise the mechanism wouldn’t work, and it does work, otherwise earth’s temperature would be unsustainable. I know Wikipedia is not always the most accurate, but my explanation roughly matches theirs.
Yes, spotless or almost, but the temperatures don’t go really down. Strange no ?
Ray (14:50:09) :
Leif, what is your take on what they call faculae regions (FR)?
The Australians have an interesting explanation… http://www.sydneyobservatory.com.au/blog/?p=2260
… and they seems to say that there was a very small sunspot (very hard to see through) this week.
The Australian comments are good. However, there is nothing new about FRs. There were first described by Schreiner in 1625. FR develop before a spot [or two spots] are seen and lasts after they have disappeared. The FR are basically lower-magnitude magnetic areas that therefore appear bright. It has been known for centuries now that sunspots are formed by coalescence of small pores and specks. This knowledge was somehow forgotten in the 1960s, possibly because of the widespread acceptance of Babcock’s idea of a thick, strong ‘flux rope’ erupting from below and arching up, spots forming at the exit and entry points. People also stopped looking at the Sun for hours to follow the development of spots, and rather relied of snapshot photographs. With the advent of movies of spot development constructed from continuous spacecraft observations, people have rediscovered the coalescence aspect. See the movie here: http://revver.com/video/404550/hinode-lower/ and the discussion here: http://heliophysics.org/headlines/y2007/4review_trilobite.htm
So, it is possible that many spots will not develop and solar activity will mainly be in form of FRs, if Livingston and Penn are correct.
Ray (11:47:07) :
Leif, what about the size of the sun? Does it change over time and are we able to measure it precisely?
In the sky the diameter of the Sun is about half a degree [same as that of the Moon]. That translates to 1,392,000 km or 866,000 miles. It does change with time [it is getting larger] but VERY slowly, millions of years to see any real change. Whether it changes on a short time scale, like days or years, is hotly debated, and there is a satellite PICARD dedicated to measuring the diameter of the Sun. Because the Sun is a rotating ball of gas with a magnetic field that creates hills and vales, the notions of a single ‘size’ is somewhat fuzzy, see: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Sun-039-s-Sphere-Is-Not-Perfect-94896.shtml
Leif Svalgaard (18:46:40) :
What I have in mind is somewhat of a kind of “breathing” of the sun. You can see a very good example (to the extreme) with the recent discovery of the cyclic swelling and contaction of Betelgeuse. That cycle must also be regulated by internal mechanisms. But it could be possible that the expention and contraction could also influence our climate.
Leif Svalgaard (18:36:08) :
Thanks! That was very interesting and informative. As they say, let’s not forget the discoveries of the past so not to think that we are the first one to discover them. For one thing, an considering the limited tools they had in the past, those people had a very good sense of observation, deduction, logic and imagination.