Many commenters have mentioned “The Watts Effect”, whereby within a short period of time after I do a post about the sun on WUWT mentioning the lack of sunspots, one appears.
I figured it was time to settle the issue with a test, a big one. The sun is blank, here is my post. We are about to break the monthly calendar record (again) for a calendar month without sunspots. Ironically this last occurred in August 2008. Depending on whether you believe NOAA or SIDC in Belgium about whether a sunspeck noted by one observatory (Catainia in Italy) was a valid sunspot or not determines if August 2008 was a sunspotless calender month or not. Let’s hope neither Catainia, SIDC, or my nefarious and dubious spot producing solar powers spoil this run.
But wait, there’s more.
This was in Spaceweather.com today:
Inspect the image below. It is a photo of the sun taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Can you guess what day it was taken? Scroll down for the answer.
August 28th, today. But it could have been taken on any day of the past seven weeks. For all that time, the face of the sun has looked exactly the same–utterly blank.
According to NOAA sunspot counts, the longest string of blank suns during the current solar minimum was 52 days back in July, Aug. and Sept. of 2008. If the current trend continues for only four more days, the record will shift to 2009. It’s likely to happen; the sun remains eerily quiet and there are no sunspots in the offing. Solar minimum is shaping up to be a big event indeed.
=========
Here’s the count as of August 30th:
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 51 days
2009 total: 193 days (80%)
Since 2004: 704 days
Typical Solar Min: 485 days
I thought I saw where Anna spotted a spot yesterday with the correct polarity?
JimB
I often wonder whether Leif and his colleagues go around with big grins.
This solar activity, or lack of it, is happening on their watch and just when the level of equipment has improved enough to study what is going on. No doubt they get to play the Name That Phenomenon game and achieve an immortality of a sort. If the sun had waited a few more cycles before becoming quiescent…
BTW Anthony, please could you test your powers by posting “Forty-seven years and still no big cash win on Andrew Harrison’s Premium Bonds”.
fred writes “Can somebody please point me to a good read about what the impact of a spotless sun is?
So what if the sun has no spots?”
Two classics by John Eddy
The Maunder Minimum 1976 Science 192 no 4245 1189
The Case of the Missing Sunspots 1977 Scientific American May p 80
Mike McMillan (23:58:08) : I find the story in this link you point to, Mike, particularly depressing in that it shows just how many of us still believe in signs and portents; and still fear things that go bump in the night.
It is not news that maturity is still missing in some of us in this 21st century; but the percentage should surely not be so high in this age of information? …52 percent to 43 percent of Americans back a system that would set a ceiling for greenhouse gas emissions. That probably means even the girl next door is spooked, and she has a college education…
I feel like Burl Ives, It’s Just My Funny Way Of Laughing, else I might be in tears. Our time will be held up to ridicule in the future. May there also be an honour roll of those who scoffed which will bear my name.
Solipsism is a terrible thing.
JimB (03:17:19) :
I thought I saw where Anna spotted a spot yesterday with the correct polarity?
It disappeared within a few hours so should not be counted, though Leif is counting it, as well as another short and tiny that I missed subsequently.
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
AndrewWH (03:38:32) :
This solar activity, or lack of it, is happening on their watch
But is not unexpected. We predicted a small cycle to come and such a cycle is always slow in starting. We even held out the possibility of a Maunder type minimum: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003SPD….34.0603S
Personally I don’t think it’ll get that low, unless Livingston & Penn are correct and sunspots will become invisible soon.
“Roger Carr (04:16:25) :
I feel like Burl Ives, It’s Just My Funny Way Of Laughing, else I might be in tears. Our time will be held up to ridicule in the future. May there also be an honour roll of those who scoffed which will bear my name.”
If the alarmists and politicians have their way, and it looks all the more possible with each passing day as we approach the Copenhagen “talk fest”, they will rewrite history to conform. It will be 1984, soon.
I noted that short lived sunspot when it occurred around the 30th of July and wondered whether or not it would be counted. (at Solarcycle24.com).
I am still of the opinion until we see something different from cycle 15 – 1911, 1912, 1913 there is some sort of pattern yet to be defined but yet nothing out of the historical ordinary.
Give another year of little activity and then make some more ESWAG projections.
I’m personally not yet ready to buy a heavy winter coat until at least another couple of years of low sunspot activity.
fred, and maybe others. I forgot another classic. The Sun Kings by Stuart Clark. ISBN -13 978-0-691-12600-9. This is a history of the science and scientists who studied the sun. One of the few good books that I have found on the history of scientific endeavour.
Questions: Back in the time of Solar Cycle 10 through 15 could they see a “pore” or “spec” like we can now? And if not what meaning do those records have versus the current solar minimum? And even if we do have some spots on occasion, while having an obvious solar minimum otherwise, what will be the comparative impact on the climate of *this* solar minimum versus the documented impact of previous solar minimums? Then there is the question of the arithmetical (or is it geometric) result of a combination of “cap and trade” (of known bad consequences) and a solar minimum (of unknown, but probably bad, consequences) on the economy.
Dave The Engineer (04:48:40) :
Back in the time of Solar Cycle 10 through 15 could they see a “pore” or “spec” like we can now?
Yes they could. Rudolf Wolf who invented the sunspot number counting method, did not count pores, but his successors decided to do so. Since Wolf died in 1893, the ‘raw’ count has been multiplied by 0.60 to compensated for counting of pores.
Saturday 29 th August 2009 14.08 CET
Just thought I let you know – Hail storm here in Copenhagen. Not often you see that in august.
Leif Svalgaard (04:24:33) :
We even held out the possibility of a Maunder type minimum: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003SPD….34.0603S
Personally I don’t think it’ll get that low, unless Livingston & Penn are correct and sunspots will become invisible soon.
Leif, if I recall some of your writings, you are now tending to lean the way of L&P and their work. Does that mean you view a MM type event as a still improbable, but growing possibility??
Tom
The Sun is too cold for sunspots.
For info.
O’Toole’s Corolloray to Murphy’s Law states that the Chances of the toast landing marmalade side down is directly correlated to the cost of the carpet.
So given that AGW is going to cst trillions….
Gene, you may farly blame the great Lord Kelvin for his errors, but not for being English.
Spot watching is great fun.
For a truly exhaustive parsing of ‘Spotless Days’, try Solemon’s http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html.
Personally I prefer monitoring the “Indian Sumac” of my ancestral home in No. Minn. Which was already changing color on July 28, 09.
Also, local reliable prognosticator for the winter is the size of the Norwegians wood pile in September.
Swedish proverb: “If you kick mother natures dog, prepare to be frost bitten”.
Politicians take note.
Advice for the rest of us: Lighten up folks, we have a ringside seat for one of the great adventures of the human race. We will not be able to change the consequence of processes physical or political, but we can appreciate and enjoy the experience. Burl Ives knew how to laugh.
Don’t let it go to your head Anthony!
Personally, I wouldn’t be converting food to fuel at the rate we are….
Forces of Nature…
First there was Mosus, who with the power of his thoughts (and possibly some external help), parted water. Effective radius of action: a few thousand meters
There there were our North American indians, with their rain dance. Effective radius of action: a a few hundreds of kilometers.
And now we have Anthony Watts and sunspots. Radius of action: at least 1.5E11 meters.
I can’t wait to hear about the guy who will have Andromeda galaxy do backflips…
🙂
If “The Watts Effect” doesn’t work right away I suggest that you repeat the following 4 times while standing outside at midnight:
Ooo eee, ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla, bing bang
re Leif Svalgaard (01:33:06)
“Although the Sun is blank, there has been a subtle shift. New SC24 magnetic flux has arrived, and the F10.7 flux has gone up. For the first 28 days of August 2008, the flux was 67.96, for the first 28 days of August 2009, the flux is now 69.01. For July the numbers were: 2008 67.78, 2009 70.43.”
Aug 2008 67.96 Aug 2009 69.01 + 1.05 (1 year)
July 2009 70.43 Aug 2009 69.01 – 1.42 (1 month)
??
The sunspot records we humans so carefully have kept over time have an Achilles Heel.
They were compiled with an understanding that there once was a definition of a sunspot. And there once was a time when everything that resembled the cutting edge of sunspot/ not the sunspot was not guarnateed to be observed.
So, here we are, wondering if SIDC or someone else will rob from us the excitement of observation, or worse yet, throw the opportunity to warn the Earth about what is happening to the Sun into utter chaos, should the need to warn manifest itself.
You see, a spotless Sun streak is not a computer model.
And that is why it has a target painted on it.
Right now, I wish to take the opportunity to thank all of you who have taken the time to express skepticism over the practice of comparing modern technology enabled records to historical records without coming to terms with the definitions.
And thank you, Anthony Watts, for bringing about such a forum where examination of the record is possible.
The lack of sunspots is caused by man. Over the last 10 years, there is a direct inverse correlation between the number of cell phones (usage time) and the number of sunspots. The more cell phone usage the fewer sunspots. Man has electromagnetically disrupted the sun. It maybe too late, we may have already killed the sunspots. We need immediate action on a cap and trade in all electromagnetic emissions.