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
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.
As I understand Henrik Svensmark, Magnetic ‘Activity’ (Flux?), correlates extremely well with temperature. When the activity goes up temperature goes up and when it goes down the temperature goes down. The mechanism he has offered (cosmic rays) are the explanation of the connection.
Where can I get the magnetic flux data from?
Also regarding TSI – this does not seem to vary very much, but there is a discrepancy between my graphs and those of SORCE’s though I have got the data from them. Mine is a perfect sinusoidal curve whereas theirs is quite different
Here is where I got their data from:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/tsi_data/daily/sorce_tsi_L3_c24h_m29_v09_20030225_20090818.txt
and this is their graph
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_3month_640x480.png
How do they get that graph?
rephelan (14:58:25) :
does this stretch mean that we will be moving the actual minimum forward again?
There is no such thing as ‘the actual minimum’.
dennis ward (14:37:06) :
Dennis, you need to keep up:
Spencer: NOAA’s official sea surface temperature product ERSST has spurious warming error, July 2009 SST likely not a record after all.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/27/spencer-noaa%e2%80%99s-official-sea-surface-temperature-product-ersst-has-spurous-warming/#more-10343
Moderator , Could you please provide a link to Roy Spencer ‘s article for Dennis Ward ? No need to post this . Thanks in advance ,
P Walker
Some points:
(a) While I was once a True Believer in the Watts Effect, I now believe that Anthony has LOST HIS MOJO, ala Austin Powers, and the Watts Effect is kaput.
(b) L&P are correct, and we are going to get something akin to a Grand Minimum
(c) Leif is INCORRECT that a Mimimum is not such a big deal.
The reason that a Minimum would be a big deal right about now is that some high fraction of the population of Developed Countries have been convinced by their Malthusian and Collectivist leadership (doubt it? read Hayek) that Global Warming has occurred, that anthropogenic sources of CO2 caused it, and we are all going to a secular hell unless we spend our children’s inheritance (plus some money borrewed form the Chinese) to “fix” it.
If we get a sustained drop in global temps while CO2 is flat or still rising, maybe folks will see that GW and CO2 are NOT coupled.
THAT is why it’s a big deal.
Hi Leif,
What I mean by the question about the F10.7 peak is this: It apparently can’t go much lower than it is now, but would it mean anything really unusual was going on if it didn’t go above say 100 for the next 10 years. You seem be saying that pretty much all is well even if no sunspots occur because other solar activity will continue on schedule. My question is how low would you expect the peak F10.7 to be in a grand minimum or a Dalton minimum, or do you expect it continue to cycle as it always does?
Do you feel sort of like a weatherman with a real tough call of rain or shine?
I guess I am dubious as to whether we can actually imply F10.7 activity with 50 to 100 year granularity out of billions of years of rocks or tens of thousands of years of ice cores or 40 or 50 years of actual measurement. Since it has been cyclical for a while, then most cycles are pretty easy to predict, we just don’t have a method to predict when the cycles will change or fail – though we have some evidence that it has happened before.
Many commenters have mentioned “The Watts Effect”…
[The “Joules/second Effect”… Heh!] 🙂
I’m not completely sure but, if this minimum prolongs for three or more years ahead, the density of the photon stream from the oceans to the outer space would reinforce beyond the density that it has presented during the last 30 years and the surface would get colder each day, so the possibility of another icy period would increase concomitantly with the absence of “The Watts Effect”.
I would like to know how many years the oceans would be releasing the extent of energy derived from the weakening of the solar photon stream. The average of TSI in 2009, until July 30th, is 1360.86 W/m^2
Before someone here says it is pseudoscience because that someone doesn’t understand it, I recommend him to read Einstein’s works on these issues.
Dennis Ward,
and one or 2 months is a TREND????
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Eric (11:54:30) :
That must be satire as someone above said.
I have lived in the UK longer than I care to remember & have many friends much older, (between 80 & 100). We all seem to think that the last 30 years or so are pretty much like the start of the last century! The last 10 being similar to the late 30s early 40s!
We’re looking forward to another 1947! Which UK are you living in?
(I’m guessing UK from previous posts)
DaveE.
kuhnkat (16:18:16) :
Dennis Ward,
and one or 2 months is a TREND????
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Not only that but in the days before the Malthusian molecules scientific dogma this little blip might have been of interest to an intelligent person interested in thermodynamics.
Now It’s twisted into some damned propaganda sound byte.
The Sun does not like James Hansen or Al Gore. The last time those two held rallies to preach their message, it refused to shine on them, and instead Old Man Winter pelted them severely.
At the same time frame, when Anthony spoke of the Sun, it shone for him, and it did so more than once.
A-bee, a-bbeeee, a-beeet, that’s all follks.
F. Ross (12:38:28) :
“The lesson: one should always wait until an event has happened before predicting it.”
The lessons I was going for were more like:
When making predictions in areas of immense uncertainty, take care to qualify and caveat your predictions with counter arguments, alternative points of view and additional potential outcomes.
We don’t understand how the sun works, we don’t understand how the clouds work, our understanding of Earth’s climate system is rudimentary,
Have some humility and don’t pretend that you understand what you do not.
Don’t lead press releases with sensational highly speculative predictions.
Do not let the politics and biases associated with the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming narrative hijack your objectivity and malign your reputation.
At present, any predictions about the sun, clouds and future trajectory of Earth’s climate are, at best, educated guesses and should be presented and treated as such.
d (07:55:03) :
i believe this streak is happening is because cycle 23 has completly finished so there will be no more sunspecks form that old cycle interupting. now its all cycle 24.
Check the facts as we know them. The sunspecks that will likely lead to a similar situation as last august are found on Leif’s graph (bottom right).
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
Observe the blue circles. They are cycle 23. So you might as well say that for the last 50 days, the sunspots have been completely dominated by cycle 23 activity. It would perhaps be a somewhat biased statement, but to say that “cycle 23 has completly finished” is at least premature.
Mr. Alex (09:19:26) :
Landscheidt’s prediction was mocked as numerology and astrology but it is now becoming clear that Landscheidt was right.
Show us some proof, please.
No more discussion of Landscheidt on this thread please, it always devolves into a war of words and I’m sorry but I’m just not interested in moderating it. Any further mention of Landscheidt goes straight to the bit bucket. – Anthony
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (17:29:14) :
The flux is pretty much in the same place, as it was last August, as well.
Leif,
I am curious about the decrease in polar magnetic fields that has plagued the sun lately. As I understand what your saying on magnetics being the primary driver of heat output through Solar Wind. This also has a dampening effect on cosmic ray penetration of the earths atmosphere and cloud formation.
With both Solar wind being low, 10.7 being low, and cloud cover increasing this seems to be a set up for major cooling of the earth..
Everything I am seeing in sub bands of the suns radio output indicates a calm and decreasing output. In fact some of the lower bands are below noise thresholds and can not be assessed.
What is your assessment on the length of this minimum and potential effects world wide? Everything NOAA has put out has been revised multiple times. it appears they do not want to go lower in there assessments, yet we are going to be lucky to top 55 this year.
OT – I put out hummingbird feeders every year. The hummingbirds were very very late getting in this spring, and we did indeed have a very slow start to spring and summer. Now, the hummingbirds are emptying out their feeding bottles as if there is no tomorrow, which usually means they are getting ready to head south. This is at least a month early for them to do that, which means an early fall. My location is in the mountains of northern New Mexico, at an altitude of 7300 feet.
We have also had a wet summer, which is rather odd for this area.
The “typical” number of 485 spotless days that is published at Spaceweather is based on the previous 10. Although it is supposed to be typical, there is not one of the last six cycles that reached 485, not one of the preceding four the were as low as 485. You get a different value if you use 12 or 8, and since I don’t know of any reason why the solar system prefers base 10 arithmetic, it seems pretty arbitrary to assign any particular importance to the 485 number.
Leif re your 10:43:32 comment. If I can interpret your charts well enough, I noticed in your 2007 reconstruction of TSI (where you compare yours with that of Wang2005 and Lean2000) that the TSI, W/m^2, remains low for almost 50 years during the Maunder Minimum, whereas during the Dalton minimum the TSI remains low for a much shorter time, although the highs for about 50 years remain below 1366.
I have two questions: 1) was the magnetic field strength also low for almost 50 years in the 17th c and do we have proxies that can corroborate that fact? and 2) since there seems to be many volcanoes spouting off then, could they have much influence on readings of sunspots/magnetic field strength? Regarding the second, could volcanic activity have screened out some of the sunspot count, TSI measurement? (Salzer and Hughes (2005) note 1641-47, 1672-81, 1702-05 as significant periods of decreased tree growth and increased volcanic evidence. Few other centuries have so many dates.)
Vinny (11:23:31) :
So as a non-scientist I enjoy reading your posts especially Leif, Rbateman, Anna V, M Alex to name a few. But no one is addressing the issue of past and present. You have a definition of a sunspot, but it has to include parameters of what was able to be witnessed in the past. If you aren’t counting apples to apples then you must establish a time frame when they are apples to apples, sort of a BC & AD type of count.
I don’t care how smart some of you people are but as a lay person there is now way you can convince me that some of the 6-12 Hour specs where counted in the past, absolutely no way.
And if the lack of sunspots is nothing but interesting why on earth are you bothering unless they have a direct relationship to something measurable other than pure speculation.
Am I wrong?
There is a new standard to measure sunspots that rbateman and myself are working on. Its called the Layman’s Sunspot Count and aims to set a standard measure of counting and replicate how sunspots were counted in Wolf’s day so we can compare grand minima more correctly.
Check this link for monthly updates, graphs and article:
http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/51
TO: dennis ward
The lack of sunspots now does not equate to falling temperatures now. There is a lag of a number of years.
The commentators here are simply stating the obvious: as global temperatures start to fall sometime in the future, the hypothesis that human-emitted CO2 is an almighty driver of climate will begin to look sillier and sillier.
Leif Svalgaard (15:47:48) :
rephelan (14:58:25) :
does this stretch mean that we will be moving the actual minimum forward again?
There is no such thing as ‘the actual minimum’.
Dr. Leif:
My apologies. I’m a sociologist, not a “real scientist” (I’ll save THAT rant for another day)… but my point was that the cycles are constantly represented as waves with troughs and peaks, and poor Dr. Hathaway had to keep moving his trough to the right until he gave up entirely about six months ago. I understand that talk about a cycle “winding down” or “ramping up” is inaccurate, but when YOU produce a graph sometime in 2011 of the transition from cycle 23 to cycle 24, will the bottom of that wave be in late 2008 or late 2009? I think you’ve been on record here as stating that Cycle 24 is now well underway (correct me if I’m wrong!) and I was wondering if that is still your position.
And please, I don’t mean to be argumentative or obtuse… a WUWT without your contributions would almost be unbearable, and the reactions I get from some “hard science” colleagues to “… well, I mentioned to Dr. Svalgaard… and his response was…” … refer to the American Express commercial.
Eric (11:54:30) :
Can’t wait till global data for August is released. Should put the final nail (well ok, the final nail has already been hammered a long while back) into the solar induced warming hypothesis.
This brings up an intriguing topic. Dare I resort to a primitive discussion of differential equations?
There has been confusing and contradictory data about the relationship between sunspots and temperature but, when you sit back and think about it, it’s all plausible. First some basics assumptions:
1) If the sunspot count (solar flux, really) matters, that’s just one of many factors. So don’t expect a high R-squared, even if you completely nail it down. There will be lots of “noise” from other factors.
2) If the sunspot count matters, it doesn’t drive T, it drives dT/dt (the first derivative of temperature with respect to time).
These two things help make sense out of a lot of things. It takes a long time for the impact of a weak solar cycle to accumulate to the point where it overwhelms everything else. The Maunder Minimum did that in spades, but it took a while. The Dalton Minimum wasn’t long enough to produce a big chill. So, it’s WAY too early to expect significant global temp effects from the current minimum.
Here’s a WAG on what’s going on. Shouldn’t the influence of sunspots be highly non-linear? Suppose the deflection of cosmic rays is proportional to 1/S where S is the average sunspot count (this is a huge simplification but stay with me here). Furthermore, the deflection is limited to 100% so we need a logarithm in the function. Put this all together and the cosmic rays getting in might look low for any sunspot count greater than, say, 10 but get significantly greater only for the low numbers.
So, the average sunspot count over the whole cycle wouldn’t be what matters, it’d be the amount of time it’s low. This could explain why some say it’s the LENGTH of the cycle, not the overall average that matters.
Ray-
U2(?) or The Police?