After an exciting encounter last week with some genuine sunspots that weren’t arguable as specks, pores, or pixels, the sun resumes its quiet state this week.
People send me things. Here’s the latest email from Paul Stanko, who has been following the solar cycle progression in comparison to previous ones.
Hi Anthony,
Out of the numbered solar cycles, #24 is now in 7th place. Only 5, 6, and 7 of the Dalton Minimum and cycles 12, 14, and 15 of the Baby Grand Minimum had more spotless days. Since we’ve now beaten cycle #13, we are clearly now competitive with the Baby Grand minimum.
Here’s a table of how the NOAA panel’s new SC#24 prediction is doing:
November 2008: predicted = 1.80, actual = 1.67 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 83.7)
December 2008: predicted = 1.80, actual = 1.69 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 84.7)
January 2009: predicted = 2.10, actual = 1.71 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 73.2)
February 2009: predicted = 2.70, actual = 1.67 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 55.6)
March 2009: predicted = 3.30, actual = 1.97 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 53.8)
April would require the October data which is still very incomplete. If this analysis intrigues you, I’d be happy to keep you updated on it. Please also find a couple of interesting graphs attached as images.
Paul Stanko
Here’s the graphs, the current cycle 24 and years of interest are marked with a red arrow:
And how 2008/2009 fit in:
http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/solar-warming-solar-cooling/
Gene Nemetz (14:22:23) :
I wasn’t agreeing with you Leif. Did you imagine I was??
Don’t care much either way.
Slightly OT…
Environment Canada back on Sept 1, had much of Canada above normal for the winter months(DJF)…..Oct 1, they have flip-flopped and now much of Canada is below normal….its worse than we thought…
@Gene Nemetz:
> According to these studies the level of activity on the sun affects your health
Gene, I can’t get at the underlying papers from you links (thanks for those) but from the abstracts, yes. Does that suprise you? I’m sure you’ll discover much else, keep digging! There’s a russian science paper from about 1907 I’ve been trying to dig up recently that’s supposed to have lots of health related correlation in it. No luck so far.
I’m afraid I’m pretty tired and heading for bed. Goodnight.
Leif Svalgaard (14:07:08) : The statement seems to be an attempt to explain how the ‘heated greenhouse gases’ influence our climate.
Certainly you know L&L better than most people and certainly better than me, that’s probably why I cannot figure out what is wrong wit the statement of Habibullo Abdussamatov. I still think that heated gases become less dense and will expand and rise and give their heat away. I always prefer to make things as simple as possible because I usually cannot understand complicated matters. This ability to explain complicated issues in a simple way was not only promoted my Feynman but also by Landau,
http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Landau
Landaus vitenskapelige stil var fri fra den dessverre ganske utbredte tendensen til å vanskeliggjøre det enkle (ofte begrunnet med generalitet og formalitet som uansett viser seg illusorisk). Selv strevde han mot det motsatte: å forenkle det kompliserte, å avdekke den sanne enkelhet i naturlovene. Denne evnen til å forenkle og anskueliggjøre var en egenskap han satte meget høyt.
http://ncwatch.typepad.com/media/2009/06/cooling-synergy-no-sunpots-and-more-volcanic-eruptions.html
Leif,
Is there any work like this involving vaccuum domains that you know of going on in the states and what credence would you give to the idea?
http://www.math.nsc.ru/directions/Geoeng.htm
Give the English a little latitude, the translation’s a bit rough in places.
ralph 11:17:55,
A slight increase in albedo has enormous impact on the incoming energy. Anything that impacts cloud formation will have a magnified impact.
“Leif Svalgaard (14:10:50) :
Mr. Alex (13:44:36) :
A better comparison would be solar cycle length.
There is no significant correlation between temperature and cycle length. If anything there is a [weak – and not significant] positive correlation: longer cycles = warmer:”
Neat graphs Leif, thanks.
I wasn’t referring to temperature correlation at all in the post, merely commenting on solar minima and how similar the current minimum is to the Dalton (in terms of cycle length), whilst the biased spotless days count shows otherwise; but thanks anyways.
For anyone interested, Leif has posted an update of the L&P Umbral Data Graph on the SC24.com message board: http://solarcycle24com.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=855
Leif writes:
“For 1027 [1026 he didn’t get], the mean of 12 spots over 4 days was:
1917 Gauss for field strength
0.850 for contrast”
Ian George (14:28:12) :
“Am I just seeing things or do some years that have a high number of spotless days are then followed by a very warm year or years?
Eg 1911-14 followed by a significant increase in temps in 1915 and 1916.
1922-24 followed by high temps in 1925 and 1926
1986 then follows increased temps 87 and 88
1976 and then a big increase in 1977
1996 and then a big increase 1997-1998
1964 followed by increases in 1965-67
1932-34 breaks the pattern a little (cool in 1935) but then increases from 1936-38
Is this a pattern?”
Ian George,
You will find plausible answers to your question here:
Also read the links in the article(s).
http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/
Invariant (15:08:23) :
I still think that heated gases become less dense and will expand and rise and give their heat away.
Yes, they expand and thereby become less dense, and hence rise and thereby cool. The jarring aspect was the fixation on ‘greenhouse gases’ and what their expansion has to do with anything: “Ascribing ‘greenhouse’ effect properties to the Earth’s atmosphere is not scientifically substantiated”.
Ron de Haan (15:10:24):
Volcanic eruptions and their climatic effects around the Dalton minimum may indeed be what fools people into believing the culprit is the Sun.
Aligner (15:14:14) :
Is there any work like this involving vaccuum domains that you know of going on in the states and what credence would you give to the idea?
Vacuum domains are not part of accepted science and I know of no reputable scientists working on those in the US or elsewhere. That could just be ignorance on my part 🙂
Leif Svalgaard (15:30:19) :The jarring aspect was the fixation on ‘greenhouse gases’ and what their expansion has to do with anything:
Thanks for the explanation. I will have to think about this for a while. The atmosphere is troublesome to understand since transients dominate it all – we can understand very little by a fixed steady state picture without any movement of anything.
“The influence of solar activity is plainly important in driving air temperature above the 200hPa level (about two thirds of the way into the troposphere). Ice cloud is also found in the stratosphere..
The upper atmosphere has an electrodynamic dimension (related to the increasing presence of plasma with elevation) that renders it susceptible to the influence of the flow of charged particles from the sun. This may be responsible for the change in surface pressure at the poles in relation to that at the equator and the phenomena whereby the upper tropical stratosphere suddenly cools as the polar stratosphere warms.
The atmosphere is asymmetric between north and south in part due to the presence of the Antarctic ice mound and the relative abundance of land at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere. The distribution of land and sea is a strong contributor to atmospheric dynamics. So, the hemispheres are essentially very different, a strong factor influencing atmospheric dynamics.
The atmosphere is not amenable to modeling that treats the globe as a closed system. Our understanding of atmospheric processes is elementary. Mathematicians who do not appreciate that the basic parameters driving climate are externally imposed and forever changing, are a hindrance to progress and best employed elsewhere.
It is unnecessary to invoke the increase in the concentration of trace gas concentration in the atmosphere as a cause of surface temperature change. This pattern of thought is nonsense. Natural processes are at work and these owe nothing to the activities of man. It is the height of folly to drive up the price of fossil fuels in pursuit of a furphy.
Footnote: A furphy, also commonly spelled furfie, is Australian slang for a rumour, or an erroneous or improbable story”.
From: http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/
Vacuum domains are not part of accepted science
Bin 🙂
How about the recent spin theory stuff
http://www.theresonanceproject.org/research.html
I guess this *is* accepted science, yes?
Paul Stanko’s version of spotless days is probably closer to the old standard than NOAA or SIDC. However, it’s not “official”. I suggest waiting another couple of weeks. The italian webpage http://daltonsminima.wordpress.com/dati-sole-in-diretta/ has a running daily update to http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html#Evolution As of Oct 3, we’re 10 days away from cycle 13 according to SIDC, and 7 days according to NOAA.
Leif:
Well, there’s a whole can of worms right there, isn’t there? Your point interested me so I did a Google and Wiki came up with this:
What intruiges me is that a huge decline in global temperatures (2 degrees), strongly correlated with low solar activity, has no firm explanation in the literature. It intruiges me because it demonstrates a lack of understanding, yet there is so much certainty surrounding a warming of 2 degrees in the other direction. It’s probably because I’m left-brained, but I see some inconsistency here.
I’m interested to know what you think when you see graphs like this one, as a solar physicist: (cosmic ray flux against temperature reconstruction). To me that there is a relationship is clear (although it’s causal properties are not so clear). When you look at this are you willing to conceed at least a long-term (millions of years) cause and effect, even if perhaps you aren’t willing to conceed a short-term one?
Lief,
Do you think the lack of sunspots during the Maunder minimum were careless counting, or just not correlated to TSI?
There was quite a lack for a long time…makes the Dalton minimum look pretty insignificant.
Ed
The suns total irradiance varies by 0.1% over the solar cycle and is out of step with the observed change in surface temperature. At the height of the sunspot cycle a La Nina cooling event is frequently experienced. Plainly, the temperature of the Earth is unrelated to the sunspot cycle. However, there is a second mode of variation in solar activity that is deterministic. This is the Quasi Biennial Oscillation.
QUASI-BIENNIAL OSCILLATIONS OF THE SOLAR MAGNETIC FIELDS E.V. Ivanov, V.N. Obridko, B.D. Shelting
Quasi-biennial oscillations (QBO) in various active events in the Sun are the second most powerful variation after the 11-year cycle. They are stable harmonic oscillations with a period changing noticeably from ~1.5 to ~3.0 years. QBO have been detected in the dynamics of sunspot indices, active longitudes, activity indices in the polar zone, magnetic field of the Sun as a star and large-scale field, solar irradiance, neutrino flux, coronal mass ejections, solar wind and heliospheric parameters, and geomagnetic activity.
http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/solar-warming-solar-cooling/
OT Eruption at Cleveland volcano:
http://volcanism.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/eruption-at-cleveland-volcano-alaska/
It’s much worse than the pure spotless days numbers would suggest.
The Area measurements of the spots are way down, as compared to runs such as 1911-13.
Most likely attributed to L&P effect, we don’t see them.
And if that were not enough, not only are we seeing smaller and weaker spots, we spent a huge amount of time with little to no visible facula. That, coupled with the spotless days records, makes a running, blow by blow tally with the cycles that daily spots were counted/measured all pale by comparison.
SC23-24 isn’t over yet, and while we have no really detailed data from the Dalton, SC23-24 will end up with the Dalton cycles or right behind them. All that has to take place is for SC24 to continue doing what it has been doing all along: A Walter Payton dead-leg fake on the linebacker.
I’ll let the experts in here figure out how that translates into Solar Cooling.
Walter Dnes (15:59:03) :
Paul Stanko’s version of spotless days is probably closer to the old standard than NOAA or SIDC.
His first graph is dubious as we do not have daily sunspot numbers before 1818, so cannot compute ‘spotless days’ for cycle 1 to 8, yet he shows such values. I’m trying to get him to explain where they come from.
Ron de Haan (15:50:44) :
The upper atmosphere has an electrodynamic dimension (related to the increasing presence of plasma with elevation) that renders it susceptible to the influence of the flow of charged particles from the sun.
This is a muddled and misunderstood and vague and somewhat wrong description of things. I have pointed that out to Erl dozens of times, but he refuses to learn.
UV from the Sun [not charged particles] basically creates the ionosphere, and heats the upper atmosphere causing it to expand. In addition, there are currents flowing into the polar ionosphere from the tail of the Earth’s magnetosphere [not from the Sun]. These currents heats the upper atmosphere too.
This may be responsible for the change in surface pressure at the poles in relation to that at the equator
The density of the atmosphere decreases by a factor of 1000 for each 50 km you ascend, so up in the ionosphere and thermosphere the density is down by a factor of a million [at 100 km] to a trillion [at 200 km], and expansion of contraction of whatever of that small amount of air has no measurable effect on surface pressure.
The rest of the comment is just rants and generalities [even platitudes].
Aligner (15:58:18) :
I guess this *is* accepted science, yes?
I’m afraid not.
Robinson (16:06:17) :
I’m interested to know what you think when you see graphs like this one, as a solar physicist: (cosmic ray flux against temperature reconstruction).
Can’t see the graph as it doesn’t want to be hot-linked to. You have to save the graph [or screen shot of the graph], then upload the image to someplace then linking to that.
“What then is the actual cause of sudden stratospheric warming?”
Scherhag suggested a connection with solar activity. His successors at the Free University of Berlin have established strong links between temperature above 200hPa and solar activity. These you can investigate at:
http://strat-www.met.fu-berlin.de/products/cdrom/html/section6.html#fig31
However, linking change in the weather with solar influences, even in the stratosphere, is unfashionable. If the sun determines weather, a raft of people might be seen to be both misguided and even a burden on the public purse”.
http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/the-atmosphere-dancing-in-the-solar-wind-el-nino-shows-his-face/
It is seems to me that the alarmists are in a win win situation and that the AGW debate will go on for decades. It appears that global mean CO2 emissions are trending downwards:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_trend_gl.png
This is no doubt because of the massive world wide propaganda campaign regarding the alleged danger of excess CO2 to life on the planet and the recent downturn on industrial activity. This may be offset somewhat by population increase but still should trend downwards.
If so and global temperatures decrease then the alarmists will claim that it is the reduction of CO2 that is causing this. If temperatures do not decrease then the alarmists will claim that we have to do more on reducing CO2 emissions.
Therefore they are in a win win situation and the sceptics are in a lose lose one (unless CO2 emissions do not decrease but temperatures do). So, as it stands I can see no resolution to the issue in most of our lifetimes.
Ed (16:12:59) :
Do you think the lack of sunspots during the Maunder minimum were careless counting
No, I speculate that the sunspots were there, but were invisible [the L&P effect]. The evidence for this is that the Sun were still modulating cosmic rays during the MM just as now, so the solar cycle was still operating.
Ron de Haan (16:16:26) :
This is the Quasi Biennial Oscillation.
It shouldn’t be called that, as it has nothing to do with the similarly named QBO in the Earth’s atmosphere.
On the Sun, activity comes in pulses or spurts, especially when activity is low [so spurts don’t overlap too much]. A particularly good example is solar cycle 14: http://www.leif.org/research/SC14.png