Guest post by David Archibald
In a presentation dated 22nd September, 2009, Dr Svalgaard produced a graphic which can be interpreted to predict the timing of the Solar Cycle 24 maximum.
That presentation is available here: http://www.leif.org/research/Predicting%20the%20Solar%20Cycle.ppt
That graphic is reproduced with my annotation:
Dr Svalgaard annotated Altrock’s orgininal figure with the red and aqua arrows. What is significant is that the Solar Cycle 24 arrow is 15 years after the Solar Cycle 23 arrow. With the maximum of Solar Cycle 23 in March 2000, that line suggests that the Solar Cycle 24 maximum will be in 2015.
With the timing of the next maximum established, we can compare the progression of the current minimum with the minimum that saw the beginning of the Maunder Minimum. Makarov and Tlatov in 2000 included a figure from Kocharov 1995. That figure follows, with my annotation:
Tree rings from the Urals have more uses than just making hockey sticks. Due to the paucity of sunspots in the Maunder Minimum (1645 – 1710), C14 data provides the evidence for the presence of solar cycles and their length. According to Makarov and Tlatov, solar cycles averaged 20 years long in the Maunder. In Figure 2 above, solar minima are associated with higher C14 content and are on the top side of the graphic. I have marked the solar minima with vertical blue lines. The blue figures along the x axis are the length of the solar cycles from minimum to minimum in years.
To compare the start of the Maunder Minimum to our current day minimum, I have marked where the maximum of Solar Cycle 24 would be in 2015 as 15 years after the peak of the preceding cycle. There is also a parallel in the way that the C14 count (reflecting the neutron flux and in turn the GCR flux) is climbing above the peaks of previous minima, as it is today with the Oulu neutron count. Neutron count tends to peak a year after solar maximum, so a neutron peak in 2010 is consistent with solar minimum in 2009.
From Figure 2, it can be expected that in a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the neutron flux will remain well above the levels reached in the minima of the second half of the 20th century.
The Maunder Minimum was not completely devoid of sunspots, as shown by the following graphic using data from SIDC:
Lastly, the Heliospheric Current Sheet has flattened, one of the conditions for the solar minimum:
A ramp up in Solar Cycle 24 activity might not be expected though until the downtrend line in tilt angle from the peak in 2000 is broken, and that might be a year away.
Summary
Activity and timing of the current minimum, as well as the timing of the Solar Cycle 24 maximum in 2015, is paralleling the start of the Maunder Minimum. There is no data to date which diverges from the pattern of the start of the Maunder Minimum.
The LIA spanned four minima: Wolf, Spörer, Maunder, Dalton. No single one of them would have been “the cause” of the LIA. It is interesting, however, that each one of the first three were “deeper” than the one previous. There was first the Oort which in the 11th century was fairly mild compared to the others. After the Oort came the Medieval maxium and then the Wolf, Spörer, and Maunder minima, each one deeper than the previous (in terms of 14C) at roughly 200 year intervals. After Maunder, there is the weaker Dalton as 14C levels are on the road to recovery to the Modern Maximum.
If there is something to the 200 year interval, we would be “due” for another significant minimum soon, if it has not already begun.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_mag/512/
Reverse polarity spot showing up…check out this match of location below.
“We’ve been waiting for this,” says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight in Huntsville, Alabama. “A backward sunspot is a sign that the next solar cycle is beginning.”
Read the rest at
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/15aug_backwards.htm
fuelmaker (14:46:16) :
That’s interesting. Along the same lines as tallbloke’s oceanic heat-release mode. When the reserves are gone, the big icy plunge will take place.
Eruptions at Mayon, Philippines:
Evacuation underway at Mayon Volcano.
Bigger eruption expected.
http://volcanism.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/eruptions-at-mayon/
History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayon_Volcano
Jim Arndt (15:24:19) :
You don’t have long to wait for the answer as to what’s behind door #3.
3 years, no windup on the solar cycle.
”
Jim Arndt (15:24:19) :
You don’t have long to wait for the answer as to what’s behind door #3.
3 years, no windup on the solar cycle.”
Oh that Mayan thing 2012 – unfortunately it wont happen. The calender just starts a new period and not the end of anything, just like that Y2K thing start a new period and nothing different.
As for the temperatures dropping is a forgone conclusion since both AMO and PDO and either negative or turning negative. About the only thing that correlates to the solar cycle is the AMO and PDO but this simply may be because both are decadal and simply be in sequence. Since we only have good data for 1.5 complete PDO cycles. Now look at the solar cycle which we have 23 complete cycles but only shows 100 to 108 year cycle, sort of. Not that I agree or do not agree with with another tree ring paper but we could wiggle match all day and something will fit.
I have been looking in more depth at the global temperatures [or sst ] that existed during the Maunder Minimum. I found a tree -ring based reconstruction of the AMO since 1567 technical paper[Gray et al]. The interesting part is that they showed a rising NORTH ATALANTIC SST from a dip in1600 to about 1690. If the sun was inactive during the Maunder minimum[ 1645-1710] , how could the Atlantic ocean warm during this period.[ all due to AMO?] Also the only dips in ocean temperatures were around 1600 and again a few dips 1710-1720. I know 1709 winter was cold . Central England was cooler 1670-1710 but I wonder how much cold there really was in the rest of the world if Atlantic sst was warming .Greenland Oxygen isotope record[per Prof. Easterbrook paper] shows three cool periods between 1640 and 1740 but this may apply to Greenland mostly. Has anyone else examined all the proxies for this period?
See fig #2 below
http://wwwpaztcn.wr.usgs.gov/julio_pdf/Gray_ea_AMO.pdf
“how could the Atlantic ocean warm during this period”
A change in wind direction/speed blowing more warm water from Southerly locations to the North.
Generally caused by a more regional pressure gradient changed as happens when pressure systems appear in different locations or of different polarity (e.g. and area that had a persistent high pressure area during some time of the year now has a persistent low pressure area causing a reversal of predominant wind directions).
Dr Svalgaard risks falsification already 2015, if he is wrong. The late Karl R. Popper would have liked it.
I can’t let this kind of attributing to Karl Popper go by without challenge.
I like David Archibald’s stuff. It’s interesting. However, I wouldn’t consider it science, because there is no theory in the sense of causative mechanism to explain the phenomena.
I suspect Karl Popper would have a similar view.
John Finn (02:18:50) :
Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory has the temperature effect from the length of a solar cycle over the next cycle. Solar Cycle 23 may have ended in 2009, so there is plenty of time yet for the consequent temperature drop, possibly right out to 2029 if it is a Maunder-type length.
Geoff Sharp (06:16:22) :
We are at least due for a de Vries cycle event, which come along every 210 years or so. The last one of those was the Dalton Minimum which started 212 years ago. The Medieval Maximum missed a de Vries event, but otherwise they have been very reliable for the last 2,000 years. We are also due for a Bond Event, which has a 1,470 year odd period. The last one of those was in the Dark Ages. In the second half of the 20th century, the Sun was more active than it had been for the previous 8,000 years. So we have lived in a special time as far as high solar activity is concerned. Are you ruling out a Maunder-type experience because it requires belief that we could experience departure from the normal? Significant departure from the normal has already been experienced in our lifetime.
anna v (06:42:36) :
Re the relevance of Figure 2. To that into context, when I started out in this field in 2005, it was a case of saying if the predictions of Clilverd and Badalyan are borne out, then we will have a Dalton Minimum repeat. Solar behaviour since then suggests that a Dalton Minimum repeat is the minimum expectation from here. Three levels of outcome remain on the table: Dalton, Maunder and Bond Event. What is very good about the Altrock/Svalgaard figure is that it is pretty definite about the timing of solar maximum. My curiosity is about the future, so I got that one piece of data (2015 for solar max) and I see if it fits in with how the Maunder started. It fits. That does not mean that we will have a Maunder outcome. I know it is not much better than reading entrails, but it is all we have at the moment. It is better than whining that it is all too difficult.
On Oulu, the Ap Index is still dropping. So far for November it is 2.2. Oulu can be expected to continue to rise for a year after solar minimum. At the trajectory it has established, I expect it to be 7,200 late next year. That would look very similar to the rise in C14 at the beginning of the Maunder in Figure 2. Once again it is a bit of pattern matching that does not preclude a Maunder outcome.
Figure 2 serves another purpose. It shows us what continuous solar minimum will look like. Even the warmers concede a 0.1 degree change from solar maximum to solar minimum. Well that 0.1 degrees will become cumulative annually.
Further to the Dalton/Maunder outcome, the late ramp up of Solar Cycle 24 is now just as late as the start of Solar Cycle 5 (relative to its inception at Solar Cycle 4 maximum). It is also a lot weaker in terms of sunspot activity.
Philip_B (17:56:43)
Not science? I am only able to do what I do because the professionals on government salaries have left a void to be filled. It is bizarre. The climate science field is getting billions of dollars of research funding, and I am able to make original observations because the full timers are too slack, or have no natural curiosity, or imagination. As for a lack of a mechanism, there is a very good model but I can not mention it because it is awaiting publication. It hindcasts beautifully. It is based on the force that dare not speak its name (not homosexuality, it is the force that can’t be mentioned on WUWT).
Ref: crosspatch (22:29:52) :
—
The problem is that we have so little experience watching the Sun (only several hundred years) that we can’t really say. While this might look a lot like Maunder, maybe the Maunder type minimum was a fluke and doesn’t happen often. Or maybe it happens more and more often and lasts longer and longer as you reach the end of the interglacial.
—
I.G. Usoskin, S.K. Solanki, G.A. Kovaltsov have a rather good reconstruction of the the Grand Minima and Maxima events during the Holocene in their paper located at http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/7704.pdf
Based on their count, we have had about 27 Grand Minima in the last 11174 years. In their definition, a Grand Minima is “(smoothed) SN level is less than 15 during at least two consecutive decades.” The Dalton was not a Grand, but the Maunder was.
David Archibald (18:01:13) :
Geoff Sharp (06:16:22) :
We are at least due for a de Vries cycle event, which come along every 210 years or so. The last one of those was the Dalton Minimum which started 212 years ago. The Medieval Maximum missed a de Vries event, but otherwise they have been very reliable for the last 2,000 years. We are also due for a Bond Event, which has a 1,470 year odd period. The last one of those was in the Dark Ages. In the second half of the 20th century, the Sun was more active than it had been for the previous 8,000 years. So we have lived in a special time as far as high solar activity is concerned. Are you ruling out a Maunder-type experience because it requires belief that we could experience departure from the normal? Significant departure from the normal has already been experienced in our lifetime.
Yes I agree, the 14c Holocene record clearly shows solar downturns occurring approx every 200 years. The MWP is a rare time where the cycle is broken, but there is a good reason. I have developed a method with quantifies the regular solar downturns and allows us to predict the future with some certainty. Using this method the next grand minimum looks to be weak and after that we have it very easy for the next 1000 years. If you want to know more I would be most happy to explain, I am also in Oz.
http://www.landscheidt.info/images/Future.png
Yeah, that isn’t enough time. We really can’t tell, for example, what was going on at the end of the last interglacial and during the last glaciation. At least not as far as I have been able to locate.
There have been some studies using 10Be (e.g. Solar Activity Induced Pronounced Temperature Oscillations During the Late Pleistocene to the Early Holocene in the Northeastern North America Huang et al 2008) going back to the late Pleistocene but nothing much else beyond the late Pleistocene / early Holocene. We just don’t know what the sun does over a a complete climate cycle of interglacial through glacial and back. Maybe the Maunder is “nothing” compared to deep minima experienced in glacial periods or maybe it oscillates wildly during glacial periods, who knows? And glacial period is the period we spend the most amount of time in (about 90% of the time over at least the past 2 million years and maybe longer).
We (humanity) will have much more authority on the subject in about 100,000 years from now when we have observed one complete climate cycle. At that point we should have pretty good documentation of how the sun does or does not relate to climate and what is “normal” and what is abnormal. Basically, all of the solar activity of the Holocene might be considered “abnormal” if it turns out that the sun acts quite differently during glacial periods and what we would consider to be “abnormal” might turn out to be quite normal.
David,
I meant science in the Popperian sense (predictive theory). Climate models aren’t science in the Popperian sense either (IMO).
As I said, I find your stuff interesting and often thought provoking.
Model … is based on the force that dare not speak its name
Baryocentric?
David Archibald (18:01:13) :
Excellent point, David. It is far better to try than to throw our hands up in the air proclaiming it’s too difficult.
SSam (18:48:57) :
The Maunder started up a cycle, turned on the ramp, and promtly nose-dived into a 60-80 yr. hiatus of very isolated spots. Not just months, years. What do we know about the cycles before the Maunder? One good one, one bum one, and then poof.
crosspatch (19:20:03) :
Basically, all of the solar activity of the Holocene might be considered “abnormal” if it turns out that the sun acts quite differently during glacial periods and what we would consider to be “abnormal” might turn out to be quite normal.
It is very likely that the Sun’s patterns of grand minima do not change across the interglacial/glacial periods. The output is probably not different to what we see in the proxy records, but the shape of Earths orbit and tilt etc are the main influence on the glacial periods. Two factors, one modulates solar output on a small scale, the other changes the way we receive that output.
Someone with real expertise help me out on this. I keep watching the climate data, looking for something that might be a signature of the “Svensmark effect” — that is seeing this solar minimum starting to cool things off. I’m looking for a cooling “effect” just over the last few years when the sunspots (and flux, etc.) have been low.
I don’t see it here:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
I don’t see it here:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
or at any of the other sea ice sites.
Wait. Maybe I do. Intuitively, more clouds would mean less ice melting in the summer (as the sun’s rays are blocked) but also somewhat less ice forming in the winter (as clear nights are the ones that get super cold). There are other effects such as arctic winds and currents, which act as “noise” on the effect I’m looking for. Plus, there is the “inertia” of the ice thickness, which makes summer melting “easy,” plus affects the albedo, plus (and this is important) leaves the ice broken up and more easily swept into the gulf stream by the currents.
But (accepting all those confounding effects) increased clouds would tend to yield, more or less, pretty much what we have been seeing now for a couple of years. The low sea ice of 2007 could have easily “tipped” the situation — as Gore predicted. The low Arctic Sea ice was almost to an endangered species which didn’t have enough “population” to sustain itself. But, that progression was halted and has now somewhat reversed. Next year’s summer melt will be VERY interesting though it doesn’t look like we’ll still be in a solar minimum by then.
What I’m hinting at is that the way big solar minimums lead to little ice ages is via growth in the Arctic sea ice. Eventually, we get to a point where the sea ice is really big all summer and the albedo effects are significant. Then everything is affected. This effect would make any change in global temp greatly lag behind solar cycles and be too slow to respond to anything less than a long term shift.
I’m not a climatologist and this all seems a bit convoluted but it does fit the current observation. Someone straighten me out on this.
Jim Arndt (16:33:22) :
I wasn’t referring to 2012 or Planet Niburu. Those are fear-driven what-ifs.
As for a correlation of Solar Cycle activity to Climate, they are associated, not correlated. There’s too much noise of other cycles mixed in with the signal for it to be that easy. A chain of events starting at the Sun and you get a chain of events on the Earth that looks suspiciously similar, yet muddled. It’s an overall appreciation. It will take a lot of hard work to disentangle, but already necessity is driving the studies and findings forward. We surely will not get any such knowledge out of polyscientific AGW/IPCC fearmongering or grandstanding.
Frederick Michael (19:58:41) :
If you have a very warm planet with plenty of heat stored in the ocean, and then along comes Solar Minimum and cooling, the first thing that is going to happen is that the energy stored in the oceans is going to seek the coldest place it can find to get transported away.
Look at Cyrosphere today, and the comparison images:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=11&fd=12&fy=2007&sm=11&sd=12&sy=2009
You’ll see 2 things here:
1.) The 100% ice extent is much greater right now.
2.) The finger of warm water coming up the Atlantic has the Ice melted much further than previous years. On the opposite side of the path of that warmer water, you have lots of snow & ice on the sea & landmasses. That make sense to you? Warm water meet excruciating cold and the heat escapes into space.
This may not be the best explanation for what’s going on. None of this is easy or straightforward, unlike the simplistic model of AGW where everything is easy as 1,2,3. Nature is messy.
Finite. The energy stored in the oceans in a cooling world has a limit, wherein once exhausted, the situation changes rapidly, and there’s nothing anybody can do except try to be prepared.
No treaty, no tax, no bill or law will make one iota of difference.
Good luck on your quest to discover for yourself what is going on.
That is the best way.
” rbateman (19:59:01) :
Jim Arndt (16:33:22) :
I wasn’t referring to 2012 or Planet Niburu. Those are fear-driven what-ifs.”
Uhh no I did not say any thing about that I was referring to a minority thinking that this is what it is. There are no what if’s about that!!!
Look this is WAG at its best. I can say for 99.99999% that we will not be hit by a 3km asteroid in 10 days but that does not mean that it will not be.
All I say is what will cause this. What is the Physics behind it nobody has put any reason other than some graphs, where is the data. It is pseudoscience in my opinion.
“the shape of Earths orbit and tilt etc are the main influence on the glacial periods. ”
That is the part that I don’t fully buy. The reason is that at the end of this past ice age, we went from maximum glaciation to maximum warmth in an extremely short period of time (a decade or two). Prior to that near the very end of the Pleistocene, there was a very unstable period where weather patterns apparently changed wildly on a century scale. It would go from the coldest of the age to modern day temperatures, stay there for 20 to 50 years and then swing back suddenly to brutal cold for another 50 years. It wasn’t a gradual change as one would expect if orbital mechanics were the main driver. I believe orbital mechanics are an enabling factor, but not the trigger. Something else goes on as we come out of an ice age that is extremely abrupt.
Even during the Holocene, there have been many abrupt and quite dramatic climate changes the causes of which are still not understood.
Those are just two examples. The research record is full of records of extremely abrupt climate changes. There are records of major shifts in trade winds, ocean circulation, movement of the ITCZ, changes in monsoons, etc. We don’t know why these happen because we haven’t experienced one of these abrupt changes yet during recoded history.
These events are extremely disruptive to the environment. They will be extremely disruptive to our culture and possibly our very lives when they happen again … and they will. Paleoclimatology shows us that these events are fairly frequent over geological time.
And these events are so far between in human years that it doesn’t make sense to invest a lot of resources in attempting to put any mitigation measures in place sort of possibly having a plan on the shelf just in case. But even then we don’t know what kind of change we will get. It might be a lot of rain in the Great Basin that floods Salt Lake, it might be extreme cold that makes Canada practically uninhabitable, we just don’t know.
But the one part I don’t buy is that it orbital mechanics completely explains why. Why are ice ages global? Why don’t they oscillate between Northern and Southern Hemisphere? When NH insolation is lowest, SH insolation is greatest. Why doesn’t the SH go into glaciation when the NH comes out?
There is more going on than simply orbital mechanics.
Jim Arndt (21:39:36) :
If we knew nothing at all, we would be making WAGS. And I really don’t believe that is what we are doing here. It’s not Sci-Fi, it’s an attempt to make sense of a very complicated mechanism, and it’s a necessary endeavor.
The worst thing we can do is to remain silent while polyscience runs amok and plays God with our Climate and existence. They really do mean to alter the Earth’s Climate by brute force, and they don’t care if they get it wrong or what the consequences might be.
I’m not afraid of adapting to the Climate as we have always done.
I’m not afraid to try and understand the Climate.
I am very worried about people who want to run global experiments on Earth who sport a mess of failed prediction based on what they claim to know.
Climatologists should catch up with chaotic dynamics and complexity issues .
Deterministic chaos is when there are definite deterministic equations and solutions, but too many of them in conflicting paths. Tsonis et al made a start in applying this type of analysis to climate, but we are a long way off, so we end up with hand wavings and cookings, a cup of this, so many teaspoons of that etc. You can always tell there is flour in the cake, a clear correlation flour/cake, but the way/equations it has mixed with is opaque to logic.
David Archibald (18:43:26) :
As for a lack of a mechanism, there is a very good model but I can not mention it because it is awaiting publication. It hindcasts beautifully. It is based on the force that dare not speak its name (not homosexuality, it is the force that can’t be mentioned on WUWT).
Hindcasts with no parameters to twiddle? Von Neumann had said : “give me four parmeters and I can fit any curve, give me five and I can fit an elephant”.
Unmentionable force? I am sure if it is a real force, i.e. enters or comes out of the equations of motion of a dynamic system it will be mentionable.
If it is a virtual force as the effect of barycentric motion, for which not only theoretical but also experimental proof exists, then maybe you are right.