December sunspots on the rise

As the windchill temp is -10 today, I can say the sunspot activity hasn’t had much effect yet. But I look forward to a toasty January if the trend keeps up.

The solar flux index is 75 and has been dropping. I personally don’t expect this group of spots to last much longer. I wonder whether Livinngston and Penn have analyzed this and recent spots to determine whether they continue to fit their model.

Looks like the original prediction of “high activity” for cycle 24 might turn out to be correct after all – just a couple of years late.

I really enjoyed this…!

Are you sure somebody is not trying to “hide a decline”? You never can tell these days!
Not that OT, UK – cold wet & miserable in the south-west, curiously, as it frequently does occur, above the line from Bristol & the River Severn, & London & the Thames Estuary, it’s colder still with snow & ice. I say curiously because it was the line I was lead to believe where the ice limit occurred in the last ice-age(s). Then again that was over forty years ago now in History classes, I expect it has all changed these days.
HNY everyone!

>Are you sure somebody is not trying to “hide a decline”? You never can tell these days!
Well, to be fair, lately NOAA has been counting even very small spots that would have never been counted before. This month’s sunspot count especially is a bit inflated.
Anyway, the sunspot count might be subject to interpretation, but sun geomagnetic indices, which are instrumentally measured, are still very low.

Hopefully they will help lift the ice from my riverside walk that was perilous earlier! I’m unsure whether I want the sun to ramp up or not – if it stayed quiet we’d be seeing an end to the AGW tomfoolery within the decade but would be a bad thing for human society.

Would someone be kind and explain to me what the implication of this is on earth’s climate? If someone is willing to do this, you don’t need to hold back on the physics. I’m sorry but I’ve read all the posts on sunspots for several months and still haven’t come across what this might all be about. THanks!!!!

Baa Humbug, Exactly. I’d love to see the latest sunspot prediction curve for the cycle 24. A few years ago, the prognosticators were claiming that the delay in sunspots would only result in a higher intensity of spots once they began. It think, (amatuer solar astronomer here) that we are seeing an overall depressed cycle 24. Less area under the curve, slower to start, sooner to finish, less in height. Bob.

I’m probably way off base here, but, isn’t there a lag time between solar sunspots and world-wide temperature? Sort of like when the shortest day is Dec. 21, but it continues to get colder until Feb. 18 when the pace of the earth cooling matches the solar warming effects. What I’m saying is that we could be in for more cooling until 2012-2014 before a warmin uptrend begins to assert itself.
Just asking.

From Dr Leif Svalgaard’s Research page:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
Looks like Cycle 24 is ramping up for sure.

I’d like the increased solar activity to resolve the query in my mind that perhaps a more active sun cools the stratosphere by increasing the rate of energy to space whereas a quiet sun warms the stratosphere by decreasing the rate of energy loss to space.
Either way there would be a knock on effect involving the rate of energy transfer from the troposphere.
Imagine a reduction of energy release from the oceans to the air during a negative PDO phase being aggravated by a faster loss of energy from the stratosphere caused by a more active sun.
Now if we get a strong La Nina in a year or so plus a more active sun as we come out of the solar minimum then that should resolve the issue one way or another. Either the current trend towards cooling will accelerate or it won’t.
Interesting times.

OK… you win it’s the sun… we realize we were wrong about that…. but the real problem is that our oceans are turning acid… we have the data to prove it, and it is much worch than we thought… we even did a little demonstration before congress… now, you realize, of course, that the acidification data is not subject to FOIA, requests and neither is any of the other data we have… so stop asking… you people are very annoying and you are keeping us from saving the planet.
Thanks,
True Science

Sunspots don’t produce heat. An uptick in the solar wind will lead to an increase in the earth’s magnetic field, a drop in cosmic rays, and therefore a lower planetary aldebo. But it will take years for the magnetic field to catch up to the solar wind. An uptick in solar activity now translates into warming in two or three years. For now, expect the cooling to continue. Expect the hudson to freeze.

Danimals:
“Would someone be kind and explain to me what the implication of this is on earth’s climate?”
see: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece
As I understand it, it could relate to Henrik Svensmark’s work. The idea is that particles in cosmic rays penetrating the atmosphere provide the “seed nuclei” for clouds to form.
When the sun is in a period of relative inactivity, its magnetic field is weak, and when that’s the case, it is less effective in shielding the earth from charged cosmic particles. Hence, more clouds form, and so less heat from the sun gets through to warm the earth – resulting in global cooling.
However, when the sun is more active, its magnetic field deflects more cosmic particles and so less clouds form, and therefore more heat gets through. Sunspots are a sign of solar magnetic activity, hence the correlation between them and global warming.
Svensmark had a devil of a job raising funding to test his theory in the laboratory because it was hardly on-message in AGW terms, but eventually, he did, and demonstrated the effect experimentally. Now Cern is involved, are looking to test the theory on a much larger scale, and have much better funding to do that.
If I have any of this wrong, which is quite possible as I’m not an expert, doubtless someone will correct me, and I’d welcome that.

Jerry M (07:35:05) :
I’m probably way off base here, but, isn’t there a lag time between solar sunspots and world-wide temperature? Sort of like when the shortest day is Dec. 21, but it continues to get colder until Feb. 18 when the pace of the earth cooling matches the solar warming effects. What I’m saying is that we could be in for more cooling until 2012-2014 before a warmin uptrend begins to assert itself.
Just asking.
_____________
Jerry, I’m trying to find a paper put out recently by an insurance actuarialist who, having some time on his hands, applied his mathematical expertise to sunspot cycles and weather/temperature patterns and he found several things:
1) He was amazed with the correlation he saw (having worked just with health/life demographics for insurance estimates, typically his results are rather imprecise), and
2) He did indeed see a definite lag of about 2-3 years. So I’m expecting really cold weather to set in 2-3 years after the deep solar minimum which we may be in now, or it may not have happened quite yet.
Now I just have to find that reference.

Christopher Moncton and Al Gore debate at last!
http://pathstoknowledge.net/2009/12/30/christopher-moncton-and-al-gore-debate-at-last

To:
Leif Svalgaard (07:59:22)
and
Galen Haugh (08:06:01),
Hey guys, thanks a lot for taking the time for my question – it was splendid help and very appreciated!!
Dan
New Jersey, USA.

We urgently need a tax on sun spots now, to keep the numbers down.
Sun spot trading anyone?

Steve, Tallblokes, Galen,
Thanks, all. This is what I love about this site – always learning something new every day.

Some posters above have been queuing for some insight to the possible relation between sunspot counts and climate change. I have done a little low key research along these lines. This is using pre-1990 type of science, you know, old-school.
Over long periods of time, say decades, if an extremely low sunspot count average tends to result in a cooling earth and if an extremely high sunspot count average tends to result in a warmer earth, like 1940s to 2002, then there must be a point somewhere between these extremes where there is basically no change in the earth’s temperature at all. But what average sunspot count would that be? My research led to a count of somewhere between 44-47.
I came to this number by doing an eleven year boxed average over the sunspot counts from 1700 to 2009 to remove the sine component. This is the same as an eleven year moving average advanced 5.5 years into the future to allow peaks and valleys to coincide at the same year as an un-averaged graph points.
You can try it yourselves. Go to http://www.sidc.be/DATA/yearssn.dat to get years and yearly average sunspot numbers. Separate into column one and two on a spreadsheet. In new column, for each year, average that year plus the five year before and the five years following. Now plot years and the averages in column three. You can now view this chart not as a temperature anomaly but as a factor which forces the global temperature anomaly.
Make a fourth column. For each year take the average sunspot number in column three and subtract, let’s say 46 from it and multiply this difference by a tiny number, say 0.00025 and add it to the previous value of the year before. That is: =D(n-1) + (C(n) – 46)*0.00025 for each year in row n. Now plot years in column one by this anomaly in column four. Look familiar? That’s pretty close to your average chart you see when looking at the global temperature anomaly found all over the internet, roughly.
This seems to imply the sun’s influence on the global temperatures but correlation is not cause. However, the sun is our very major source of all energy input so in the old-school science, I would first want to prove this wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt. The exact mechanism how the sun seems to exert 8-10 times the influence than is shown by irradiance variance is currently unknown. Some question the electric aspect via ions in solar wind. Some question the magnetic ties to the sun’s magnetic field. Neutrino flow would be a slimmer chance of influence and VERY hard to prove it, if any. These would, however, tend to explain why the other planets also have shown heating in the previous few decades. The clouds and water vapor are, of course, major players in heat retention and redistribution.
There’s a little insight into a far fetched relationship I stumbled upon.
By the way, the 0.00025, it’s units are (+/-) degrees / year / sunspot count in Celsius. Can account for ~0.00003 by irradiance. Real science will have to help here! This is just my best guess to the correct amount.
Yes, I know, there’s a hockey stick graph right in front of you now, strictly from the sun’s variability. Maybe AGW scientists had the anomaly correct but the cause wrong, the sun’s furnace, not 366 PPM of CO2.
A sample spreadsheet row 11: A is 1710.5, B is 3, C is =AVERAGE(B6:B16), D is =D10+(C11-46)*0.00025 .

Also, when you view that graph, keep in mind that major factors as El Nino, La Nina, PDO, AO, NAO etc can delay or advance this line for many years. The two major ways for the Earth to “hide” heat. On is to shove it deep in the oceans. The other is to absorb it in melting ice. To show “self heating” is the opposite. Seems these factors are why this graph doesn’t exactly follow the anomaly reconstructions.

This slide show might spin your head around to how complex this situation is, with many, many variables and complex systems.
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/solar-cycles/IanwilsonForum2008.pdf

You have to ask why they don`t run the old equipment alongside the modern, might it be they are trying to hide the decline.

Robert Jones (07:30:43) Here is the Dec 8, 2009 sunspot graph with the red prediction line from the NOAA:
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/sunspot.gif
John M Reynolds

Ref – Leif Svalgaard (10:06:34) :
“Robuk (09:50:31) :
You have to ask why they don`t run the old equipment alongside the modern, might it be they are trying to hide the decline.”
“But they do, and it does not make any difference. Here is the telescope Wolf used: ..”
__________________________
Outstanding! Surprised they don’t have in enclosed.

The high peaks are during times, when the Sun approaches the solar-system barycenter. At these times, the
Sun moves in the contrary (retrograde or highly inclined) direction for a short while, and has got a negative
angular momentum (with respect to the invariant plane), so it should actually subtract in a vector sum of the
system, but here it is added in the scalar sum (there is no negative scalar (absolute value or vector length)
“Simon Filiatrault (07:00:09) : angular momentum)…
The first derivation of angular momentum sum (fig. 78) only little matches the sun-spot cycle, but the highpeak
arround 1990 could be correlated with a drop of solar-flare activity at the middle of preceeding Sunspot
cycle 22, both peaks arround 1800 and 1990 having a damping effect on the Solar activity, possibly due to
effects of exchange between Sun orbital angular momentum and spin angular momentum.
The “wave” of approximate period of 854 years, which could also probably be anti-correlated with Sun spin”
I would really like to know what inside the sun could cause this. What I mean are there physics involved? If so what type of physics or even the physical mechanism that can explain this statement. Thanks.

Ref – wmsc (10:25:36) :
“Why should the AGW crowd want to maintain a status quo pegged at some predetermined preindustrial date?”
___________________
Once read: ‘Humans evolved during and are the product of the Ice Age.’ If the paleologists, climatologists, etc. are right then we sure need to get used to warmer temps, no ice, and higher sea levels. Ice Ages don’t last long during the solar system’s trek around the MilkyWay. It’s kinda: Short Winter, Long Summer, Short Winter, Long Summer, or so I seem to recall. No real Autumn or Spring to speak of (unless one counts the rise and decent periods). I guess the AGW crowd will want to spend a lot of money to even out the Sun’s orbit and make everything nice and cool.

“This is depressing. These sunspots are going to warm the earth giving fuel to the warmers.”
Even so, it will be weaker than late 20th century activity. The next minimum will likely be as big; as the one we just went through. Also consider; this lower solar activity is happening along with negative PDO. So the overall trend will be cooling of the climate, at least for 2-3 decades.
Remember, late 20th century warming coincided with higher solar activity and positive PDO. Now the opposite is unfolding.
Let’s not forget, back in 2007 NASA was expecting solar cycle 24 to be a gigantic one. That’s when Al Gore came out with his movie and the infrastructure was set up ready to introduce Carbon trading schemes, soon as cycle 24 was to get kicking. Oh the irony!

Dr. Svalgaard, I believe you correctly called the low point of the minimum long before anyone else that I know of did. If I recall correctly, you made the determination based on your F10.7 chart. I remember at the time not being sure that the turn you were seeing wasn’t just a random variation, but your interpretation was correct.Congratulations!
(and of course those scientists such as Hathaway who predicted the minimum was here each month until they got lucky and it happened hardly deserve notice)

No electric power, no email, no Internet 30 Dec 09 – Here’s a great graph showing two different solar cycle 24 predictions (guesstimates) from NASA, the latest of which shows a less active sun … and ultimately, no electric power, no email, and no Internet.
See
http://www.iceagenow.com/No_electric_power_no_email_no_Internet.htm
Is this possible? Should it be taken seriously?

So what you guys are saying is;
-Svensmark & Co are on an upswing.
-The AGW flock will run into hiding until spring.
Then they will return, trying to put tax on soot and
methane?
Kind of when the berlin wall fell, all the socialists went
into temporary hiding…
What do you think?

Simon Filiatrault (07:00:09)
When looking at the path of the sun about the solar systems barycenter, I know you think the sun must be somehow be affected by this malformed Spiro graph path it takes over the centuries. However, don’t you realize the sun is merely following the geodesic gravitational gradient and “feels” basically nothing? The core path of the sun is around the Sun-Jupiter barycenter and the non-aligned accelerations from the other eight planets are incredibly tiny and tend to cancel out to boot. Why would you follow this path thinking the sun’s relation about the solar system’s barycenter would somehow affect sunspots?

Now I am really impressed.
This could all be a bit confusing but I’ll try and sort it all out.
Our staring point is:
Anthropogenic CO2 causes global warming.
The IPCC claims a consensus and Al Gore says so and who am I to question them.
There is even an accepted and established mechanism for this, the “greenhouse effect”.
Now its no good people pointing out any correlations between sunspot activity and climate, aurora activity and Nile floods, solar flares etc without showing a causal relationship.
Until some mechanism is found that links them all together, we cannot draw any conclusions.
But I’m really impressed, the correlations are very strong and if we follow through with the data it suggests that the current cooling is only temporary.
So, to borrow from the declaration that followed the acceptance of the global chilling data, this cooling is actually masking the full effect of global warming.
But, since we know that CO2 causes global warming and since CO2 is man made, and hence since global warming is unequivocally caused by mankind, it necessarily follows that if there is a causal link between these various activities that it must be that they are all also caused by CO2 and hence man is responsible for destabilising solar activity and planetary motions.
No other conclusion is possible.
I mean, we may suppose that there is a link between planetary motions and sun spot activity (which ought to make choosing the start and end of sun spot cycles much easier since you would define them from the planetary resonances and not but some arbitrary “pick a day” method, and then we could re-compute all solar activity cycles based on historical resonance data rather than arbitrary cycle start and end points just to see what it throws out).
We may also suppose there is some mechanism that links the earth’s climate to solar activity and hence to planetary motions.
But, since we already know that climate change is caused by CO2 then the only possible conclusion is that CO2 must also cause solar activity changes and planetary resonances which means we should now invest heavily in finding out how CO2 causes the planets to move as they do and how they can affect solar activity. I’m pretty sure that if President Obama and Gordon Brown throw enough taxpayers money into research, the physicists will find that just such a mechanism exists.
But damn, that’s gonna cause a hell of an increase in taxes.
(to be honest, I suspect that about the one and only thing definitively caused by anthropogenic CO2 is taxation).

Only problem I have with “cosmic rays” is that it sounds so “tinfoil hattish”.
Cosmic particles sounds a bit better (still out there) and is a bit more accurate I think.

George S. (10:45:32) :
@AdderW (08:31:14) :
“We urgently need a tax on sun spots now, to keep the numbers down.
Sun spot trading anyone?”
Drats! You beat me to it.

Feels good that 🙂

Michael Larkin (08:05:48)
Danimals
For a very good exposition of this topic, see the in-house lecture given by Jasper Kirby of CERN
http://seekingalpha.com/article/175641-climategate-revolt-of-the-physicists

Congratulations Dr. Svalgaard! Your brave predictions¹ came true once more! Happy New Year to you and your family!
Kind Regards,
Invariant in Norway!
¹Climate models are not predictions according to IPCC – the reason is that if they were, AGW would have been falsified long ago. I cannot think of a better modern example of good science than the testable predictions of Dr. Svalgaard. IPCC is Cargo Cult Science in action…

Quote: Jim Arndt (12:32:13)
Leif Svalgaard (11:17:29)
‘There is no known mechanism for this, . . . .’
“Leif that is why I asked the question . . .”
If the standard solar model of a hydrogen-filled sun were correct, Leif would be correct in stating that ‘There is no known mechanism for this, . . . .’
Fortunately precise experimental measurements showed several years ago
“Why the Model of a Hydrogen-Filled Sun Is Obsolete”
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0410569v1
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel

Quote: Leif Svalgaard (13:16:34) :
“so tallbloke would have to subscribe to Oliver for their opinions to be consistent.”
No Leif, tallbloke and I do not necessarily agree with each other. We not worship consensus science.
As Michael Craighton noted in his Michelin Lecture at Caltech on 17 January 2003:
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel

From Jimbo (14:23:14) :
“The British Antarctic Survey developed the 1.5g data logger built into a soft leg ring, after previous tags proved dangerous for the birds….Bands had been fitted to penguins’ flippers, but they affected flight and increased the chances of the birds dying, while metal or plastic rings fitted to their legs were causing cuts and sores. ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/uk_news/england/leicestershire/8434390.stm
——-
Eh…! flying penguins! Wait…sorry…of course…that year on year increase in ice extent…how else were they expected to get from their breeding grounds to the open ocean…walk or something. Finally, a climate change induced evolutionary adaptation.

So is #23 officially over? What was the length?

wakeupmaggy (15:28:38) :
Jimbo (14:23:14) :
OT –
.Bands had been fitted to penguins’ flippers, but they affected flight and increased the chances of the birds dying
“Duh, “flight” as in flying???? Did I miss something? HAHA, but maybe they meant escape from predators…”
————————————
Please note wakeupmaggy I quoted the BBC :o)

With TSI constant equal 1366 ± 0.5 W/m² the last 300 years, I am not sure whether we can blame an increasing sun for the global warming since the little ice age. However, the good news is that a constant sun perfectly well can lead to global warming if the heat balance of our planet is not in equilibrium. We may argue that our planet never had any chance to reach equilibrium because of oscillations between:
1. day and night,
2. summer and winter,
3. ice ages and warmer periods.
Not to mention various volcanic activity and other unknown factors. The time required to heat or cool our oceans to balance the outgoing Stefan-Boltzmann radiation with the input from the sun may be substantial – maybe several hundred years. In this context the importance of the sunspots for our climate seems somewhat exaggerated – our climate can perfectly well oscillate alone, with our without them…

Leif Svalgaard (11:33:45) :
Leif Svalgaard (11:19:58) :
wws (11:04:54) :
Dr. Svalgaard, I believe you correctly called the low point of the minimum long before anyone else that I know of did.
The NASA-NOAA panel [of which I’m a member] also called December 2008 as the minimum.
Actually Leif predicted the low point of the minimum to be Aug 2008….surprised he did not correct wws’s statement?
There is a long way to go before the SSN reaches 50, the SIDC report is the one to watch for at the end of the month and then the Layman’s Count soon after. The Layman’s count is the only count that compares apples with apples.
It is interesting that some are now conceding a grand minimum could be in the making. Also interesting that the Babcock believers have no answer for two low cycles that usually go together during grand minima…..the “crap shoot” logic obviously failing.

Jimbo,
Sorry, I thought you saw it too, didn’t mean to skip the quotations and link to make you look as stupid as the BBC.
I tried really hard to imagine a penguin flying, before I posted something stupid, AND off topic, thinking surely there must be some species in the antecatarctical zonio of which I wasn’t aware, or that I’m senile.
Thanks for the humor:)
.”Bands had been fitted to penguins’ flippers, but they affected flight and increased the chances of the birds dying, while metal or plastic rings fitted to their legs were causing cuts and sores. ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/uk_news/england/leicestershire/8434390.stm

Zeke the Sneak (15:51:36) : Hey Zeke, you are risking to being taken to the Inquisition. You know Inquisition means “questioning” but with much more effective methods….Or you´ll be condemned by a convenient “peer reviewing”, or anatemized by the Lord of Darkness himself!
The trouble with the theory you mention is that it is really a “key” to understand the universe and that is extremely blasphemous, it would debunk astrophysics like in a climate-gate process. Try to be respectful with the sacrosant and holy church of the settled and ex-chatedra science and its representatives on this world.

Leif Svalgaard (14:44:59) : Wondrous that Anthony puts up with this, but I guess that shows his great tolerance for fringe comments.
This is reminiscent of the CRU emails, trying to oppress opposing views so that only yours is left.
REPLY: Oh that does it. Here’s your posts all over this thread and many others and you say this? I suggest you apologize before you post another single comment. You have your own blog, and as I’ve indicated, you should discuss these topics there. – Anthony

Ref – E.M.Smith (17:07:56) :
“Sometimes grabbing a salty sour pickle makes you appreciate that Merlot and Brie so much more ;-)… Yes, sometimes the unexpected Jalapeno can be a bit vexing, but at other times one may be looking for something to shake up their comfortable predictable day…”
___________
Me thinks thee thinks too much of thyself and not enough of those in the room with ye

for those interested in the sun stuff and with much much more knowledge than me, NASA propose an innocentive challenge to forecast Solar Particle Event
” NASA Challenge: Data-Driven Forecasting of Solar Events
Challenge Reward: $30,000 USD Challenge Type: RTP INNOCENTIVE 9059496
Forecasting solar activity is important for future manned and unmanned exploration of the solar system. The Seeker wishes to develop the ability to forecast the occurrence of a Solar Particle Event (SPE) within a select window in time. Methods must make use of current real-time space weather measurements and/or archived space weather data. ”
http://gw.innocentive.com/ar/disciplineSearch?challenge-order-by=desc&challenge-sort-by=postedDate&viewMode=abstract&challenge-search-text=9059496

/hyperbole on
The recent burst of sunspots shall soon subside. Come mid-January we should see four or five months of near non-activity, followed by a gradual upwelling of activity for a year, culminating in sunspot numbers averaging around 40 come June of 2011 and maintaining a sunspot number between 40 and 50 for 18 months or so, only to dip slightly near or below 10 during the spring of 2013.
What does this mean for us here on Earth ? Absolutely nothing. What we should consider is what are we going to do come 2016 through 2035.
The threat of global cooling will greatly effect us more than anything the alarmists of AGW could ever imagine.
I felt it was a bit necessary to go over the top to help remind many of you wishing to bicker about subjectivity that there is larger more pressing matters than your opinions on your understanding of science and our need to set aside differences of opinion and collaborate together to predict with certainty the future of our planet and the responsibility we have to prepare for 50 or so years of declining temperatures.
There are scientists among us now that should disregard the pseudo-scientists baits and traps and start laying out guidelines for us to follow if we are to overcome what our sun is challenging us with.
Time to educate is over and the time to lead is now.
/hyperbole off

If this linear trend continues, by June 2020 the Sun will be entire covered with sunspots.

Michael Larkin (08:05:48),
Sorry – I actually meant to thank you instead at (08:30:28). Thanks for taking the time Michael, I appreciate it!

E.M.Smith (17:07:56) :
“Leif Svalgaard (14:44:59) : Wondrous that Anthony puts up with this, but I guess that shows his great tolerance for fringe comments.”
……….
Yes, sometimes the unexpected Jalapeno can be a bit vexing, but at other times one may be looking for something to shake up their comfortable predictable day…
Notice the difference. The salad maker knows that the jalapeno is there and it is a jalapeno, not avocado.
I also am intrigued by out of the box thinking theories, and agree they are fun. They should be though, in a scientific discussion, adhering to the very basic tenets of known physics: energy, momentum, and angular momentum conservation. Once they have been demonstrated to violate these basic requirements, and barycentrinc theories of climate and sun control do that, we are talking of science fiction, and this is not the point of this blog.
I would also once again want to make the general comment that in addition to the “correlation is not causation” comment there is the observation that gravitational systems are giant clocks, i.e. have very specific and predictable functions of time for any kinetic variable (at least with computer models : ) ). All clocks will show correlations in periodic functions, by construction. The moon is a clock, the earth is a clock, the planets are clocks, but also the collective theoretical point’s motion, the barycenter, is a clock because they follow deterministic solutions of differential equations. When one gets the chaotic periodic behavior of sunspots, or PDO or etc. and finds correlations with one clock, there will be correlations with all clocks.
One has to find the physical forces entering to determine what is causative and what is simple correlation because of this inherent property of gravitational systems to be clocks.
And maybe the periodicities seen are chaotic, as Tsonis et al have shown for climate a while ago anyway, and no new physical forces are needed to explain them and it is just coincidence that some peaks and troughs are timed by the giant planetary clocks .

Anthony,
I love these solar posts. To me it is like being back in undergraduate physics classes (40 yrs ago).
Keep them coming.
And Prof Svalgaard, please keep coming back and keep actively participating.
John

tallbloke (03:37:12) :
anna v (23:01:11) :
“there is the observation that gravitational systems are giant clocks, i.e. have very specific and predictable functions of time for any kinetic variable …the planets are clocks, but also the collective theoretical point’s motion, the barycenter, is a clock because they follow deterministic solutions of differential equations.”
No they don’t. The solar systems orbiting bodies (including the sun) follow quasi cyclic but ultimately indeterminate courses. This is known physics. The current best guess is that the solar system has settled down to a beat wherein the planetary motions are chaotic, but mostly within bounds which greatly reduce (but do not eliminate) the chance of a collision between major bodies. If you are going to extrapolate in order to attempt a disproof of something (as if that were possible!), you should at least make sure you have your premises correct.
I would appreciate a link to this claim.
It is true that the solar system is a many body problem even though the equations controlling it are known, but chaotic? The equations have been programmed both in analogue ( planetaria) and in computers so I think the claim far fetched but am open to convincing.
Nevertheless each individual planet is a clock and certainly their combined motion will be a clock too. Clock: a method of counting time.

1. Quote: Leif Svalgaard (23:11:52) :
“Other processes creates the other heavy elements, but Hydrogen, Helium, and Deuterium are primordial.”
No. Deuterium (H-2) is made primarily by spallation reactions in the outer part of a star. Deuterium, Li, Be and B are produced by a process that B2FH called the x-process.
Deuterium (H-2), Li, Be and B have very low nuclear stability, i.e., their nucleons are very loosely bound. Inside a star, they would be quickly consumed by fusion. Readers be aware that Deuterium (H-2) and Li are therefore used in the production of thermonuclear weapons (H-bombs).
Fowler, Greenstein and Hoyle were keenly aware of the low nuclear stability of these nuclei when they suggested local synthesis of D, Li, Be and B in 1961 [“Deuteronomy. Synthesis of deuterons and light nuclei during the early history of the Solar System”, American Journal of Physics 29 (1961) 393-403].
Later Dr. D. D. Sabu and I proposed that other elements were also made by local element synthesis [“Elemental and isotopic inhomogeneities in noble gases: The case for local synthesis of the chemical elements”, Trans. Missouri Acad. Sci. 9 (1975) 104-122; “Strange xenon, extinct superheavy elements and the solar neutrino puzzle”, Science 195 (1977) 208-209].
2. Quote: Leif Svalgaard (23:16:40) :
“As the Figures show, they apply [if we assume for a moment that they make sense] to amu greater than 3 and therefore not to Hydrogen. Explain HERE why Hydrogen [and Deuterium] become deficient.”
You are right. We did not report mass fractionation across H-1 (1 amu) and H-2 (2 amu) because spallation and/or fusion reactions readily increase and/or decrease the abundance of H-2 (Deuterium) in the solar wind. We could not separate out and identify mass fractionation changes in the D/H ratio.
Hydrogen (the lightest of all elements, H-1) did not become deficient inside the Sun. It is continuously being produced there by neutron-decay near the solar core. Upward migration of H+ ions, carried by deep-seated magnetic fields, is the flow that maintains mass separation in the Sun. When these deep-seated fields reach the solar surface, they carry H+ away in the solar wind. Each year the solar wind carries away 50,000 billion metric ton of Hydrogen with isotopes of other elements carefully sorted by mass and selectively enriched in the lightweight ones.
Geiss thought that fusion reactions that in the Sun converted H-2 into He-3 [“Primordial abundance of hydrogen and helium isotopes”, in Origin and Evolution of the Elements (eds., Prantos, N., Vangioni-Flam, E. and Cassè, M., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993) pp. 89-106]. His proposal would explain excess He-3 without solar mass fractionation.
Isotope data on H and He from the 1996 Galileo Probe into the atmosphere of Jupiter do not support Geiss’ idea that excess He-3 was produced in the sun by deuterium burning [“Abundances of Hydrogen and Helium Isotopes in Jupiter”, in The Origins of the Elements in the Solar System: Implications of Post 1957 Observations (O. K. Manuel, editor, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, NY, 2000) 589-643].
Solar mass fractionation has been quantitatively identified:
a.) Across isotopes in the solar wind over the range of 3-136 amu.
b.) Across s-products in the photosphere for 27-207 amu.
Is there reason to doubt that elements like Hydrogen (1-2 amu) and Uranium (235-238 amu) are immune to solar mass fractionation?
With kind regards and best wishes for 2010!
Oliver K. Manuel

Quote: Leif Svalgaard (08:58:00) :
quotes: Oliver K. Manuel (08:37:40) :
a.) ‘Deuterium (H-2) is made primarily by spallation reactions in the outer part of a star.’
“Deuterium is destroyed in convective stars like the Sun. The Deuterium in interstellar space is primordial. The precise prediction of its abundance is one of the triumphs of the Big Bang theory.”
The Big Bang is desperately in need of triumphs, but Deuterium is not one of them.
b.) ‘Is there reason to doubt that elements like Hydrogen (1-2 amu) and Uranium (235-238 amu) are immune to solar mass fractionation?’
“Yes, many [e.g. that OBSERVATIONS show that most of the baryonic matter of the Universe is H].”
Yes, interstellar space has a weak gravitational field and is filled with H and some D that is carried away with the H by stellar winds of stars.
Perhaps a return to basics will help you understand the difference between the composition of material in weak and strong gravitational fields. Look at the RED DOTS representing the two basic constituents of all nuclei in the Cradle of the Nuclides:
http://www.omatumr.com/Data/2000Data.htm
The neutron with Z/A = 0, and
The hydrogen atom with Z/A =1.
The neutron spontaneously decays to a hydrogen atom in the Earth’s weak gravitational field. This natural process (half-life ~ 10 minutes) is accompanied by a hugh volume expansion:
Charge separation:
Neutron ==> Hydrogen
V(final) /V(initial) ~ 1,000,000,000,000,000
The opposite reaction occurs naturally with a hugh volume contraction in the strong gravitational field at the center of stars and galaxies.
Charge collapse:
Hydrogen ==> Neutron
V(final) /V(initial) ~ 0.000,000,000,000,001
The visible universe is filled with Hydrogen, but compact, energetic cores of stars and galaxies are mostly Neutrons because
V( H) ≈ 1,000,000,000,000,000 x V(N)
Again, best wishes for 2010!
Oliver K. Manuel

Just read a post that made me think about the “descreening” of an astrosphere.
Not that I think that this is possible in this new “dark age.”
Not that I think that this is possible in this new “dark age.”
But was wondering (again) about the different possibilities, levels or effects of descreening when I came across this article.
M Star Astrosphere Size Fluctuations and
Habitable Planet Descreening∗
Smith & Scalo
Department of Astronomy, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712
June 9, 2009
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0906/0906.1274v1.pdf
Leif, got this article under your belt?

Happy New Year to all and cold enough to throw a spoke in the cart-of-fools’ wheels of AGW, but not too cold for the rest of us 🙂
http://arthistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/search_engine_optimization
“The Haywain” by Hieronymus Bosch is overcrowded with objects and figures surrounding a cart laden disproportionately high with hay and with a bush somehow growing from the top. In front of the bush, three people are making music. Standing beside them are an angel and a devil.
To the left, behind the wagon, ride an emperor, a king, and a pope, incongruously providing an escort for a wagonload of dried grass. To the right, the wagon is being pulled by an assortment of strange demonic creatures from the underworld. One of these creatures is a combination of a man and a fish; another is part bird, and a third is a hooded man with branches growing out of his back. Nearby, people can be seen streaming out of a wooden doorway in a mound of earth. The haywain itself is accompanied by men and woman trying to grab handfuls of hay; they fight and fall beneath the wheels.
The cart moves inexorably forward. The foreground of the painting is chaotic, while a clear and beautiful landscape can be seen in the distance. The haywain and its crowd of followers seem to be heading away from pristine innocence toward a place of punishment. The crowd is moving toward their ultimate destination: the day of reckoning.
Artist Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) is well known for paintings that mock equally the hypocrisy of the clergy, the extravagance of nobility, and the immorality of everyday people. His use of Christian symbolism and his extraordinary level of detail come from the traditions of manuscript illustrations of the Middle Ages. In this example, the hay wagon is his symbol for human greed, and his painting depicts the unworthiness of humans and their approaching doom.

Using the cause and effect argument, have you tried to compare your solar fluctuations with long-term indicators of fluctuations like lake levels, flood frequencies, changes in glacier size, etc.? Closed basin lakes would be best (depend on long term changes in precipitation/evaporation) such as Great Salt Lake or Lake Baikal. (Aral Sea is a different reason). Lakes with smaller outlets like Lake Superior and Lake Victoria, especially since they have a 100 years of lake level records compared to piecemeal glacial size measurements for a 100 to 300 years.

Quote: Sask Resident (15:01:36) :
“Using the cause and effect argument, have you tried to compare your solar fluctuations with long-term indicators of fluctuations like lake levels, flood frequencies, changes in glacier size, etc.? . . . ”
See: W. J. R Alexander, F. Bailey, D. B. Bredenkamp, A. vander Merwe, and N. Willemse, “Linkages between solar activity, climate predictability and water resource
development,” J. South African Institut. Civil Engineering 49 (2007) 32-44.

Quote: tallbloke (06:46:21) :
“Hi Oliver, and Happy New year to you.
Do we know the mass of the gas giant planets well enough to be able to calculate the total mass of the sun from the size of the wobble it counteracts their mass with as they orbit? . . . Would that provide independent confirmation or disproof of your theories of a superdense solar core?
Thanks”
No, the total mass of the Sun is not the issue. The distribution of mass inside the Sun is.
Those who understand (neutron-repulsion, neutron-emission and neutron-decay to produce the Hydrogen that the Sun continuously discards) know that the minimum mass of a neutron star is 1 amu, not 1.3 solar mass!
There is other strong circumstantial evidence for a dense solar core among the many “mysteries” for the Standard Solar Model of a Hydrogen-filled Sun:
Solar cycles of deep-seated magnetic fields protrude through the solar surface in a pattern that follows shifts in solar angular momentum.
That observation provides circumstantial evidence for a compact, energetic and highly magnetic solar core!
Do you or others have any questions about my comment to Leif: “The visible universe is filled with Hydrogen, but compact, energetic cores of stars and galaxies are mostly Neutrons because
V( H) ≈ 1,000,000,000,000,000 x V(N)”?
Apparently unaware of huge volume differences between H and N, scientists mistakenly assumed that H must be the most abundant species in the cosmos because it occupies the most space!
Again, thanks for the question, tallbloke.
Best wishes you and yours for 2010!
Oliver K. Manuel

Qupte: Leif Svalgaard (13:30:45) :
“I’m overwhelmed by the clarity of the arguments by one of the greatest scientists of our time fighting consensus and sense, so I give up.”
I am certainly not a great scientist but I was trained by one of the very best:
In 1960 I was an unusually naive 23 year-old graduate student at the University of Arkansas when I became part of a research project to decipher the origin of the solar system, directed by a very sophisticated and talented nuclear geochemist that the US military had relocated from the University of Tokyo after WWII – Professor Paul Kazuo Kuroda.
Although Kuroda’s skills as a nuclear geochemist had been used by the Japanese government during Second World War, Kuroda himself was very humanistic and idealistic – teaching by example to always follow the basic principles of science.
His autobiography describes Kuroda’s work at the University of Tokyo:
http://www.omatumr.com/abstracts2005/PKKAutobiography.pdf
This obituary is a short summary of his life:
http://www.omatumr.com/abstracts2005/KurodaWriteupMeteoritic.pdf

Glenn (14:06:39) :
“Really, really, really bad manners, Leif.”
This has been noted before and is unfortunate. Resorting to Ad Hominem seems to be acceptable policy when confronted with an opposing view.

It’s a shame that solar related threads almost always end up in acrimony.
Ad hominem arguments (against the person) are usually one of the last resorts of someone trying to defend an untenable belief, and have no place in a scientific debate.
These sort of tactics are being used by the IPCC Climategate cabal and add no value to our understanding. This is a sure sign that the CAGW hypothesis has hit the rocks and it is time for new ideas to be considered even if they rock the boat of main-stream scientific thinking.
Any theory which fails to accurately predict future events or requires liberal doses of ‘pixie-dust’ to account for new observations is in need of a re-think, no matter how useful that theory has been to the progress of science in the past.

Quote: “Although Kuroda’s skills as a nuclear geochemist had been used by the Japanese government during Second World War . . .”
I have more respect for scientists who use their skill for the government that pays their salary than I do for NAS members who ignored experimental data for the past 35 years and pretended that the Sun is a ball of Hydrogen and that injections from a nearby supernova explain short-lived radionuclides and linked chemical and isotopic variations in the material that formed the solar system.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel

OT, but there is an interesting detail in the LASCO 3 image on the SOHO web site. Look at the image at this link.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/c3/512/
Is that a comet in the middle of the lower left quadrant of the image?
JT

Quote: Robuk (14:40:59) :
“What this means is that the climate scientists are fully aware of the almost perfect correlation with sunspot numbers and the earths temperature but have NO idea how this link works.”
You are exactly right!
The standard solar model of a Hydrogen-filled Sun cannot explain the observations.
NASA and the Geophysics Division of NAS are not about to admit now that they have manipulated “space age” data since the Apollo Mission returned samples from the Moon in 1969 to hide evidence of an error in the ssm of a Hydrogen-filled Sun.
C-SPAN News captured an embarrassing moment for NASA when its Administrator was finally forced to release data in 1998 from the 1996 Galilleo Mission to Jupiter.
That data confirmed severe mass separation in the Sun [“Isotopic ratios in Jupiter confirm intra-solar diffusion”, Meteoritics & Planetary Science 33 (1998) A97, paper 5011: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/metsoc98/pdf/5011.pdf
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA PI for Apollo