Back on December 12th 2009 I posted an article titled:
Solar geomagnetic activity is at an all time low – what does this mean for climate?
We then had a string of sunspots in December that marked what many saw as a rejuvenation of solar cycle 24 after a long period of inactivity. See December sunspots on the rise
It even prompted people like Joe Romm to claim:
But what Joe doesn’t understand is that sunspots are just one proxy, the simplest and most easily observed, for magnetic activity of the sun. It is the magnetic activity of the sun which is central to Svensmark’s theory of galactic cosmic ray modulation, which may affect cloud cover formation on earth, thus affecting global temperatures. As the theory goes, lower magnetic activity of the sun lets more GCR’s into our solar system, which produce microscopic cloud seed trails (like in a Wilson cloud chamber) in our atmosphere, resulting in more cloud cover, resulting in a cooler planet. Ric Werme has a nice pictorial here.
When I saw the SWPC Ap geomagnetic index for Dec 2009 posted yesterday, my heart sank. With the sunspot activity in December, I thought surely the Ap index would go up. Instead, it crashed.
Annotated version above – Source: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/weekly/Ap.gif
Source data: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/weekly/RecentIndices.txt
When you look at the Ap index on a larger scale, all the way back to 1844 when measurements first started, the significance of this value of “1” becomes evident. This graph from Dr. Leif Svalgaard shows where we are today in relation to the past 165 years.
Source: http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-Monthly-Averages-1844-Now.png
With apologies to Dr. Svalgaard, I’ve added the “1” line and the most current SWPC value of “1” for Dec 2009.
As you can see, we’ve never had such a low value before, and the only place lower to go is “zero”.
But this is only part of the story. With the Ap index dwindling to a wisp of magnetism, it bolsters the argument made by Livingston and Penn that sunspots may disappear altogether by 2015. See Livingston and Penn – Sunspots may vanish by 2015
Above: Sunspot magnetic fields measured by Livingston and Penn from 1992 – Feb. 2009 using an infrared Zeeman splitting technique. [more] from the WUWT article: NASA: Are Sunspots Disappearing?
The theory goes that once the magnetic strength falls below 1500 gauss, sunspots will become invisible to us.
Note where we are on this curve that Dr. Svalgaard also keeps of LP’s measurements:
Source: http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston%20and%20Penn.png
It appears that we are on track, and that’s a chilling thought.
NOTE TO COMMENTERS AND MODERATORS: No off-topic discussions of Landscheidt, “electric universe”, or “iron sun” will be permitted on this thread. All will be snipped. Stay on topic. – Anthony
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The hottest decade ends and since there’s no Maunder mininum — sorry deniers! — the hottest decade begins
In all fairness, this *was* the hottest decade — *if* the world was created on 1 January, 2000…
“Tenuc (01:58:26) :
Weak Gulf Stream.”
There is discussion on the NIA blog about the Gulf Stream and the possibility that it is undergoing change.
http://translate.google.co.za/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=http://daltonsminima.wordpress.com/&ei=AHWVSrv_K5zLjAfom5zbDQ&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://daltonsminima.wordpress.com/%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG
I know many of you are not big fans of D. Archibald and
much criticism has been made about the quality of his papers and predictions.
Whilst many of his predictions have not turned out, this one has:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/archibald_ap_predict2.png?w=520&h=303
However his statement that sunspots will not form below an Ap of 2 is clearly false with sunspot 1039 present well into January 2010.
It is a pity D. Archibald is not here to discuss this minimum in its current state, and explain more.
With regards to climate, the Svensmark Hypothesis (Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) to cloud cover modulation theory) is very promising in my opinion.
We will have to wait and see. The 2010s will answer many questions but probably generate new ones.
Does anyone know when and if this graph has been updated??
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/cosmic_ray_surge_graph.jpg?w=510&h=290
Thanks.
Mr Svalgaard, Your work is a credit to your field of study but your attitude to readers and commentators (as others have noted) is sometimes counterproductive (and smacks of the same kind of arrogance that AGW advocates tend to employ.) I remember one of my physics professors advising me to employ doubt when formulating even scientific theories at all times for only self-doubt can interject ones egotistic desire to get to the truth.
You would think that you owned the Sun the way you dismiss anything not on your field of view. That said, you still have my respect.
* wrt the DA Ap prediction, it is on track, not yet fully confirmed (due to “5 month smoothed” aspect ) sorry… late night last night!
Carla (05:13:33) :
Vuk etc. (13:25:58) :
Mr. Alex (11:28:40) :
“1. Solar Polar Field Strength in a funk:”
Not a time to be troubled much about polar fields. See you around 2020-25, then we’ll have something to talk about. See Polar fields links on:
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/GandF.htm
Might be a rush on snowmobile purchases ya think?
Hi Carla
Hope had good Ch & NY break. Interesting NASA’s article you put up ‘overthere’.
“Their analyses isolated six slow-moving oscillations, or waves of motion, occurring within the liquid core. The oscillations originated at the boundary between Earth’s core and its mantle and traveled inward toward the inner core with decreasing strength. Four of these oscillations were robust, occurring at periods of 85, 50, 35 and 28 years.” http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=2420
I was wondering about the GMF oscillations for some time now. This graph I constructed recently, clearly confirms the NASA’s theory.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/EMF85N.gif
See also: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GandF.htm
Charles (05:44:33) :
but your attitude to readers and commentators (as others have noted) is sometimes counterproductive…
It would be nice if we could discuss the Sun and climate, rather than my attitude. I call things the way I see them. This may seem counterproductive to peddlers of pseudo-science and unfounded speculations. They are welcome to just ignore my comments [as some do when they hijack a thread for their own purposes].
Dear Mr.Watts,
I’m writing to ask you to check out this picture I have on my blog of a supposed dead Alien. I know you are somewhat of a scientist. I would really like your opinion on the matter. Thank you.
http://56rebels.wordpress.com/
David Alan (02:46:00)
“,,,It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice a very similar pattern. The timing between these apparent patterns are roughly 88 years. I don’t know if thats significant, but it dears bear scrutiny.
If we went back another 88 some odd years and find a similar solar-terrestrial pattern?
Would it be possible to find any supporting data for other periodic similarities?”
Reply: I think so:-
1410-1500 cold – Low Solar Activity(LSA?) – (Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA?)
1610-1700 cold – (LSA) – (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold – (LSA) – (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold???) – (LSA???)
However, our climate is driven by deterministic chaos, with many separate but interdependent processes at work in concert at any one time. The effect of this is to make the periodicity imprecise, with the scale of the effect varying as each quasi-cycle unfolds.
You can break a block of concrete with a few blows of a heavy sledge hammer, or produce the same effect by using a sharp chisel and light hammer, but giving many small blows.
Thank you very much indeed for your comments, Dr Svalgaard – I await them eagerly in any thread here, debating the sun.
Most intriguing, for me, were your comments and quotes (e.g. Bartels) in regard to the value of the observer’s personal experience as opposed to computer models.
What a reliance on computer models alone can lead to, as opposed to observations by people with experience in field work, we have had amply demonstrated by recent events …
Old Chinese Proverb: “May you live in interesting times.”
Come what may, we are in for an interesting ride. Let’s enjoy it.
Bill Tuttle (05:21:16) :
The hottest decade ends and since there’s no Maunder mininum — sorry deniers! — the hottest decade begins
In all fairness, this *was* the hottest decade — *if* the world was created on 1 January, 2000
———————————————————-
Which, of course, would be fairness. 😉
DirkH (12:15:01) :
“Mike O’Kelly (11:32:46) :
A highlevel thermodynamical discussion is Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi’s thoery
—————————————————-
Discussion has its place. But i’d rather see if anyone has disproven his math. So far no one has.
But I’ve seen this comment a few times: “his math is over my head”
Alexander Feht (23:09:07) :
I find Dr. Svalgaard’s attitude toward readers and commentators to be most inappropriate.
Reply:
Dr Svalgaard is rather patient with us as we fumble towards knowledge. Unlike a paid professor he is giving us the benefit of his expertise (and time) for free. I for one am glad he is willing to explain things in a simple manner for us. First it is often quite difficult for an expert to make simple explainations. Second reading inaccurate statements about your area of expertise can be quite irritating.
I’ve always wanted Henrik Svensmark to comment in sun threads here. But He appears to be busy with his most fascinating theory!!
—-
p.s.enjoy the warming we have now.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/10/svensmark-global-warming-stopped-and-a-cooling-is-beginning-enjoy-global-warming-while-it-lasts/
Vuk etc (10.06.30)
For those who like to know such things, the image is that of the town of Hawick in Scotland.
J.P.Douglas (06:16:04) wrote:
picture I have on my blog of a supposed dead Alien.
Commentators writing in Spanish think that the ‘alien’ might be a sloth, based on its nails.
Leif Svaldaard
I thank you for giving me ‘enlightenment,’ for someone with your expertise to spend so much time educating us uninformed is unique. God bless you.
Alexander Feht,
you may try putting you mouth where your mother never kissed you !
I have this weird thinking that five centuries from now, self-aware supercomputers with god-like intellect will look at the climate history of our time, model it with a full understanding of obscure and bizarre feedback mechanisms of which we are all but ignorant today, and proclaim that mankind dodged a bullet. We would have been due for another ice age, they will tell us, and it would have ended our civilization, but very fortunately and entirely accidentally we produced enough pollutants to keep us warm.
Today, they cannot model next month’s weather. And the scientists say that’s not an issue, modelling long term climate is not the same as modelling short term weather. But central to weather is chaos theory. Lorenz’s butterflies. And that brings us to “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” In light of that, if we cannot get tommorow right, next year is impossible.
Events have demonstrated this. Climate scientists did not predict last year’s cool summer. They did not predict the decline in powerful hurricanes over the last two years- although after the fact, Scientific American ran an embarrasing article that explained how a decline in hurricanes, much like an increase in hurricanes, or no change in the pattern of hurricanes at all, was an entirely expected outcome of global warming.
It seems climate scientists have revised the scientific process. It now runs like this:
1. Construct Hypothesis.
2. Make predictions.
3. Make observations.
4. Revise predictions to meet observations, or revise observations to meet predictions- whichever works.
5. Declare that observations, since they have met the predictions, prove the original hypothesis.
6. Viciously attack anyone with a competing hypothesis.
Let me give a real example of this in action.
Step 1. Hypothesis. Global warming is melting arctic ice, “northwest passage” is open. (National Geographic, 2007. )
Step 2. Prediction. Shippers have wanted this for centuries. It would dramatically reduce costs of shipping between Europe and Asia. Therefore, we expect to see shipping across this route. (see: http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/northwest-passage/2007/10/10/ )
Step 3. Observation. No shipping taking place. Just try finding a shipper with a route across the Northwest Passage. Except for a few specialized vessels in summer on very special tasks (which is nothing new) none exists. Despite the cost savings. Europe to Asia, they’d rather risk the coast of Somalia than the north coast of Canada.
Step 4. Revise Prediction. “Shippers will avoid the northwest passage because the icebergs are exceptionally dangerous there. Because of Global Warming.”
The merry-go-round continues.
At what point, climate scientists, does the merry-go-round stop, and you tell us, here’s what we say will happen, and if it doesn’t, then my theory is wrong?
“The theory goes that once the magnetic strength falls below 1500 gauss, sunspots will become invisible to us.”
Perhaps thats what happened during the maunder minimum.
I am looking for data on climate for central New Mexico for the period from 1900 to 1950. The region where I live is the Estancia Basin east of Albuquerque. This area was at one the leading producer of Pinto Beans but in 1950 there wasa dramtic change in the climate that produced a dustbowl. Today the area is arid. Could the climate be changing drastically as the climate was prior to 1950 as a result of changes associated with solar activity? In the height of the Pinto farming the winters we characterized as severe according to the few people here old enough to remember. One respondant,dram1, had some agriculture growth data but I don’t know how to reach this person.
There is no point, Swami – they’ll continue to revise and spin and change the parameters – and when you explicitly point to what they said would happen and didn’t, you’re pronounced too stupid to understand the nuances of it all anyway.
If Tenuc (06:27:49) is right in his predictions, we’re going into a LIA event that we’re not prepared for, and the Warmists will fight tooth and nail to persuade us isn’t happening. But you can only fool people so long – eventually they’ll figure out that the flipflops and Speedos and SPF-40 sunblock won’t do them much good in waist-deep snow!
Re: Mr. Alex (Jan 8 00:39), It appears that the goal for January 2010 is to reach monthly mean of at least 15.7 and do everything possible to achieve this,
so that claims can be made in February that “spots” such as 1040 have heralded a “surge in sunspot activity in the new year”.
That seems to be a rather pointless claim to try and make. How many spotless days would you wish to claim in the past 30? Are you denying that the sun is more active than it was 6 months ago? I haven’t yet checked where the monthly average F10.7 for December fits on my plot, but the blue line here does seem to be edging ever upward.
At these levels, the sunspot count is still in the noise. Anyone making grand claims based on current counts probably has no other evidence for their theory.
magicjava (15:56:38) “For example, the R² for CO2/temperatures is 0.96.”
Where on Earth are you getting this? (You are certainly not talking about simple bivariate linear regression.)
joe (10:13:03) :
“The theory goes that once the magnetic strength falls below 1500 gauss, sunspots will become invisible to us.”
Perhaps thats what happened during the maunder minimum.
That is a distinct possibility, see e.g. page 14 of http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202009%20SH13C-03.pdf but note also that we label it ‘wild speculation’.
Vuk etc. (16:07:43) “[…] magnetic anomaly […] I have produced a unique diagram of evolution of the NH’s anomaly during last 400 years. http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NHMFevolution.gif “
Interesting. I encourage you to expand this into a time series of hovmollers (which could be dropped into a folder and rolled-through as a mouse-wheeling movie – or stacked in a PowerPoint file to same effect). Excel does decent color-contour plots (so hovmollers are feasible in Excel) …once you figure out a few bugs in the pop-up menu design [feel welcome to request coaching from me on this topic] …but once you have a template saved, you’ll be able to reuse it in a *snap* with each new data series.