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.
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Is it possible that the instruments used for detecting and recording the geomagnetic index are just more sensitive today than they were say 100 years ago? Could this account for higher highs and lower lows seen recently?
JT
I guess we could call it, “Our Solar Disaster”.
My first thought upon seeing a sharply incongruous data reading from expected is to double-check there isn’t a fubar in the data pipeline somewhere. Did someone do that?
if these changes in solar magnetism etc affect cloud formation, how long does this take to get to planet earth, certainly it is not instantaneous, right? How long does it take cosmic rays to her here from where they may be “blocked”.
According to Jan Null, the El Nino has reached “strong” intensity. http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm
Jasper Kirkby colloquium
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1181073
“nevket240 (13:32:11) :
Jones11
it isn’t just the windbag farms. how are the Chinese solar users going today??
how will solar perform if this situation worsens?? will you get your money back??”
The chinese sell most of their solar cells to Germany because we have unlimited subsidies for now so unlimited demand. I’m paying 20 eurocent for a kWh and the renewable-energy makers get 50 eurocent.
Photovoltaics deliver next to nothing in winter. There output is very seasonal. It has to do with the fact that days are shorter in winter and the sun doesn’t rise as high. Measuring the output over a year gives you a curve that looks like a gaussian, with the maximum in summer of course.
So no, renewables help us nothing in winter except for wood and books. Germany has never switched off a conventional power plant for this very reason, even the ones in eastern germany got modernized.
Please stop calling plasma “comic rays”.
What do you call a spade? “Terra former”?
The hottest decade ends and since there’s no Maunder mininum — sorry deniers! — the hottest decade begins
This is a tacit admission that the sun is causing our cooling (or not warming if you wish).
Aha now the sun hots up, maybe now warming may renew, maybe just a little bit. Now this may give us the ammunition to flog our alarmist myth again, with tax funded dollars, with renewed vigour.
Ahhh, having reviewed the thread comments now, I see that Dr. Leif essentially agreed with me –the data/calculations aren’t amenable to really dealing with such low values. Truncating 35.9 to 35 is one thing –truncating 1.9 to 1 is something else entirely.
Tho still, that it didn’t go the other way (rise) given the sunspots is still at least moderately interesting.
[Quote nofreewind (14:07:57) :]
if these changes in solar magnetism etc affect cloud formation, how long does this take to get to planet earth, certainly it is not instantaneous, right? How long does it take cosmic rays to her here from where they may be “blocked”.[/quote]
At it’s nearest point to the sun, the solar wind extends out about 12 billion km, if I remember correctly. As cosmic rays travel at nearly the speed of light, it would take about 12,000,000,000/c to change the amount of cosmic rays hitting the Earth. If I’m doing the math right (and I can’t promise I have) that’s about 11 hours.
But you can just measure the number of cosmic rays hitting the earth and completely ignore the solar wind. It’s effects are already factored in by the time the cosmic rays hit the Earth.
“DirkH (14:15:07) :
[…]
unlimited subsidies for now so unlimited demand. I’m paying 20 eurocent for a kWh and the renewable-energy makers get 50 eurocent. ”
And may i add: Yes Brits. This is what awaits you.
Dr. Bob
“Joe Romm is a joke. ”
Joe is a one man George Soros funded propaganda industry. I’ve tried to debate him on his articles before. But he always deletes the material. Same with Tamino. If you want to post what you said to Romm, go here.
http://aicomment.blogspot.com/
graeme (12:54:14) : “This could be worse than Y2K.”
My last cold was worse than Y2K. 🙂
(I know it was in jest, but “jest” couldn’t resist.)
John Silver – you’re on the right track I believe. David Archibald, an Australian earth scientist has done some very interesting work on the length of solar cycles and global temps (others as well). There seems to be a far better correlation between solar cycle length and global temps than Ap, TSI, Wolf numbers etc.
Archibald suggests that for every 12 month increase in solar cycle length, global atmospheric temps will drop 0.7c over the following cycle. It’s a fairly broad sweeipng statement, but he does back it up with some convincing arguments. You should find it buried in his website/blog on the Net somewhere.
Mind you there is a pretty good correlation between solar cycle amplitude (the sunsport number peak) and global temps too, if you plot them both on a running average.
Remembering of course that correlation is not always causation, but it does certainly give you a ‘heads up’.
My money at the moment is on flat global temps until the 2nd half of 2010, and then once El Nino has disappeared, expect to see a pronounced cooling trend commence then.
Those graphs look decidedly spooky. Here you live for years thinking the sun is a pretty stable object on our scale of things, and then you go and plot a steady dive into the basement, as if some battery is running down, and the lights are about to go out.
I know about nowt about solar physics; but I imagine that the coffeee pot chatters at Leif’s place must be quite interesting. We certainly are living in interesting times.
I would say that 2010 at WUWTville, is off to a roaring start.
magicjava (12:56:52) :
Probably a stupid idea.
Have you tried removing these…
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
corrections from the temp data & seeing what the R2 is?
DaveE.
Quote: Bill Jamison (10:12:51) :
“What an incredible opportunity to learn more about the sun itself and of course the sun’s impact on climate. What a fascinating time to be a solar scientist!”
Yes, indeed!
If only solar scientists were willing to learn. But they learned absolutely nothing from space age measurements summarized here:
http://www.omatumr.com/images/Fig1.htm
http://www.omatumr.com/images/Fig2.htm
http://www.omatumr.com/images/Fig3.htm
http://www.omatumr.com/images/Fig4.htm
http://www.omatumr.com/Data/2000Data.htm
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA PI for Apollo
myprofile.cos.com/manuelo09
Is there any official public source for AP Index data (reconstructed or raw) going back to 1844?
JonesII (12:34:17) :
“How is it going with those windfarms in England?”
Not very well, providing < 1% of total demand a couple of days back. When we have cold weather in January and February, there tends to be very little wind.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/its-still-global-warming.html
Sound and Fury (13:51:20) : You wrote, “Does this make Leif look a tad foolish, or have I misunderstood something?”
You missed something. Just in case Leif ignores your comment for suggesting he was looking a tad foolish, I’ll refer you to his 12:28:05 comment, reproduced below.
“The very low Ap values are an artifact. There are two problems. The first [and glaring] is that Ap sunk to 1.9, but because SWPC truncates their values, it is plotted as 1 which is only about half of what it should be. The second problem has to do with the definition of Ap [and similar indices Aa and Am]. They simply cannot be measured when the values falls below about 3 [for Ap] and 5 [for Aa and Am]”
Dirk H and Gumby,
If the atmosphere is smaller and denser because of the small magnetic field of the sun, then the atmosphere over time should cool off to reach an equalibrium. When the the magnetic field comes back, and the atomosphere expands again, it should get even colder! This is how an air conditioner works.
I just scared myself.
“”” DirkH (12:15:01) :
“Mike O’Kelly (11:32:46) :
So the AGW theory is that CO2 acts like an insulating blanket in the troposphere absorbing infrared radiation that the earth is trying to radiate out to space … But doesn’t that same CO2 material also absorb incoming solar irradiance in the exact same infrared spectrum and then radiate it when possible towards a cooler area, (usually outerspace), long before that heat/energy can reach the surface of the earth?”
No. IR from the sun is shortwave. It goes downward right through.
The backradiated IR is longwave – longer than a micron i think. “””
Well you have to be careful to define what you are talking about.
Actually, it is well known that a higher temperature Black Body ALWAYS radiates at a higher intensity; at ANY wavelength that a black body at any lower temperature. So the sun surface at about 6000 K radiates much more LWIR at 10-15 microns, than does the earth surface at about 300K. But then you have to apply the inverse square law from solar surface to earth orbit, to find the amount of 10-15 micron radiation falling on earth from the sun; and yes CO2 and H2O and any other GHG will snap that up, just as quickly as it does the earth surface emissions. But by the time it gets to earth it is much weaker than the earth emissions.
But in the main energy containing portion of the solar spectrum, about 98% of the incoming solar lies between 0.25 microns, and 4.0 microns, with 1% beyond each end of that range. But water is active from about 0.75 microns, where about 47-8% of the solar energy falls, and may account for as much as 20% of the total solar energy, being absorbed in the atmosphere. CO2 accounts for way less than that for the incoming solar energy; and both are effective to some extent in the 1-100 micron range. But since water abundance pretty much always exceeds CO2 abundance; by a wide margin, the H2O is much more effective in atmospheric warming via the GHG effect, and would do so in the complete absence of CO2; I daresay, we would scarcely know the difference; except for a little less cloud cover on average.
Leif Svalgaard
“The physical meaning of Ap and similar and how to calculate them from interplanetary parameters can be found here.”
http://www.leif.org/research/suipr699.pdf
Dr. Svalgaard thanks for the link (not something that I could easily absorb) but I found interesting the divergence between even and odd cycles (page 53), as in the case of GCR.
Presumably you will disagree, but I believe that, judging from the limited magnetic records, there is a perceptible difference in the solar magnetic output between odd and even SS cycles as well, at the time of the last four solar maxima. Unfortunately even if the differences are real rather than imaginary, four is far too low number to draw a worthwhile conclusion.
It’s worse than we thought.
Actually, with Leif’s explanation, this is worse than it appears for science. It means that we’re no longer getting data that represents reality because we are unable to measure the real value. It means that if the Sun ever does this again when we do have the ability to measure it accurately at these low levels (correct me if the measurement process makes this against the laws of physics, I didn’t read Leif’s entire paper), then this data is sort of meaningless. It means that from a scientific perspective we really are in a zone similar to the previous dalton/maunder minimum because at least one way of measuring the sun has dipped below our ability to measure, much as sunspot measurement back in those times was limited to a pinhole and time of day.
It means, that for all intents and purposes, the needle has hit bottom, and we need a better gauge.