The Gods punish excessive hubris, but Anthony has invited me to comment on Dr Hathaway’s most recent Solar Cycle 24 prediction:
The number is still wrong.
Hathaway’s number is 64. The best estimate is 48, the same as Solar Cycles 5 and 6. We still have four years to solar maximum so there is plenty of time for activity to build. With the F10.7 flux at 75 as I write this, the trajectory is very flat.
The shape is wrong.
Strong cycles are front-loaded. Weak cycles are symmetrical. This is a weak cycle so the decline will be as long as the ramp up. Dr Hathaway has the Solar Cycle 24/25 transition in 2020. It will be in 2022.
Year of maximum is wrong.
Dr Hathaway has maximum in 2013. It will be in 2015, as foretold by the green corona intensity, and halfway through a 12 year solar cycle that started in December 2008.
Based on the rate at which Dr Hathaway is approaching a correct prediction, we can now estimate when he will finally make a correct prediction. That will be in 2012.
In the spirit of the Hockey Team, I will now make a prediction based on an interpretation of someone else’s as yet unpublished work. That prediction is that there will be no reversal of the Sun’s magnetic poles at Solar Cycle 24 maximum.
In hindsight on Solar Cycle 24 prediction, what is apparent now could have been predicted a couple of decades ago in that it is a de Vries cycle event. The de Vries cycle is a 210 year cycle. The last one was the Dalton Minimum which started in 1798. The current minimum started right on schedule exactly 210 years after that. In the last 2,000 years, the only time we missed out on a de Vries cycle event was the Medieval Warm Period. So it is about 90% reliable. To not have a de Vries cycle event now, we would have to be able to explain why this time that we live in is special. This is a not a special time in which the laws of physics and Nature are suspended, so we are having a de Vries cycle event. While a couple of individuals (Clilverd and Badalyan) made early and correct predictions of Solar Cycle 24 amplitude, nobody got the big picture view correct. While I am saying that, we are also due for a Bond Event.
Under Svensmark’s theory, the significance of weak solar activity is in its effect on the neutron flux in the lower troposphere. Neutron flux remains in an extended peak:
If someone was really good, he or she would be able to predict the shape of the Oulu neutron flux over the rest of this solar cycle (My fossil fuel interests have sidelined me – I am in the middle of drilling an oil well).
With global cooling underway, and while waiting around for solar maximum, my own research interest has moved on to understanding the transition to cooling. A recent report on the Canadian wheat crop has it down 20% this year due to a cold and wet start to the growing season. This is consistent with my view that, by the end of the decade, Canadian agriculture will be reduced to trapping beavers, as it was in the 17th century.
The transition to a severely cold regime can happen in one year flat. Brauer et al, http://geoweb.princeton.edu/people/sigman/paperpdfs/Brauer08.pdf , determined that the transition to the Younger Dryas occurred in 10,671 BC. The date they used was 12,679 BP. As their paper was published in 2008, I changed it to a fixed date. The year of transition was preceded by 21 years of sometimes bad winter weather, but otherwise there was no gradual transition. It was a rapid regime shift. We are now headed into the third cold northern winter in a row, so perhaps there may be only 18 more winters before the climate is set up for a rapid regime shift. As Brauer et al note, there is a strong negative feedback from sea ice. Last winter, some English people were astounded by a patch of sea ice that grew out from the local beach. That may have been the harbinger.
Apart from being very cold, it was also very windy, which reminds me of a slide I will be using in a presentation at a power conference in Brisbane next week:
The north German plain is now blessed with an abundance of wind turbines. With the fierce winter westerlies coming, they might get to have a higher load factor.
Leif Svalgaard says:
October 6, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Sunspot area will also be [mildly] affected by L&P.
The sunspot areas reported by SOON [NOAA] must be multiplied by ~1.5 to match Greenwich 1874-1974.
I don’t use SOON data. I use Debrecen ( or compute it myself) and divide it by 1.1 as per the best estimates that Tunde Baranyi gave me – to relate it to Greenwich photoheliogram data.
Like you say, the area measurements are decoupling somewhat from the flux data.
It’s every indice for itself.
rbateman says:
October 6, 2010 at 10:13 pm
I use Debrecen ( or compute it myself) and divide it by 1.1 as per the best estimates that Tunde Baranyi gave me – to relate it to Greenwich photoheliogram data.
The umbral area is not homogeneous for the Greenwich data was my point.
Better to use the whole area.
OH’ Canada,
Northern Europe survived off of potatos during the mini-ice age.
France stuck with cereal crops and lost a third of the population.
Farmers slept with their cattle in Long houses..
Villages disappeared and survivors fled to the cities and, there, they met the “Black Death”.
Stack the wood high.
Leif Svalgaard says:
October 6, 2010 at 10:26 pm
The umbral area is not homogeneous for the Greenwich data was my point.
Better to use the whole area.
Did that for a while. Made no appreciable difference to the slope of progress. Even in this weak and goofy cycle, the whole spot and umbra are strongly related (despite being very noisy at minimum). Going back to 1874, from cycle to cycle, the relationship of umbral to whole spot does vary, but slowly. So does L&P. That might be a clue.
If something does catch my eye with the relationship, I’ll look back into it.
The religious allusion might be inspired by this little polemic by two German authors who are well known for their “skeptical environmentalism”:
http://www.maxeiner-miersch.de/oekologismus.htm
The headline says “Let us separate waste – Ecologism, the new religion of the wealthy elites”. At the bottom it lists the “Ten commandments of eco-religion”:
“First commandment: Thou shalt be afraid! The most horrific scenario is the most probable. What came out harmless once, will only hit back doubly bad nex time
Second commandment: Thou shalt remorse! Anyone who lives, damages the environment if only by pure existence.
Third commandment: Thou shalt not doubt! The eco movement never errs. Those who doubt serve the infidels.
Fourth commandment: Nature is our benevolent God! It consists of panda bears, baby seals, sunsets and flowers. Earthquakes, tornados and killer viruses are results of human hubris.
Fifth commandment: Thou shalt despise your own species! Man is the cancer tumor of the world. Before his appearance, earth was a peaceful idyl.
Sixth commandment: Thou shalt abhor free markets! The planet can only be saved by central planning of international bureaucracies.
Seventh commandment: Thou shalt not consume! Whatever you buy, use or consume, it is damaging to the environment. Rationing of goods shall be handed to the wise priests of ecologism.
Eighth commandment: Thou shalt not believe in a better tomorrow! Prevent changes and progress, because everything was better in the past.
Ninth commandment: Thou shalt disdain technology! The only remedy are fundamental changes in society, but not inventions of technocratic engineers.
Tenth commandment: Know that guilt is male, white, Christian and western! Innocence is an Indian woman from the jungle.”
By the way, about the remark on wind turbines in the North German plains. Here is a photo of the wind park at Friedrichskoog on the North Sea cost in Schleswig-Holstein state:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2629/4258348804_1234a9594a.jpg
Well I have been watching Erik Klemetti’s Eruptions blog a fair bit. Many who study the seismic activity say this Iceland volcano is likely to erupt about April.
Global Volcanism Program | Grímsvötn | Eruptive History
http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=1703-01=&volpage=erupt&format=expanded#E190212
So there may be no break from the solar dimming after Eyjafjallajökull. That’s cold!
If I may offer a comment about context –
NASA, Hathaway, has to produce a number, that the satellite owners and operators can plan on, in terms of potential for solar disruption. This is a huge responsibility that is not uncommon to that which other of the people I associate with have to maintain regarding an environmental impact document. These responsible parties (state and federal agencies) must state the problem in terms of the potential maximum impact, so that , if necessary, they can back track, but they can never go beyond the anticipated impact in the environmental document.
I suspect that the same is true for Hathaway. He does not have a free path of prediction. He MUST predict the most dire result he sees. This fits with his re-estimations and re- reporting of his estimations over time. I bet if someone with phone privileges to him were to give him a call that he would back this up.
If this is the case, maybe we should give him some space. He will adjust his forecasts, likely as predicted.
He has before.
In other words, he may not be an in the way guy – get It?
William wrote
Response to Comment on “Are there connections between Earth’s magnetic field and climate?,
See Climate Change and the Earth’s Magnetic Poles,
A Possible Connection
Author: Kerton, Adrian K.
Source: Energy & Environment, Volume 20, Numbers 1-2, January 2009 , pp. 75-83(9)
Available on my website http://www.akk.me.uk/Climate_Change.htm
However it may be that changes in ocean currents cause changes in climate also affect the orientation of Earth’s magnetic field and this might be the cause of my observations.
Professor Gregory Ryskin from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University in Illinois, US, has defied the long-standing convention by applying equations from magnetohydrodynamics to our oceans’ salt water (which conducts electricity) and found that the long-term changes (the secular variation) in the Earth’s main magnetic field are possibly induced by our oceans’ circulation.
With global cooling underway,….
No chance we’ll see some evidence of this, I suppose.
vigilantfish says:
October 6, 2010 at 7:02 pm: ‘Christianity did not start out of some capitalist impulse, subsidized by state support, to pull one over on the gullible.’
State Christianity did start from political motives, as an aid to establishing Constantine’s control after his coup d’etat, and was used by the state to bolster its power. Subsequent to Constantine it was then organised by emperors and clerics into an overarching system of social, political, financial and personal control which dominated and, in many ways, stultified European thought and history almost up to the present. Ask Bruno or Galileo or any of those the church destroyed because of their heresy or free-thinking. There are clear parallels with the extreme environmentalist movement – all they need is some compliant politicians …. yeah, but that couldn’t happen could it?
http://www.jupitersdance.com/thelasttango
Planetary motion affecting solar output.
Oh, come on Archibald. Please don’t say we are in for a de Vries cycle and that this explains everything – and then not tell us what a de Vries cycle actually is (apart from the fact that we get 5 of them per millennia).
I tried Wiki, but no luck. Can you write a Wiki article?
.
Archibald:
And regards the de Vries cycle, I am not looking for a URL to that slide of yours with the various solar minima displayed on it. I was looking more for your best guess and explanation for this cycle.
It is a cycle. The Sun spins, the planets orbit, the Sun throbs and churns – so what is the driving factor of the de Vries cycle? What, exactly, is resonating?
.
I just love this blog, though I am not a scientist and do struggle with the finer points. Needless to say, I have the logs stacked already. On the crucifix/winturbine slide, I agree, it is a salient point and I do come across people who behave as though AGW is a fundamentalist religion and brook no other view.
Please continue with your excellent dialogues, I follow with a lot of interest though not complete understanding(understatement). It does prompt a lot of interest and reading whilst trying to keep up with you guys though
>>Owen says: October 6, 2010 at 6:03 pm
>>2. Their founder lived a life of simplicity, had “nowhere to rest
>>his head”, and died a cruel death to open the way to God.
Actually, their founder was given great riches on his birth, was highly educated (enough to amaze the chief priests), became an architect (tekton), had a number of very rich tax-collectors and very rich and influential friends (Nicodemus** and Arimathaea among many), had a sumptuous wedding (Cana), was judged not by some yokel priest but by the Roman governor himself (the equivalent of being judged by Obama), and he was hailed as a king.
So yes, the Green religion is indeed like Christianity – they are both masquerading as something that they are not.
** According to Prof Eisenman, Nicodemus was the richest man in Judaea.
.
William – Thanks for the citations and links, most helpful!
Very interesting…..
This might shed some light on the issue of Grand Minima
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com/2010/10/recent-grand-minima-in-level-of-solar.html
While your at it you might want to look at the synchronization of the Odd and Even sunspot maximums and the position angle of the planet Jupiter at the times of the alignments of Venus and Earth:
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-are-evenodd-sunspot-cycle-maxima.html
Ed Murphy says:
October 6, 2010 at 11:41 pm :
“Well I have been watching Erik Klemetti’s Eruptions blog a fair bit. Many who study the seismic activity say this Iceland volcano is likely to erupt about April.
Global Volcanism Program | Grímsvötn | Eruptive History……”
Hekla is also ready, so we may have two eruptions here in Iceland soon: Grimsvötn in Vatnajökull glacier and Hekla. We have been waiting for Katla for a long time… Maybe Katla is also ready…
This reminds me of: Year Without a Summer by Willie Soon and Stephen H Yaskell.
“A weak solar maximum, a major volcanic eruption, and possibly even the wobbling of
the Sun conspired to make the summer of 1816 one of the most miserable ever recorded”.
This was during the Dalton minimum which may be repeating…
cfa-www.harvard.edu/~wsoon/GoldbergMay05-d/Summer_of_1816.pdf
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=86174493950
http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/Calen/Year1816.html
For those who might be interested as to when the next Bond (or DO) Event will occur:
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com/2010/10/1470-year-do-events-transition-from.html
I should have added to my comment at October 7, 2010 at 3:04 am that Constantine didn’t get baptised until his deathbed and, previously and pertinently to this thread, had always been a devotee of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun.
The north German plain is now blessed with an abundance of wind turbines. With the fierce winter westerlies coming, they might get to have a higher load factor.
Their recent load is more than enough to overwhelm the north-south energy transfer inside Germany. Because there is a “green” resistance to build more power lines (disfiguring the landscape and suchlikes…), the Germans dump the whole energy overload from their Northwest to Polish and Czech grid without any warning. In Czech rep., we already had a blackout due to overload some years ago and our grid manager therefore decided to install sort of fuses at the German-Czech interface to protect us, but the Germans complained at the EU and we were forced to remove them.
Ralph says:
October 7, 2010 at 6:35 am
“So yes, the Green religion is indeed like Christianity – they are both masquerading as something that they are not.”
Ralph, how did it serve the main discussion here to go out of your way to offend those participants here who are of the Christian faith?
Hi Mac the Knife,
We may have a chance to observe how an interrupted solar magnetic cycle restarts.
The mechanism that creates sunspots appears to have been interrupted based on Livingston and Penn’s measurements of the magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots that show the magnetic field strength of new individual sunspots is reducing linearly. As a minimum magnetic field strength is required for the magnetic ropes that travel from the tachocline through the convection zone to the solar surface, to enable the magnetic ropes to avoid being torn apart by the turbulence in the convection zone there will be no sunspots after around 2014. (The ropes will be torn apart in the convection zone.) One solar mechanism theory postulates that the past cycle sunspots are the seed for new sunspots (That mechanism has the sunspots formed at the tachocline). Without the seed the mechanism is interrupted.
Comment:
I believe the changes in LTD (ionosphere increases and decreases tracking the solar magnetic cycle) are related to what causes sunspots. If the sunspot mechanism has been interrupted one would expect the ionosphere to continue to contract.