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In the spirit of the Hockey Team, I will now make a prediction based on an interpretation of someone else’s as yet unpublished work.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.
>>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?
??? Sorry, how can the truth be offensive? The truth has no motive, nor does it have an agenda, it just IS.
Your position is like saying that F=M*A might be offensive to some scientists. It cannot be offensive, it is just the truth of a formula, no more no less.
If a member of a sect wants to profess something, and the very texts of that faith say something completely different, how can they be offended by this? Do their texts offend them? If so, perhaps they should try a different belief system.
I fail to see your logic.
.
I’d like to recommend “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps” by Robert Felix – picked up through another WUWT reader’s recommendation, about a year ago, and
readdevoured voraciously as one of those special rare “aha” books. A book that somebody here might tell me is total rubbish. But it’s a paradigm shifter that is scientifically well-grounded IMHO, well-written with a light touch so it’s very readable. It draws on a formidable number of sources – I estimate the bibliography has some 150 science papers, in addition to books and articles.“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.”
October 7, 2010 at 11:24 am
??? Sorry, how can the truth be offensive?”
That’s not factual truth, that’s an opinion. Not everyone here agrees with your opinion, including myself and hence it is offensive. I’ll leave it at that.
Still waiting for leif’s question to be answered by DA:
“Best estimate”? based on what?
Similar questions have been asked on other threads and they have not been answered…
David Archibald
You have to distinguish clearly between Christian spirituality and idolatry because icons speak to people very fast. *No pressure*
Please, what is the de Vries cycle? And can you give some refs to work that evidences your predictions?
Ralph says:
October 7, 2010 at 11:24 am
“I fail to see your logic.”
Indeed.
vigilantfish says:
October 6, 2010 at 7:02 pm
“Owen, Mike McMillan and RockyRoad are right – that slide should be removed. Christianity did not start out of some capitalist impulse, subsidized by state support, to pull one over on the gullible.”
As a Catholic and a believer in Jesus Christ I still must take exception to your comment. Ever heard of Emperor Constantine? Christianity was not started by him but was certainly given a big push when it was made the Roman Religion of choice 1500 or so years ago. The truth is still the truth and the Roman Empire, then, was a much stronger influence than any corporate influence of today. Plus I am not so sure the Council of Nicea got it all right in terms of which Gospels to use as well as other issues which most present day Christians buy into.
Mr. Alex says:
October 7, 2010 at 12:36 pm
“That’s not factual truth, that’s an opinion. Not everyone here agrees with your opinion, including myself and hence it is offensive. I’ll leave it at that.”
How is it that one can be offended by an opinion they do not agree with? That is a “dis-agreement” not an “offense”.
What a world we’d live in if every opinion was the same.
It seems to me the trouble these days is that people are too easily “offended”.
JimG
Of particular relevance is that Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople and enabled the Eastern Roman Empire to flourish as Byzantium. Thanks to this we have some 1000 years of climate references relating to the Byzantine empire demonstrating numerous periods of climate change.
Tonyb
Lucy Skywalker says:
October 7, 2010 at 12:31 pm
I also like Robert Felix’ web site http://www.iceagenow.com, its entertaining and informative
– he doesn’t take himself 100% seriously which is always good. He is often quicker to post important climate news and scientific publications than WUWT. Iceagenow is an easy place to see the latest sunspot status with a very nice link at the top.
He has some sound instincts on climate and other areas of science; however his ideas on evolutionary leaps coinciding with magnetic reversals is impossible to believe. Too much is known in too much detail about species formation and change under natural selection, for it to be remotely possible to re-write evolutionary history on such a punctuated timescale. Many instances thoroughly documented of species changes over much shorter timescales, such as the remarkable African Cichlid fishes of lakes Tanganika and Victoria and surrounding waterways, where hundreds of new species have appeared on a century to almost decadal timescale over just a few millenia. Other examples are the recent evolution of the spider crab and the ring species (species merging into each-other around a geographical ring) such as the herring gull / lesser black backed gull around the Arctic and the Ensatina salamander of Central Valley in California.
Also his tenacious adherence to the idea that magnetic reversals lead to catastrophic “explosions in the sky” leading to extinctions, is hard to take seriously. None the less R Felix is likeable and his website interesting and useful.
DA has found a symbolic link between the Roman warm period and our own moden warm period.
Do these new structures represent our own modern crucifiction at the hands of the panic driven greenies on mass, who believe in the false anti-Carbon ?
Always look on the bright side of life
Jim G and Ralph:
I know that Christianity is not the subject of this blog but must reply to your distortions of the point I made yesterday – Christianity began in the year 33, not the year 313, in which the Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan declared religious tolerance for Christians. Christianity did not become a state religion, but rather one of many religions to be allowed. But all of this happened long after Christianity inspired its followers, who were not state-supported elites, but rather often the poor and marginalized, and especially women and slaves, with a new understanding of the essential equality of all of humanity. Too often people read back into history the later tropes which were not at all in existence in earlier times. I have the hardest time making my students understand the almost total lack of support by the military of scientific and technological research and development in the US prior to the Second World War. I can give example after example of military hostility to innovation, and they will still tell me that US inventors had it easy because of military funding in the late 19th and early 20th century. To argue, going back to my earlier point, that Christianity enjoyed a state-supported, almost corporate influence on the population, of the kind that wind turbine companies are enjoying today, is like trying to argue that CO2 is responsible for global warming even though CO2 increases historically have followed centuries after temperatures peaked.
Stephen Wilde says: As for a Bond event I’m vey doubtful They are characteristic of highly unstable glacial epochs so I think we will need to have exited the current interglacial before seeing one of those.
Um, the 1500 year cycle persists in both glacial and interglacial periods. It was found by two different groups in each, so is named differently during glacials than interglacials. During interglacials (that is, now) it’s a Bond Event. During glacials it is a Dansgaard Oeschger event.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard-Oeschger_event
(The wiki, of course, has to assert that the periodicity is “debated”. Couldn’t just admit there are long cycle events…)
Given that the 1500 year cycle has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, the odds of us skipping this one are close to nil, IMHO. And this being an interglacial, it will be a Bond Event. I’ve christened it Bond Event Zero (as they are numbered higher as you go back in time)…
Oh, and D.O. Events are warming events while Bond Events are cooling (same 1500 year cycle, just they detected the flip sides of it…) The cooling event is called a Heinrich Event, though we’ve not detected as many of them. NCDC:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data3.html
says it’s all about fresh water flows. My opinion is that the water flows are a symptom, not root cause. Oh, and I’d bet there were some 1500 year coolings that we didn’t tag as Heinrich Events simply because it was in the middle of a glacial and kind of hard to pick them out…
So I’d put hard money on Bond Event Zero happening. Then again, they have a couple hundred year or so error band, so it might be a while before it gets here…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_event
makes an indirect assertion that the Little Ice Age might have been a Bond Event (and it could, I suppose) but my money would be on it being just a lead in opening act. The nominal cycle is 1470 years, and the last one ran about 450 – 900 AD. So with a 450 year duration, we ought not to be out of the wood yet. (The Iron Age Cold Epoch ran about 900-300 BC or 600 years, so long events are not unusual). If the LIA was the start (say 1700) we ought to still be in the middle of it.
But take 535 (when the Dark Ages began, supposedly with a couple of years where the sun was quite dark “like the moon”) and add 1470 to it. 2005. Gee, just about the time our present solar quiet began…
So my money would be in the LIA being just a normal part of our oscillation down toward the next glacial. And that Bond Event Zero has not yet passed….
but we’ll see… even if it takes 100 years…
John Finn says:
“With global cooling underway,….”
No chance we’ll see some evidence of this, I suppose.
All the snows in both hemispheres last winter(s) along with all the rains now. All that rain comes from clouds. More clouds mean more sunlight reflected away AND they mean that a load of water condensed up high and dumped that heat to space.
So you can see the cooling (heat loss) in all the mass flow of water. Eventually the temperatures will drop everywhere (not just in selected areas as now) as even more heat is lost. But please do remember that ‘cooling’ is heat loss, not temperature reduction. “Warmers” like to confound those two, but they are quite different.
So just look at the global precipitation and see the heat loss.
Per the folks wondering what a De Vries cycle is: Try looking up a Suess Cycle. They are the same thing.
It’s a 205 or so year long solar output cycle.
http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/2001/2000GL006116.shtml
E.M.Smith says:
October 7, 2010 at 10:50 pm
All the snows in both hemispheres last winter(s) along with all the rains now. All that rain comes from clouds. More clouds mean more sunlight reflected away AND they mean that a load of water condensed up high and dumped that heat to space
So the evidence that “cooling is underway” is that it was a bit snowy in parts of the NH last winter and it’s raining in some parts of the world. Isn’t this cooling supposed to be part of a significant decades-long downturn? When did it start? I thought the “cooling” had been going since 1998.
Never mind you’ll soon have some La Nina-affected data to offer as “evidence”.
E M Smith said:
Stephen Wilde says: As for a Bond event I’m vey doubtful They are characteristic of highly unstable glacial epochs so I think we will need to have exited the current interglacial before seeing one of those.
Um, the 1500 year cycle persists in both glacial and interglacial periods. It was found by two different groups in each, so is named differently during glacials than interglacials. During interglacials (that is, now) it’s a Bond Event. During glacials it is a Dansgaard Oeschger event”
Thanks EMS.
I noticed my terminology error shortly after posting and once again regretted the absence of an edit facility.
I really had in mind those much larger swings of the glacial epochs and mixed them up with interglacial Bond Events. My comment is applicable to the former rather than the latter and of course David was indeed referring to the latter.
EMS,
“The events may be caused by an amplification of solar forcings, or by a cause internal to the earth system – either a “binge-purge” cycle of ice sheets accumulating so much mass they become unstable, as postulated for Heinrich events, or an oscillation in deep ocean currents (Maslin et al.. 2001, p25).”
I’d go for the combination of solar forcings plus oscillations in deep sea currents with the binge – purge process as a by product. That would fit my NCM nicely especially now that Jo Haigh has firmed up the matter of the sign of the solar effect on the atmosphere for me. That was by far the point that caused me most concern prior to her announcements since my proposal was way out of line with the received opinion. I had a lot of problems with Leif over that issue.
You can offend my God all you want He doesn’t care. You can offend my Gods all you want they don’t care.
And Bond event? Will there be a feature on the girls in one of the usual magazines?
But all of this happened long after Christianity inspired its followers, who were not state-supported elites
How the times have changed. At least in some places.
Any way. Back On Topic. It is criminal given the uncertainty that we are not preparing for change in either direction – warm or cold.
I too see no semblance of similarity between the cross of the crucifixion and the wind turbines. It might appeal to some with little or no knowledge of Christianity, but to everybody else it reveals how little you know about it.
Hey. It amuses us Jewish guys. (You know. The old time religion.)
Personally I am tickled even further because of all the Christian hymns I was forced to sing back in public school. (yeah it was a long time ago – in human years). Funny how some things stick with you and still leave a bad taste in your mouth 50 years later.
Any way I liked the graphic. And I like religion. Realizing that it may just be an artifact of our brain chemistry. Maybe that Leary guy was on to something.
If this cooling comes to pass I think I’m going to enjoy going back over the Inet and making fun of the warmistas. OTOH the hunger will not be so much fun.
D Archibald : “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.”
12,679 BP is a fixed date and means “12,679 before 1950”, ie 19729 BC !
E.M.Smith says:
October 7, 2010 at 10:25 pm
What does it take for you you note this post?
Ninderthana says:
October 7, 2010 at 8:11 am
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
The Christians are offended because they don’t like their icons being compared to some other faith based outfit’s icons. But they are just icons! Both the cross and the turbine only provide alms to salve the fears and uncertainties of the unknown and unpredictable future. One outfit is offering freedom from persecution in the after life, the other is offering freedom from persecution by hot weather. Both outfit’s force the individual to give up some freedoms in order to attain the salvation. One can argue whether both outfits are frauds or not; but you cannot argue that the icons are just representations of the belief system. I wish the modern day Christian was a bit more easy going about their icons just as much as I wish the same for the AGW alarmists. But I can acknowledge that the Christians are not as threatening as the AGW alarmists are these days. However, Galileo (and plenty of others) had it the other way around in their day.
E.M.Smith says:
October 7, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Those are not “bonds” to buy but to sell, in any case. 🙂
MikeH says:
October 8, 2010 at 6:55 am
You are confusing icons with symbols, these are representations of actual working laws in the universe, neither imagination nor dreams, but actual “machines”.BTW the “cross” which worries you so much, it is one of these.
See:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38598073/Unified-Field
also:
http://www.amazon.com/Symbols-Sacred-Science-Guenon-Works/dp/0900588772/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286553282&sr=1-1