The sun went spotless yesterday, the first time in quite awhile. It seems like a good time to present this analysis from my friend David Archibald. For those not familiar with the Dalton Minimum, here’s some background info from Wiki:
The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity, named after the English meteorologist John Dalton, lasting from about 1790 to 1830.[1] Like the Maunder Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Dalton Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. The Oberlach Station in Germany, for example, experienced a 2.0°C decline over 20 years.[2] The Year Without a Summer, in 1816, also occurred during the Dalton Minimum. Solar cycles 5 and 6, as shown below, were greatly reduced in amplitude. – Anthony
Guest post by David Archibald
James Marusek emailed me to ask if I could update a particular graph. Now that it is a full two years since the month of solar minimum, this was a good opportunity to update a lot of graphs of solar activity.
Figure 1: Solar Polar Magnetic Field Strength
The Sun’s current low level of activity starts from the low level of solar polar magnetic field strength at the 23/24 minimum. This was half the level at the previous minimum, and Solar Cycle 24 is expected to be just under half the amplitude of Solar Cycle 23.
Figure 2: Heliospheric Current Sheet Tilt Angle
It is said that solar minimum isn’t reached until the heliospheric current sheet tilt angle has flattened. While the month of minimum for the 23/24 transition is considered to be December 2008, the heliospheric current sheet didn’t flatten until June 2009.
Figure 3: Interplanetary Magnetic Field
The Interplanetary Magnetic Field remains very weak. It is almost back to the levels reached in previous solar minima.
Figure 4: Ap Index 1932 – 2010
The Ap Index remains under the levels of previous solar minima.
Figure 5: F10.7 Flux 1948 – 2010
The F10.7 Flux is a more accurate indicator of solar activity than the sunspot number. It remains low.
Figure 6: F10.7 Flux aligned on solar minima
In this figure, the F10.7 flux of the last six solar minima are aligned on the month of minimum, with the two years of decline to the minimum and three years of subsequent rise. The Solar Cycle 24 trajectory is much lower and flatter than the rises of the five previous cycles.
Figure 7: Oulu Neutron Count 1964 – 210
A weaker interplanetary magnetic field means more cosmic rays reach the inner planets of the solar system. The neutron count was higher this minimum than in the previous record. Thanks to the correlation between the F10.7 Flux and the neutron count in Figure 8 following, we now have a target for the Oulu neutron count at Solar Cycle 24 maximum in late 2014 of 6,150.
Figure 8: Oulu Neutron Flux plotted against lagged F10.7 flux
Neutron count tends to peak one year after solar minimum. Figure 8 was created by plotting Oulu neutron count against the F10.7 flux lagged by one year. The relationship demonstrated by this graph indicates that the most likely value for the Oulu neutron count at the Solar Cycle 24 maximum expected to be a F10.7 flux value of 100 in late 2014 will be 6,150.
Figure 9: Solar Cycle 24 compared to Solar Cycle 5
I predicted in a paper published in March 2006 that Solar Cycles 24 and 25 would repeat the experience of the Dalton Minimum. With two years of Solar Cycle 24 data in hand, the trajectory established is repeating the rise of Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum. The prediction is confirmed. Like Solar Cycles 5 and 6, Solar Cycle 24 is expected to be 12 years long. Solar maximum will be in late 2014/early 2015.
Figure 10: North America Snow Cover Ex-Greenland
The northern hemisphere is experiencing its fourth consecutive cold winter. The current winter is one of the coldest for a hundred years or more. For cold winters to provide positive feedback, snow cover has to survive from one winter to the next so that snow’s higher albedo relative to bare rock will reflect sunlight into space, causing cooler summers. The month of snow cover minimum is most often August, sometimes July. We have to wait another eight months to find out how this winter went in terms of retained snow cover. The 1970s cooling period had much higher snow cover minima than the last thirty years. Despite the last few cold winters, there was no increase in the snow cover minima. The snow cover minimum may have to get to over two million square kilometres before it starts having a significant effect.
David Archibald
December 2010
NASA proclaims a discovery (Dec 2007)
NASA Spacecraft Make New Discoveries about Northern Lights
Angelopoulos estimates the total energy of the two-hour event at five hundred thousand billion (5 x 1014) Joules. That’s approximately equivalent to the energy of a magnitude 5.5 earthquake.
Where does all that energy come from? THEMIS may have found an answer:
“The satellites have found evidence for magnetic ropes connecting Earth’s upper atmosphere directly to the Sun,” says Dave Sibeck, project scientist for the mission at the Goddard Space Flight Center. “We believe that solar wind particles flow in along these ropes, providing energy for geomagnetic storms and auroras.”
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2007/11dec_themis/
I wrote the Sunspot formulae in 2003 (published Jan 2004)
http://xxx.lanl.gov/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0401/0401107.pdf
that not only predicted low SC24, but indicated even the lower SC25, and SC26.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC11.htm
This is the time when the NASA’s top expert Dr. Hathaway (frozen field expert) was predicting highest ever SC24, and declared my work ‘irrelevant’. How wrong one can be!? Where were the experts in 2003?
For some time now I have been advocating the idea that solar activity destabilises the Arctic magnetic field
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC9.htm
which in the association with Arctic ocean currents, has profound effect on the N. Hemisphere’s climate.
Currently this is also labelled ‘nonsense’ by the experts. Time will tell.
Bill Jamison says:
December 20, 2010 at 12:54 am
“Well we’re having a cold FALL, winter is yet to be determined!”
Same here in south central Texas. A few “hard” freezes where that’s defined as below 30 degrees and many mornings with light frost. More than usual for December but so far no really hard freezes yet which for us is dropping down into the teens along with not going above freezing at all for 48 or 72 hours. We don’t get much in the way of snowfall – maybe an inch or two at most that might stick for a couple of days. What we get more often are ice storms where everything gets covered in a half inch of perfectly clear ice.
How does CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere effect the sun. That’s going to be a tough one. Maybe Al Gore would like to take a trip there and let us know what he finds.
The more we know, we find, the less we really know. Can you imagine, if we used the climate science methodology to build bridges with?
@ur momisugly RR Kampen
You should note, looking at the graphs provided in this post, that 1970 was several years into that solar cycle, and past solar maximum. Here in 2010 we have not yet approached maximum. Your comparison is not honest.
Creighten says: “Then there is past correlation to consider. Correlation may not be causation, but that’s the way to bet it. A hypothesis without correlation of some sort to back it up will not fare well.”
Oh my. So MUCH harm and sorrow has been caused in the past by just such a belief as you state regarding science. And much harm repaired by people courageous enough to purpose a hypothesis not so evident to the masses but proposed first through plausible mechanism, followed by observation, then through experimentation, and by every attempt to disprove it. Let us never, never go back to your way of thinking, else we find ourselves in a modern dark age.
HR says:
>>December 20, 2010 at 3:23 am
Just out of curiosity where does the data from Oberlach Station come from? A google search just keeps coming up with quotes from Wiki. I see the Wiki article refers to Archibald. Any help?<<
The reference was vandalised from Wikipedia. I have returned it. It is:
http://climatepolice.com/Solar_Cycles.pdf
See page 5 (pg 33). Mr Archibald, sir, what is the primary data source for these 3 series of temperature readings?? It would be interesting to review them.
richard jenkins says:
December 20, 2010 at 4:45 am
Look at this data set, it goes back 11,000 years, until 50 years before now.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/solanki2004-ssn.txt
Where is the Dalton minimum?
vukcevic says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:33
Formulae that give a close approximation of solar activity
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC11.htm
and solar polar fields
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC2.htm
One more time – Vuk, would you please label your graphs so they might convey your message to the rest of us?
Leif says
Quote
Getting facts straight seem to be hard. Magnetic ropes in the solar wind have been recognized for decades, e.g.:
Unquote
Recognised and waffled about is one thing, hard data to show they link to Earth by Themis Imaging is something else. It would be interesting to know exactly what a magnetic rope is. Seems to be a euphemism for electric current. Bit like concrete etched magnetic lines of force, still looking for them.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 5:15 am
“On the contrary, the official [sunspot] count has been a bit too low.”
So like the instruments used to view the sun have gotten worse in recent years?
That claim has zero credibility.
^^ Clearly a troll. Only someone trying to generate inflamed responses would be so casual as to not bother to define what constitutes “Solar Activity.” For all I know you’re referring to visible solar radiation like many CAGW believers do. If, however, you mean sunspots or F10.7, you’re wrong. But of course being a troll, the conflation of the two is probably what you’re going for.
the_Butcher says:
Don’t take it to the heart Vuk, you’re not the first or the last from your country to be called such names.
Don’t know how to take that….but thanks for the support ..
In no way comparison, but one of the great scientists of late 19-20th century Nikola Tesla was proclaimed as a charlatan too. No internet blogs in those days , so Edison used more direct method:
But Edison soon had too much money invested into his DC system, and he tried his best to discredit Tesla by showing that AC was more dangerous than DC. Edison paid local children 25 cents for each stray dog they could bring him. Then he would hold press conferences and electrocute the dogs at public gatherings to frighten people.
He claimed that DC could not kill, but in fact, it can.
Fred from Canuckistan says:
December 20, 2010 at 6:06 am
“Shouldn’t we be asking how carbon dioxide causes this lack of sunspots?”
______
Too much CO2 causes the Earth to heat AND cool –but eventually it will boil– and this causes changes in the atmosphere which, in turn, distort human perception much as too much Coors on a hot winter’s night panty raid will also doeth. Anyway that’s the Technical explanation being given to post grads at Hav’erd and, I believe, at every other Ivy Covered Institution for the Preservation of Witchcraft in the Western Hemisphere. It’s NOT that there are less sunspots, there are actually just as many as ever there were or will be, tis that we cannot see them. See? Humans have a very serious alergic reaction to CO2 and eventually go blind when the play with it too much. The Sun doesn’t change, well not at a rate to matter; it’s kind of a constant thing. It’s the CO2 that’s going to kill us. (SarcOff;-)
>>Kampen
>>So 2009 and 2010 should have been half a degree C colder than it
>>was around 1970. But they aren’t. How come?
Because, by the time you have finished rationalising and rebasing the temperatures, they always turn out to be warmer. Funny, that!
.
Dave Springer says:
December 20, 2010 at 7:30 am
So like the instruments used to view the sun have gotten worse in recent years?
That claim has zero credibility.
Counting of sunspots uses telescopes of same power as 150 years ago [on purpose]. In fact, the very same telescope Rudolf Wolf used in the 1850 is still being used and serves as a nice standard. Comparing the official count with everybody else [see Figures 23 and 24 of http://www.leif.org/research/SIDC-Seminar-14Sept.pdf shows the undercount very clearly.
Grey Lensman says:
December 20, 2010 at 7:25 am
Recognised and waffled about is one thing, hard data to show they link to Earth by Themis Imaging is something else. It would be interesting to know exactly what a magnetic rope is. Seems to be a euphemism for electric current. Bit like concrete etched magnetic lines of force, still looking for them.
The hard data has been there a long time. ‘Recognized’ means being accepted as fact and that acceptance is decades old. Here is more on flux ropes: http://www.vsp.ucar.edu/Heliophysics/pdf/MoldwinM_MagneticFluxRopesSpacePlasmas_07.pdf
Electric currents must be maintained [by an emf] otherwise they short out. It has been known for decades that such emf is naturally provided by neutral plasma [conductors] moving [by gravity or thermal gradients] across magnetic fields provides the needed emf. The lamp on my old bicycle was produced by such a method [called a dynamo].
Pascvaks says:
December 20, 2010 at 5:39 am
“During the Little Ice Age (and all the minima and the Big Ice Ages too) both poles experienced significant sea ice growth. Watch the sea ice global total for global cooling-warming indicators. It’s a kind’a global thermometer thingy-wingy.”
It’s not quite that simple. Heat is transported from tropics to poles by ocean and atmospheric convective currents. Those convective currents can change for reasons largely not understood. If the transport slows for any reason you can get rising temperatures in the tropics and falling temperatures at the poles. The opposite can happen as well if the convective for any reason increase – falling temps in the tropics and rising temps at the poles. To complicate things even more the northern and southern hemispheres have convective currents largely independent of each other so you can get an increase in one hemisphere and a decrease in the other at the same time. Making matters even more complicated is the Atlantic and Pacific have some degree of independence from each other so they aren’t always in sync with each other. Complicating things even more is that the vast majority of the ocean (90%) of it is at a nearly constant 3C and where only a shallow surface layer (first few hundred meters) gets warmer than that. The mixing rate between warm shallow surface and frigid depths, can also change due to changes in trade wind patterns and in the great conveyor belt which transports warm surface water towards the poles where it cools below 3C and sinks to the bottom and where that warm surface water is replaced by cold water flowing along the bottom from polar region to tropical oceans. Complicating things even more are changing gyre currents which are huge eddies which loop off from the main conveyor belt circuit.
The global ocean has over 1000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere and it’s average temperature from top to bottom is scary-cold at 4C which is scary because any change that increases the mix rate between surface and deep waters will make the planet very very cold. The climate is controlled by the global ocean. Weather is controlled by the atmosphere. The sun heats the ocean and the ocean heats the air.
Four degrees C is the average surface temperature of the globe when averaged across both glacial and interglacial epochs of the current ice age. It can be nothing else as over periods of hundreds of thousands of years even the slow mixing rate of shallow and deep ocean waters will average it out and the average air temperature at the surface must eventually follow the temperature of the ocean since the atmosphere has such a tiny thermal mass compared to the ocean.
“Global temps are still high by all five metrics (NOAA, UAH, RSS, GISS, and HADCRUT).”
When are we going to get over the fact that “global average temperature” has no relevance to anything.
Here is a comment I have sent to real climate re cold weather and global warming. Awaiting moderation so it may never see the light of day. This seems the closet fit on your topics. If it passes your moderation please feel free to add it.
Gilles/Gavin comments
“It’s difficult for me to understand how one can evaluate the consequences of a global warming, if the local changes are so much unknown. The global consequences are just the sum of local consequences – if they are so many unknown in the local responses of winters, rains, etc.. how can one evaluate any sensible figure ? and more generally, if the LOCAL variance is higher than the long term (which can be true even if the GLOBAL one is not), how can it affect significantly the all day life of people living in some place ?
[Response: It’s difficult for me to understand how one can evaluate the consequences of the Earth’s passage around the sun, if the local changes are so much unknown. The global consequences are just the sum of local consequences – if they are so many unknown in the local responses of seasons, rains, etc.. how can one evaluate any sensible figure ? and more generally, if the LOCAL variance is higher than the seasonal cycle (which can be true even if the GLOBAL one is not), how can it affect significantly the all day life of people living in some place? Indeed, it is truly a mystery. – gavin]”
I love comment 1 and the response as both are so true.
Making a living in a real world on energy policy and project implementation I have learnt that it is essential that we learn to manage uncertainty. In supporting and developing some of the first initiatives responding to the global warming risk in the early ’90s it was good for me to make sensible and concrete progress on the basis of common objectives. But then the predictions of catastrophe got more extreme, and the responses were built on an assumption of certainty. Impacts were extrapolated to fantastical levels (Maldives, polar bears and the rest – both seem to be thriving on the evidence) without any reference to probability or to offsetting benefits. The economics of global warming mitigation have become ridiculous – as the nonsensical uneconomic (wasted resources of the earth and the human race, goddammit) investment in windpower and solar demonstrate.
Mr Cook wonders why the scientists have not explained themselves well. Easy – scare mongering wins politicians but loses the credibility of professionals, and the general public. The CO2 modelling has been around long enough for people to test the predictions – compared with the solar modellers (Corbyn, Sharp) the CO2 modellers are losing. Corbyn and Sharp are beating the professional weather and climate forecasters this year. My previous employer used Corbyn from 1994 because he was even then by some way the most accurate in the medium to long term – and the long term weather becomes the climate.
“Global warming means cold winters and more Antarctic ice” sounds a facile and stupid excuse for failed models in that context even if you believe it to be the truth. If you have a load of missing energy then your model is wrong and you cannot blame sea ice or some other unproven hypothesis. The solar guys acknowledge uncertainty, while uncertainty is a barely disclosed caveat in the CO2 world, to be used as an excuse if necessary.
Oddly, I do not give a fig who is right scientifically – but I want to respond on behalf of clients as to the best (economic, efficient, sustainable in the true sense) way to meet the energy needs of customers – that is, everyone. Working in developing countries as well, I have to recognise that wind and solar are not substitutes for economic energy to deliver economic and social welfare, replacing forests and kerosene as fuel sources.
Where risks are overstated on both impact and probability, you have to ignore them. You follow the best, most accurate predictions, not the politically correct ones. When people in many countries perceive cooling (starting in my case with cold winters in Southern Africa from 2007, and now in Latin America and Central America where people’s perception is mirrored in satellite models – I will not mention the more obvious Northern Hemisphere worries of a cold population paying higher than ever energy bills) they do not like being told it is their fault and due to global warming. Politicians outside the EU and the US are paying lip service to global warming while planning energy policies that increasingly ignore the warming risk – especially in the developing world and the “nearly developed” world.
The vitriol and points scoring on both sides of this debate are a waste of time. The skeptics have the merit of not trying to prove anything, and their case that the evidence (not the models or the science so much) is poor is manifestly correct: diminishing correlation between CO2 and global temperature, measured sea level rises insignificant, failed predictions from the CO2 side – even if these were silly – Messrs Parker, Viner and Monbiot come to mind.
My non-scientific reading of the current situation is: the CO2 forcing and economic impacts need re-thinking and re-modelling to match evidence since 1995; everyone needs to accept that the solar people are winning on predictions, and to work out why –
is CO2 forcing overstated and solar forcing understated?;
as the answer is uncertain because the science is uncertain, policy makers and professionals and businesses need to come up with a better policy framework (and not the damaging precautionary principle – this is about risk management, not capitulation)- and that means suspending the UN and EU policy rules for now while we learn a bit more;
and what if nothing substantive is really changing at all, and this is all just weather – we can then save a load of taxpayers’ money on unnecessary modelling and research!
By the way, on the specific point of cold weather, I remember the effect of Greenland highs in 78/9 and December 81. I also remember 62/3 but was just too young to note where the Greenland high was. But clearly Greenland highs and late Hudson Bay icing go together, and have pleasingly not changed over my lifetime. That is good news – less is more.
Sense Seeker says:
December 20, 2010 at 4:04 am
“Also, since 1980 temperature has gone up by about 0.5 degrees Celsius, you’d need a very impressive lag effect to explain that, given flat solar activity.”
The numbers are worthless because the temperature record continues to comprise only averages, not actual observations. If all the heating occurred at night, it could very easily be the result of UHI. But no one knows because meteorologists and climate scientists have all sworn to use numbers that are an average of a daytime and a nighttime temperature for each day. If pro-AGW folk were serious, they would insist that all funding for AGW research should be channeled into a program that produces temperature measurements that are acceptable to all parties in the debate. In other words, put the money where the science is, namely, in its infancy.
It looks like the UN will soon be running the internet.
I expect the IPCC will have them ban sceptics.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/20/un_committee_internet/
-19.6C in Chesham Buckinghamshire last night.
@Pascvaks (continued)
The global climate, when viewed over hundreds of millions of years has winters and summers where the winters (ice ages) persist for millions of years and the summers persist for tens of millions of years. Where we are at right now is a winter period. The earth has been in an ice for the past 3 million years. More immediately speaking we are in a brief thaw. For people in the north where I’m from there’s something commonly referred to as “The January Thaw” which, when it happens, is a brief period of a week or two where daytime temperatures rise well above freezing and snow cover might completely melt. It’s almost like a false spring but everyone knows that January is the dead of winter and the thaw won’t last long. That’s what the current interglacial period (the past 10,000 years) is like – a brief thaw in the dead of global winter. The bad part of that is 10,000 years is the average length of the thaws so statistically speaking we should expect global winter to return real soon now. It would be the ultimate in lucky happenstance if non-condensing anthropogenic greenhouse gases were enough to stop or even significantly extend the interglacial period but I doubt it will be anywhere near enough to be more than a tiny blip of extra surface warmth that might persist for a few centuries until we run out of CO2 locked up in fossil fuel reserves – when that happens it will back to business as usual for global climate if it is indeed not business as usual even today.
If we are entering into a period similar to the Dalton, I propose it be named the Hanson Minimum, which is also what I expect to hear from the man if this does come to pass.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 7:46 am
The information about Wolf’s telescope is very interesting. However, the telescope alone does not tell us what standards are being applied today or if they have changed over the years. Has someone had the good sense to publish the standards and the history of their use?
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 5:15 am
Pops says:
December 20, 2010 at 12:43 am
The sun has probably been spotless on several occasions recently but those doing the counting have been using a large magnifying glass to count every pixel in a desperate attempt to pump-up the numbers.
On the contrary, the official count has been a bit too low. At any rate, cycle 24 is going to be low as predicted back in 2004 [by me] and 2003 [Schatten]. The cosmic ray count from Oulu is likely too high [it is difficult to maintain long-term stability]. Most other stations show that the current minimum has been on par with the minimum in 1965.
Hide the decline,
No study showing global temps with RURAL data only, and don`t say there are are not enough rural stations, global temps up to 1990 will do.
No study on sunspots using exactly the same type as the telescopes of the 17th century, like these, 1609 and 1668.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/galileonewton.jpg
Not one of these,
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/McMath-pierce.jpg
Studies show that by the end of the 20th century the Sun’s activity may have been the highest in more than 8,000 years, with the Sun’s magnetic field almost doubling in the past century.