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
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Sense Seeker says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:10 am
Solar activity started declining in 2003 – not so long ago. The Sun was more active in the second half of the 20th century than it has been for the previous eight thousand years. CO2 was worth 0.1 of a degree of the 20th century rise.
Roger Carr says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:30 am
I read Indigo Jones’ stuff and could not make any sense of it.
HR says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:38 am
My prediction is holding up very well. The Sun is behaving as predicted. Everything else will follow. I am not able to satisfactorily predict when the seas will stop rising though.
richard jenkins says:
December 20, 2010 at 4:45 am
Try reading more widely. I only get to post here because I am filling a vacuum. You have the opportunity to displace me by offering up work with greater predictive ability.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 5:15 am
I checked the SIDC count post solar minimum against the F10.7 flux and they are basically line ball. So sunspots are not being over-counted.
Espen says:
December 20, 2010 at 6:48 am
I keep putting in references to the 1970s cooling period in my graphs because it upsets the warmers. Note the high CGR flux in the early 1970s. Thus according to Svensmark theory, the Sun did play a role in the cooling of the 1970s.
Madman2001 says:
December 20, 2010 at 7:23 am
It is really flattering that people are digging up my original paper, the one that started the whole solar-climate connection. The source of the temperature data was Warwick Hughes, who emailed me a file of long term European temperature records. That reminds me. The UK Met Office said it would take three years to fix up their version of the historic record. So now we have two years to go. In two years time, there may be an easily accessible repository of temperature data that we can use for these sort of studies. When I was starting out in this field, all I had was scraps of information.
John Whitman says:
December 20, 2010 at 8:25 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/13/solar-driven-temperature-decline-predicted-for-norway-by-a-norwegian/
The eleven year cycle is very, very important. Witness the work of Professor Solheim in Oslo referenced in the above link. He applied the Butler and Johnson methodology to the Norwegian temperature record, and was able to determine that the carbon-secreting Norwegians are going to get whacked by a 1.5 degree decline. You cannot wish the Schwabe cycle away.
Dr. Lurtz says:
December 20, 2010 at 8:26 am
Agreed. If solar minimum is associated with a 0.1 degree decline on average, flux conditions that are essentially a continuation of solar minimum should result in a decline of 0.1 degrees every one or two years. I believe that you are also right on EUV, which may be a more important effect than GCRs on cloud cover. The full effect of EUV seems to work straight away, the GCR effect may be more cumulative. I think you have the right framework to make progress.
Ira says:
December 20, 2010 at 2:23 pm
The question is what is the tipping point that gets the next glaciation underway? Insolation at 60 degrees north is now low enough to initiate it. It might be the next Maunder Minimum-type event that will get the Northern Hemisphere albedo up. I am working on this subject with another Perth scientist. The atmosphere is deficient in carbon and so are the rocks that we can access. Over the next few hundred years, we will dig all that carbon up and the deep oceans will simply swallow it down and we will never see it again. Rocks down to 10% carbon can burn in pure oxygen, and we will dig them all up. Some of that precious carbon will be applied to the advancing glacier front as per your smudge pots.
Sense Seeker says:
December 20, 2010 at 2:04 pm
“Since the AGW alarmists have savaged the reputations of anyone who maintains that the sun has an influence on weather,…”
Nonsense. Climate scientists have not ‘savaged the reputations of anyone who maintains that the sun has an influence on weather’. Scientists agree that solar activity has a very important influence on climate, and that until about 1950 it was the main factor determining global average temperatures, toghether with volcanic activity.
However, solar activity cannot explain the warming seen over the past 30 years. This has been snown in countless peer-reviewed papers. Those who still maintain that ‘it is the sun’ are flogging a dead horse. Such people are rightly ridiculed in science. Only on blogs like these are they still believed.
Yes, the sun has an influence, but that is now dwarfed by the effect of CO2.
So the sun`s activity since the 50`s has been at it`s highest for around 8000 years and the temperature goes up, then the sun goes dormant and the temperature goes down with CO2 still rising, didn`t take much to knock CO2 on the head did it.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 4:33 pm
R. Gates says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:58 pm
I do however believe that the role of the sun on climate, through secondary effects, such as the GCR/Cloud effects, high-energy UV, etc. has not been fully accounted for in Global Climate Models
All known – and quantifiable – effects [UV, TSI, etc] are fully incorporated into Global Climate Models already.
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I would throw in with Gates on this one.
———-
then:
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 4:39 pm
harrywr2 says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Which is why the scientists at CERN are doing very expensive CLOUD experiments.
No, the scientists at CERN are not doing any such experiments. CERN only lends some unused, obsolete capacity to outside scientists for this.
————–
Wow you make it sound like they are lending a trash can to some moonshiners.
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/CLOUD-en.html
I am not an alarmists, but we have yet been able to tie or correlate solar activity to some atmospheric condition that relates to long term climate variation. The minimum we’re seeing now is only a few year old, where as the Mauner Minimum lasted 5-6 decades. The Dalton Minimum also had at least one major tropical volcanic erruption (1815) that skewed global temperatures for a year.
What I find interesting, and what few people have commented on is the much longer DeVries Cycle. According to its definition, it cycles fully every 400 years (200 years negative, 200 years positive). The Sporer, Maunder, and Dalton Miniumum occurred mainly during the negative DeVries Cycle. It’s been 190 years since it went positive.
In any event, there are plenty of fascinating theories out there concerning solar activity and climate, but none have yet been “proven”.
I submit that this statement is incorrect (an over simplification). The key issue is when and where the snow falls and how long it stays on the ground. Snow will have its highest impact on albedo if it is a late snowfall when things are starting to green up and the sun is near its highest altitude during the day. Snow fall on the ground in late May and early June will have a significant impact on total energy absorbed compared to the same snow event in late December or January when the sun is at its lowest altitude (northern hemisphere) and all the vegetation is withered for the winter.
To assign an appropriate weight to the effect of a snow fall you would have to consider the solar angle at the time of the snow fall, the area covered and the duration of the snow fall (with some consideration for its depth). Multiple large area snow falls late in winter and early spring could reflect away considerably more of the sun’s heat than the same snow depth deposited in a single snow storm in the depth of winter.
Think area under the curve with the curve plotted according to area covered and duration of cover then weighted by the suns angle to the surface at mid day.
Larry
The best of the best Dr. Hathaway predicted a big solar cycle 24, reaching 140+. Hathaway has since progressively updated this prediction well after the horse had left the starting blocks. What the experts are saying is “we don’t really know any more than you”.
If you look at the 11year cycles amplitudes back to 1750, it is obvious that there is a rough cyclic pattern on about a 10th harmonic. This tells me that the next two cycles will peak at 50 to 60. We will not be able to compare the temperatures that we are given by GISS as they are unreliable because of continual adjustments made to the baseline.
Charles S. Opalek, PE says:
December 20, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Theodore Landscheidt predicted a Grand Solar Minimum starting in 1990 bottoming out in 2030 and ending by 2070. This isn’t guess work or hyperbole. This is very predictable planetary mechanics controlling the weather on the Sun, which in turn controls our weather here. It is well underway as demonstrated by the decade of recent cooling.
That statement is not correct. He incorrectly predicted a grand minimum for 1990, and then moved onto 2030 as the height of the next grand minimum. Theodor was incorrect because he was looking at the wrong indicator related to solar angular momentum. He used the zero crossings that occur when the Sun is at the centre of the solar system which are now seen to sometimes occur near grand minima. There is extensive study relating to this on my blog if you are interested.
Theo Goodwin and Robuk are correct about how we count spots today along with the equipment. You have to be very careful when reading Leif’s replies as he does not give all the information needed to form a reasoned outcome.
The telescopes today see far more than those used by Wolf, only the magnification is the same. When it comes to seeing the aperture size is what is important. An 80mm Wolf telescope is able under the best conditions to see a spot that is 1051 kilometers wide, the modern 150mm telescope has resolution down to 558 kilometers. This is indisputable and I have setup myself two telescopes to prove this. So the new telescope sees twice as much. Looking at the Locarno and Catania sunspot drawings you can see they are counting specks that are 700 kilometers across, Wolf couldn’t and didn’t count these.
Leif also admits that after 1945 the counting method has changed substantially, this alone shows we can’t compare the modern count with the Wolf reconstruction of the Dalton. We also had very good records during cycle 6 so we don’t need to only focus on cycle 5.
Today’s SIDC count is in line with the NOAA count (in raw format). I don’t believe we are under counting spots today. Leif uses a perceived deviation between the F10.7 flux values and the sunspot record to bolster his claim, but he uses his own F10.7 data to show this deviation. If the standard Canadian F10.7 data is used there is no deviation. This can be viewed in the “L&P debunking” article on my blog along with a thorough history on the Wolf telescope and counting methods on the Layman’s page.
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?
If you plot the data correctly it is clearly present.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 4:33 pm
R. Gates says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:58 pm
I do however believe that the role of the sun on climate, through secondary effects, such as the GCR/Cloud effects, high-energy UV, etc. has not been fully accounted for in Global Climate Models
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All known – and quantifiable – effects [UV, TSI, etc] are fully incorporated into Global Climate Models already.
Total garbage….if so they would have predicted a leveling off after 1998 and a temperature decline beginning now. The models assume a mainly positive AO and NAO as a result of Co2, I guess they got that bit wrong too. The “EUV effect” on atmospheric oscillations has been missed and they are now panicking.
For once Gates has made a reasonable statement.
Dan Kirk-Davidoff started out “Skeptics: ….” then said something about sensitivity.
Dan, sensitivity derived the from the CO2 to temperature relationship cherrypicks one relationship and ignores other factors that drive temperature. If sensitivity is really as high as the catastrophists say, then the ocean must be storing most of the heat because we have not seen the predicted warming. But that heat could only be stored in the ocean by overturning which would also sequester CO2. So the simple conclusion is that if we stop producing CO2, the “extra” (above 280) will diminish by 1/2 in about 40 years. Crisis averted, now go have a talk with China.
David Archibald says:
“It is really flattering that people are digging up my original paper, the one that started the whole solar-climate connection…”
____
Your paper “started” the whole solar-climate connection? Wow! Did you publish your original paper before the work of William Hershel, Charles Greeley Abbot, Waldo S. Glock, or even before Dr. Jack Eddy made his rather groundbreaking hypothesis in 1976? If so, my hat off to you…if not, then you’ve suffered from a bit of a hyperbole I think…
David Archibald says:
December 20, 2010 at 4:46 pm
The Sun was more active in the second half of the 20th century than it has been for the previous eight thousand years.
There is no good evidence for that. In fact, for the opposite, e.g. the Steinhilber TSI reconstruction, which I showed the last 2000 years of, already:
http://www.leif.org/research/Loehle-Temps-and-TSI.png
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 5:15 am
I checked the SIDC count post solar minimum against the F10.7 flux and they are basically line ball. So sunspots are not being over-counted.
Scientists do not do ‘basically line ball’ analysis, and I have shown that sunspots are being under-counted, not over-counted, so although your method is suspect, you seem to agree with that.
R. Gates says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:58 pm
“has not been fully accounted for in Global Climate Models
L.S.: All known – and quantifiable – effects [UV, TSI, etc] are fully incorporated into Global Climate Models already.”
I would throw in with Gates on this one.
Then you simply don’t know how the models work. The source code is available, you know.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Wow you make it sound like they are lending a trash can to some moonshiners.
You are quite perceptive. CLOUD is not run by CERN. but just at CERN.
Geoff Sharp says:
December 20, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Looking at the Locarno and Catania sunspot drawings you can see they are counting specks that are 700 kilometers across, Wolf couldn’t and didn’t count these.
You are omitting that there is a factor applied to these counts to align them with the standard count
Leif also admits that after 1945 the counting method has changed substantially
Actually, I have shown and drawn the attention that the counting method changed and that therefore the counts after 1945 are too high, compared with Wolfer’s counts. Wolfer counted more than 2.5 times as many spots as Wolf [since 1860]. Modern observers follow Wolfer’s correct method as the only workable solution.
Today’s SIDC count is in line with the NOAA count (in raw format). I don’t believe we are under counting spots today.
You simply do not know or else play ignorant, that SIDC both compared to NOAA and the Keller using the original telescope are undercounting.
Leif uses a perceived deviation between the F10.7 flux values and the sunspot record to bolster his claim, but he uses his own F10.7 data to show this deviation. If the standard Canadian F10.7 data is used there is no deviation.
The claim is not derived from F10.7 [original of improved]. That there is a deviation from F10.7 [also found by Ken Tapping using only the Canadian data] is not due to undercounting but to the Livingston & Penn effect. This will hit any observer and thus have no influence on the counting differences.
Geoff Sharp says:
December 20, 2010 at 5:43 pm
“All known – and quantifiable – effects [UV, TSI, etc] are fully incorporated into Global Climate Models already.”
Total garbage….if so they would have predicted a leveling off after 1998 and a temperature decline beginning now.
You simply do not know how the models work. The source code is available, go look. Or just read a high-level explanation. That the models still get it wrong have other reasons.
This notion that we are in another Dalton Minimum seems so far to be based on a “hunch”. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence so far that we are in for consecutive weak cycles except for someone’s belief that we are based on … well … nothing as far as I can tell so far.
So we are going to have a weak cycle. So far I see nothing that says the next cycle will be weak, too. Cycle 14 was pretty weak with over 1000 spotless days. It was followed by a stronger cycle with only half the number of spotless days. People who are claiming to know what is going to happen ought to put up some supporting data aside from simply showing what other cycles did in the past.
And I made none of these claims. I’m saying a “global average temperature” tells you nothing about the atmospheric heat content. It only tells you what the average temps are where there are thermometers, or in the case of satellites, what they’ve smoothed.
If, since 1850, some places have cooled, some have no trend, and some have warmed, there a global average tells us nothing except that it’s an average.
I agree that the agw policy threat and subsidized energy markets are a greater threat than 2c cooling. The new normal for growth in the US combined with so many unsustainable spending policies a lot of misery before we even get to the 2014 test solar peaks. Of course the one-two punch of economic and debt malaise coming before global cooling realization is about as scary as Maundering Minimum. Also, it was most reprehensible to see climate change being used to explain current cold autumn. They don’t have to rub their noses in it…..or do they. Agw all the time, 24-7
@ur momisuglyR Gates,
Yes, I can see that there is an ongoing discussion about the role of cloud cover. Regrettably, that topic is beyond my understanding and (being a scientist) I therefore have to believe the published literature. And although Lindzen & Choi and a few others have found that cloud cover will partly compensate for the warming effect of CO2, as far as I can see most studies support the opposite view: that cloud cover will exacerbate warming. I hope Lindzen & Choi are right, but won’t bet on it.
And anyway, that is on top of an estimated 1.2°C of directly CO2-caused global warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2, and another 1 to 2°C from a combination of melting snow/ice and increased evaporation of water.
@ur momisugly those who say the temperature record is so flawed that we don’t even know if it’s warming or cooling: (1) gletchers all over the world retreat (and not only those next to cities or airports), ice sheets are thinning, and sea levels are rising; (2) your latest hype, the UHI hypothesis, has no support in the literature and until it has, it remains good for filling blogs but little else.
I think that Leif has solved the problem. He said
Quote
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].
Unquote
He also provided a very useful link regarding bubbles and ropey things. So lets put it all together.
Sunspots are an indicator of turbulence in the sun, moving plasma and as Leif says moving plasma crossing magnetic fields generates an emf and thus an electric current.
We know that the ropey things transfers that current through space to a load, the Earth. Themis has imaged them and Nasa has reported on them. Electric current sheets have been measured in the Aurora. now when you apply electric current to a load you get heat.
Thus low sunspots, low current , low heat and vice versa.
Thank you Leif
crosspatch says:
December 20, 2010 at 6:26 pm
People who are claiming to know what is going to happen ought to put up some supporting data aside from simply showing what other cycles did in the past.
Your point is valid, and much will be uncovered soon. We did not have the technology during the last grand minimum, but one suggestion is that grand minimum type cycles suffer a ‘phase catastrophe’ where the hale cycle is broken. This will lead to a failure of one or both solar poles not changing polarity which will take another cycle before balance to the dynamo is restored…we will see but the WSO record right now is not looking good for pole reversal at cycle max.
“I agree that the agw policy threat and subsidized energy markets are a greater threat than 2c cooling. ”
But both combined are a recipe for disaster.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 6:07 pm
Geoff Sharp says:
December 20, 2010 at 5:43 pm
“All known – and quantifiable – effects [UV, TSI, etc] are fully incorporated into Global Climate Models already.”
Total garbage….if so they would have predicted a leveling off after 1998 and a temperature decline beginning now.
You simply do not know how the models work. The source code is available, go look. Or just read a high-level explanation. That the models still get it wrong have other reasons.
________
My original point is that there very likely are UN-known (or at least, not as yet fully quantifiable) secondary solar effects that have not yet been incorporated into the GCM’s, and when they are, the GCM’s will be more accurate in predicting future climate scenarios. These as yet not included effects could include the GCR/cloud relationship, high energy UV effects, solar-geomagnetic effects, etc. There is no way these secondary effects could be currently included (at least not accurately) in GCM’s as none of their dynamics are as yet fully understood or even proven.
The bottom line is, even when such secondary effects are finally included in GCM’s, it remains to be seen how much difference it will make in terms of overtaking the dominant forcing role that the 40% increase in CO2 plays in the models, such that, even if we are entering a period of weak solar activity, it still could be the case that this activity will only slightly lessen the effect of centuries of rapidly increasing CO2 concentrations. The good thing is, we should know the answer to these questions in the next few years…
The Year Without a Summer, in 1816
Yes, that’s what it was known as here in the USA, because the massive 1815 Eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia blew an untold amount of dust and debris into the atmosphere in 1815 and it took that long to get over to the states.
It may be that the climate anomaly was caused by a combination of a historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event; the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped off by the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, the largest known eruption in over 1,600 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 6:03 pm
Geoff Sharp says:
December 20, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Looking at the Locarno and Catania sunspot drawings you can see they are counting specks that are 700 kilometers across, Wolf couldn’t and didn’t count these.
—————-
You are omitting that there is a factor applied to these counts to align them with the standard count
And you are omitting that Wolfer applied this factor outside of a grand minimum. The factor falls down when the speck ratio increases, so it is better to use a threshold like Wolf. Plus you are omitting that the factor was applied to the 80mm telescope that does not see as much as the current 150mm telescope. This is simple telescope basics.
The claim is not derived from F10.7 [original of improved]. That there is a deviation from F10.7 [also found by Ken Tapping using only the Canadian data] is not due to undercounting but to the Livingston & Penn effect. This will hit any observer and thus have no influence on the counting differences.
Once again your not giving the full detail. Tapping’s exercise shows a deviation around cycle max when flare activity was unusually high, he does not show the deviation over the whole back half of SC23 as you do. The L&P effect continues to be junk science as outlined so many times.
You agree that the record needs adjustment after 1945…that should be the end of the argument. We are not comparing apples.
Are you still holding the line that we are not heading into a grand minimum?
The alarmists cannot spot the Dalton minimum, perhaps, because they suffer from Dalton’s disease—that is, they cannot distinguish red from green.
Thanks Tallbloke
“so the La Nina’s following the El nino’s will take the surface temps lower than before the previous El Nino from now until the sun perks up again.”
I like shorter term predictions like this we should get the first insight in 12 months or so, something to watch.
“Your point is valid, and much will be uncovered soon.”
That sounds like the mumbo jumbo that Madame Sofia up the street says when she looks into her crystal ball.
If you have physical evidence that this cycle will be anything different than other such weak cycles we have seen in the past, then present it. What evidence is there that there will be more than one weak cycle (as in two successive weak cycles as the Dalton Minimum was)? Please show the basis for the “prediction” else label it as speculation.
Weak cycles probably happen all the time. We haven’t been reliably recording sunspots for that long (only 24 going on 25th cycle) so over the course of geological history weak cycles are probably pretty common. Actually, it would appear that multiple weak cycles and long periods of no sunspots would be pretty common, too, else we wouldn’t have seen them over this sort of time (and by short time, I am thinking of anything shorter than 100,000 years).