[quote]Dave Springer says:
December 23, 2010 at 10:52 am
I don’t suppose this will do anything to stop the flood of legal immigrants from New York to Texas. A little 2010 census humor there.[/quote]
Not as long as we don’t have an income tax.

I am reminded that it takes a lot of things to go right for this planet to maintain a warm and consistent atmosphere. On the other hand, it would be easy for the Earth to revert to a snowball.

@John Day
> Think of geomagnetic storms as magnetic “quakes”, analogous to earthquakes,
> except the magnetic field is trembling, not the ground.
… forgot to mention, using this earthquake analogy, that Ap/Kp indices are then analogous to the open-ended Richter Index for measuring the intensity of earthquakes. Kp, being logarithmic, is closest to this Richter analogy. Ap can be thought of roughly as the anti-log of Kp.
Ap, being linear, can be averaged with other readings. Kp, being logarithmic, cannot be averaged. They both are a “Richter-like” measure of the “magnetic quakes” in the Earth’s magnetic field.
So an Ap value of zero doesn’t necessarily imply a low magnetic field value, only that there are no _measurable_ perturbations.

“Gerry says:
December 23, 2010 at 11:17 am
How many denials are we going to hear from the AGW crowd when the price of firewood and heating oil skyrockets during the next mini-Ice Age??? Oh, that’s right… it’s all just ‘climate change’ and ‘local weather’.”
Did you know that the theft of heating oil in the UK is one of the fastest rising crimes. The lowlife always seem to know the best way to get money and what people will be willing to pay for.

Re: “It’s 2-3 million Kelvin but that’s pretty meaningless because the corona is a near perfect vacuum. The photosphere is what we see and that’s 5000K. The core, which is where the energy is generated by gravitational compression of hydrogen to fusion temperature and pressure, is 14.5 million K and is by far the hottest densest portion of the sun.
The corona, because it’s so vacuous, throws off almost no radiation and neither does it absorb a significant amount . That’s why it isn’t visible except during a full eclipse.”
By the way, none of the responses thus far have begun to grapple with the various enigmas which Wal Thornhill brings up. Anthony’s objection to Wal’s inference fails to address the numerous problems with the currently favored explanation, magnetic reconnection.

Magnetic reconnection is the process whereby magnetic field lines from different magnetic domains are spliced to one another, changing their patterns of connectivity with respect to the sources. It is a violation of an approximate conservation law in plasma physics, and can concentrate mechanical or magnetic energy in both space and time. Solar flares, the largest explosions in the solar system, may involve the reconnection of large systems of magnetic flux on the Sun, releasing, in minutes, energy that has been stored in the magnetic field over a period of hours to days. Magnetic reconnection in Earth’s magnetosphere is one of the mechanisms responsible for the aurora, and it is important to the science of controlled nuclear fusion because it is one mechanism preventing magnetic confinement of the fusion fuel.
…
Magnetic reconnection is something that has supposedly been “tested” and proven in the lab yet for some reason the lab results keep coming out “wrong.”
Currently when scientists create a “reconnection” event in the lab between two electrically charged plasma sheets the “reconnection” event takes place at twice the speed MHD theory predicts.
So far no one has been able to rectify this problem, nor have they been able to produce a “reconnecting” magnetic field without first applying current to the plasma sheets they are observing. The reason being obvious of course, in order to create a magnetic field, one must first induce an electrical current. So far, this is the only known way of producing a magnetic field in a plasma that can be tested.
As soon as the current shuts off, so too does the magnetic field.

The Sun does appear to be quiet but it is still far more active than it was during the minimum. NASA’s latest SOHO images can be found here: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html has some great images.
I’m waiting for the day when world wide 10m propagation on a modest antenna becomes a reality. I understand that will be around SSN 50 and above.

I’m wondering what the possible implications are for the solar industry and all the project metric$ going forward in North America and in the West…thinking there is a good chance the ~.5% annual degradation rates for PV assumed in most solar business models may not quite be enough…
And are we looking at a Dalton or a Maunder? Thoughts?
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/SOLAR_MINIMUM.pdf
Favorite points from this article…aside from the WUWT honorable mention therein?
“There remains the question of whether the Maunder Minimum will arrive in time to avoid a global carbon tax?” (where reality meets scientific wit)
“a better understanding of the Sun might now have practical value.” (intentional understatement of the century)
Are we there yet?

Take your pick: Do you want an electric current powering the Sun? Or, would you prefer magnetic reconnection experiments, which apparently fail to work without an electric current?
I’m sure that *somebody* *somewhere* can come up with an inference which explains the inverse-corona temperature enigma and which does not involve an electric current. But upon what philosophical basis are we even trying so hard to do so? Isn’t this the same antiquated approach which led Sydney Chapman to ignore the role of the Sun when trying to explain the aurora?

I see that there are competing ideas as to how the Sun works. The only viable one that I have seen so far is fusion. It not only explains our star, but also stellar evolution such as red giants, novas and other related phenomena. We have still not figured out the finer details of stellar behaviour, but no doubt that will come in time.
Any competing theory has to be good enough to explain all aspects of stellar evolution, as well as variations that exist in our universe.

Well, the Solar Minimum began in 2008. That not prevented 2010 being so far the hottest year on record.
The Earth has been warming since the 1970s, while at the same time solar activity was in the decline, after peaking in the 1950s.
A new Dalton Minimum will not cause significant global cooling, the impact of the enhanced Greenhouse effect is overwelmingly bigger. The data show that clearly.