from mars says:
December 23, 2010 at 1:30 pm
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.
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I hope you had your tin foil hat on while typing this drivel. Since you believe everything someone feeds you, I happen to have a bridge that I’m selling in Brooklyn.

“And the Sun’s corona is millions of degrees hotter than the photosphere. These simple observations point to the energy source of the Sun being external. ”
Really? What rubbish. – Anthony
Well, why don’t you be the one person to explain it then, because no one else has.

@jay curtis

The sun has been as smooth as a baby’s butt for more than a few days now. What are the odds it will climb back out of the current funk? Maunder Minimum on the way?The sun has been as smooth as a baby’s butt for more than a few days now.
What are the odds it will climb back out of the current funk? Maunder Minimum on the way?

I think it’s already started. The 2800Mhz microwave flux is back up to 80 (from 78 yesterday) and the Xray flux is increasing slightly. A few new tiny specks now visible in the NE quadrant.
On the far side we can still see (via the STEREO peekaround satellites) the old sunspot #1131, the largest in solar cycle #24, is still magnetically active. Should be rotating back into Earth view in about a week (if it can keep itself organized).
You can check all this out for yourself here: http://www.solarcycle24.com/
So, old Sol will certainly bounce back. But it’s going to be a very small cycle, max smoothed sunspot number around 70 or so.
In any case, it will be the “Eddy Minimum”, not Maunder, if we do enter another Grand Solar Minimum.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/13/online-petition-the-next-solar-minimum-should-be-called-the-eddy-minimum/

Chris Reeve says:
December 23, 2010 at 10:49 am
I have a question for the electric sun people… I constantly see them purporting that, like on Earth, fusion is an effective energy sink, i.e. it takes more energy to get fusion going than you get out of it… therefore requiring a huge amount of electrical energy being transported to the sun through some mysterious means I can’t quite figure out, given that over 14 billion years, any widely distributed energy in the vacuum would have been all gobbled up… I digress.
How can you possibly assume that’s a valid concept though, given that the human energy input is needed specifically to provide the things that a stellar core provides… high temperature and pressure, conducive to producing fusion. It was my understanding that once the reaction was triggered, it was sustainable ONLY through maintaining high temp and pressure.
Is that fundamentally wrong? Does it require more electricity or energy, sans triggering containment and thermoregulation, to MAINTAIN a fusion reaction than it produces?
Because otherwise, I can easily imagine that there’s an intrastellar/intrasolar electrical component, but the concept of pulling in essential unimaginable amounts of electricity from the ether for all of the stars in the galaxy… where exactly did you say all that electricity comes from (laws of thermodynamics and all that)? And why hasn’t the Universe already reached a final entropic stage?

Shoot the shoulds!
TX. Great info! Always love learning about the sun. Quiet indeed, and interesting to see how climate will be affected – may finally help quantifying cosmo-climatological forcings.
BUT… making a posting about the oh-so-low activity at what just as well could be the bottom in an usually up and down swinging graph, and then – much worse- comparing that weekly data point with the prediction for monthly smoothened data, come on now… that’s right up there with putting some instrumental temperature record average for one hot year at the end of a multiyear smoothened proxy graph for temperatures and then saying “look! We are here! See this gap!”.
So, in regards to potentially “jumping the gun”, I agree with Luis
(Luis Dias says:
December 23, 2010 at 10:55 am
The graph is too noisy to take any kind of “aha” moment… it’s still very possible for the graph to catch up to the prediction. Check the spikes.)
Perhaps it’s all in the language that was used to frame the unusual low.
This is something YOU REALLY DON’T EXPECT TO SEE this far into solar cycle 24. But there it is, the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite shows the sun as a cueball: The Ap index being zero, indicates that the sun’s magnetic field is low, and its magneto is idling rather than revving up AS IT SHOULD BE on the way to solar max. True, it’s just a couple of data points, but as noaa’s swpc predicts the solar cycle, WE SHOULD BE further along instead of having a wide gap: …
It’s like saying “we should be seeing this, but”, “Ice breaks off sooner than expected”, etc. The mentality that something is “wrong” with reality when reality doesn’t match a prediction is something I’m accustomed to see among ‘warmistas’, and wish can be steered clear from among the more scientifically inclined here. If you go jump at every low temperature and low solar activity datapoint, disturbingly similar to how CAGW-hotheads send out press releases (a la the tunes of “This is much worse than expected”, “according to our predictions, this wouldn’t be happening until so many years from now”, etc.) whenever there’s unusually hot weather, or as some hype any solar flare, then you begin to lose the scientific high ground, IMO. Same goes for the polar ice data reporting.
In the long run, I think it’s simply better to wait a couple weeks or months, or ideally: until the smoothened data catch up with the smoothened predictions you want to compare ‘m too. Or just shoot the shoulds and word it a bit more objectively.
Ya know what I mean? :-/

@Christolph Dollis

“And the Sun’s corona is millions of degrees hotter than the photosphere. These simple observations point to the energy source of the Sun being external. ”
Really? What rubbish. – Anthony
Well, why don’t you be the one person to explain it then, because no one else has.

You’re conflating temperature, an intensive property of matter, with energy, an extensive property of matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_and_extensive_properties
Temperature, being intensive, does not depend on the amount of matter. A gram of water can have the same temperature as an entire ocean.
Heat energy, measured in joules or calories, being extensive, does depend on the amount of matter, in an additive way. A gram of water, even if heated to a million degrees, does not contain as much energy as an entire ocean of water.
Conservation Law: Energy is always conserved. There is no conservation law for Temperature.

James F. Evans says:
December 23, 2010 at 6:23 pm
MDR states: “If there corona were gone, the change in the radiative energy flux incident on earth would be changed by only a small, fractional amount.”
Pure speculation
We don’t know what the situation would be if the “corona were gone”.
And, let’s hope we never find out!

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Why not? I think it would be interesting from a scientific perspective. It’s likely that (at least some) aspects of the conventional wisdom would be challenged.
In fact, from your “let’s hope we never find out” comment, it seems that you do indeed know that a missing corona would be an overall negative. Please fill me in; I’d like to know.

Mac the Knife said:
“From unforgiving experiences, I know there is far more to fear from “big bad snow and ice”, be it ‘weather’ or ‘climate change’ induced, than there will ever be from 3C of ‘global warming’. ”
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Well said, Mac. From a human perspective, it would be better if the AGW crowd was right. There are good reasons why the tropics are populated, and the poles are not.
Where did you live?

Sorry for getting a bit off topic,… just blowing some steam.
Here in Vancouver BC, it’s relatively balmy, but that is normal. There was some dusting by snowflakes about a month ago. 2 inches. It is still likely that there would be some cover later in January/February.
I remember looking at the graph of ice age periods years ago and it was quite clear to me that we are nearing the end of the interglacial. In fact, we seem to be a bit past that. I wish it were possible to keep it that way, but I have little illusions that we can change the underlying nature of the cyclical phenomenon. Not that far into the future, we will be freezing our butts off. Unfortunately, there will be a lot of meat popsicles as a result. Yea, I too wish it was really globally warming out there, my decrepit arthritic bones would welcome it with “open arms”.

Jay Curtis says,
The sun has been as smooth as a baby’s butt for more than a few days now. What are the odds it will climb back out of the current funk? Maunder Minimum on the way?
Anyone?
It’s too early to tell. If the LP effect continues, it would be a Maunder event instead of a Dalton event. As of now it LP is on track. See
http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston%20and%20Penn.png