From Mars says,
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.
2010 is not the “hottest year on record.”
Earth has been cooling since 1998.
The greenhouse effect is not “overwhelmingly” bigger.
The data does not show that clearly.
You really are from Mars!

MDR:
No, I don’t know what would happen (if the corona disapeared).
I would be speculating, but since you invite speculation, the Sun might be like an ember, instead of a bright “campfire” in the sky, to employ an older analogy… or it could be something entirely different… as stated, “I don’t know.”
But put it this way, if one part of a wholistic system is missing, the effect on the rest of the system could have significant effects… or possibly even none at all (although, a highly improbable event).
We don’t know.
Science derives understanding from observation & measurement… both directly, and indirectly from inferences, or from a chain of circumstancial evidence.
Something that has never happened in Man’s experience is not subject to direct observation & measurement… and, in this case (the hypothetical of the corona being “gone”), inferences or indirect observations & measurements likely would be of little help.

Reconnection is observed in space and in the laboratory
Magnetic field is a continuum. There are no “lines”. Hence the whole Magnetic Reconnection Experiment is a waste of money if they are after lines that are only a conceptual aid to visualize. They do not exist, They may encounter double layers of excited plasma, but they can’t get lines that are just a figment of human imagination to make a model of magnetic field more accessible to human grasp. Same with the longitudinal/latitudinal grid–it does not exist, but it is an abstract concept that aids us to get our bearings. Every electrical engineer knows that the lines of magnetic field are just an aid and that they do not represent any physical phenomenon. But hey, it is nice to get some grants pouring in, hook, line and sinker, innit?
But if you think the lines do exist, please present the part of the Maxwell equations that desribes and proves them. As far as I studied them, they describe the magnetic field as a continuum, there is not a hint of any lines no matter how you slice them, or even normalize.
Would like to address your segment about stars, but time is not there, so some other day.

James F. Evans says:
December 23, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Science derives understanding from observation & measurement… both directly, and indirectly from inferences, or from a chain of circumstancial evidence.
Something that has never happened in Man’s experience is not subject to direct observation & measurement… and, in this case (the hypothetical of the corona being “gone”), inferences or indirect observations & measurements likely would be of little help.

I believe there are benefits to thought experiments, though. I find value in the process of (a) assessing what is thought to be true about a particular topic, and then (b) applying this knowledge to various hypothetical situations, with the aim of, say, building intuition, disproving the conventional wisdom, or simply exploring the concept in question.
Thought experiments can lead to real experiments that do test aspects of what is thought to be known, and such testing of hypotheses is of course an important part of the scientific method (and is thus useful). And in fact, since the future is unknown, one never knows when a hypothetical situation may occur in reality, and indeed evaluating any predictions made from what was thought to be only a hypothetical situation is usually a stringent test of how good a how good the hypothesis is to begin with.
As a famous example of someone who used thought experiments to great effect, Einstein used thought experiments to refine concepts of special and general relativity, and some of these thought experiments led to real advances in understanding (e.g., the precession of the perihelion of Mercury).

While I might not agree with the ‘standard’ Electric Sun model, I am inclined to agree that the gravity, hydrogen, fusion model is even further from correct. I do believe, as a
still very small but growing nucleus of investigators are reasoning, that the Sun converts energy to mass, and not mass to energy. Again, there is disagreement as to the exact process even amongst that group. I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that an even more outlandish model should be considered, that of resonance, spherical standing waves (wavefront collisions for coronal heating), scalar electromagnetics, and all powered by a central vacuum spark. The Birkeland currents do not provide the energy for the Sun, but provide the base current required to trigger release of the ZPF energies which provide the real ‘umph’. Phase conjugation also comes into the picture, but unless you firstly admit to the energy to mass function, the Sun as Creator, then the information as energy part of the proposal will make even less sense.

rbateman @ur momisugly 9.21
robert, you’ve whetted my appetite . More please

As Dr. Svarlgaard puts it. “No matter what the Sun does, it has done it before :-)”
That statement is an example of hubris. First the age of man is a tiny tick in the history of the sun. It has done things man has never seen before and since as it grows older it is supposed to progress into a red giant, you better believe there things its going to do that you have never seen before. It bothers me you consider the sun as consistent and totally predictable.

johanna says:
December 23, 2010 at 8:18 pm
……………….
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.

One part of me wants to see prolonged cold / mini ice age just to extinguish the AGW scare cold dead. Another part of me realises the havoc this sow in agriculture and lives in the northern hemisphere. By the way I live in the tropics and am so pleased now I moved out of London.
Is a mini ice age around the corner? [ http://sc25.com/index.php?id=267 ]

Stephen Wilde says:
December 23, 2010 at 3:03 pm
phlogiston said:
“we are just starting a new La Nina dominant phase. Perhaps a quiet sun will add something to this.”
Yes, that’s all I meant in my earlier post.
There are internal ocean variations that are largely independent of solar input and they obscure the solar effects for long periods of time but the recent step change in solar behaviour is so clear that I hope to see a short period where the solar effect becomes apparent above the background ‘noise’.
A test would be to observe how the current negative PDO phase compares to the earlier one which took place when the sun was much more lively. It will take some years to resolve though.
In the shorter term I think observation of AO behaviour in relation to solar activity is a more fruitful area.
The current coincidence of negative PDO and an apparent solar minimum will definitely be scientifically informative. I agree strongly with your point that the oceans can have intrinsic cycles, not every variation has to be traceable to some astrophysical forcing. However, it may be a 2-way process. Solar and other astrophysical cyclical or fluctuating inputs might act as a periodic forcing of the ocean system. If the ocean system acts as a nonlinear oscillator, then the external forcing could entrain the ocean’s cycles; note however that the pattern and frequency of such forced oceanic nonlinear oscillations would be quite different from the frequencies of the external forcing agents.
I think Willie Soon has done some work on solar cyclical inputs at the arctic showing up some years later in the tropical ocean.

stephen parker says:
December 24, 2010 at 12:13 am
rbateman @ur momisugly 9.21
robert, you’ve whetted my appetite . More please

Which part? The erratic and sporadic behavior of the sun, or puzzling indications that the sun is being acted upon externally?
If you took your ipod or cell phone & dropped it into water, then halfway dried it, it would act erraticly, just like our star is now doing. I wouldn’t call the Sun a variable star, I would call it a chaotic variable. It’s a sputtering mess. Like the doused electronic device, it gives every indication of being about to blue screen. Reboot.