Solar Max – So Soon?

Very interesting post. Is it possible the magnet pole reversal phase could take longer though in a weak cycle? In the strong cycle the switch looks to have happened in the space of around 1 year – perhaps in a weak cycle it will take 3 years due to the amplitude of the pattern being less.

“(based on forces that dare not speak their name)” ???
Anyone care to enlighten me?

If one uses an model based on the planets, how to explain the maunder minimum?

If the extended solar minimum of Cycle 23 was the cause of the severe winters we’ve had these past two or three years, the next Cycle could result in a series of winters more like that of ’63. In addition, the less energetic jetstreams in both hemispheres will mean more of the unsettled weather we’ve had, including more flooding and more mini heat waves.
Irrespective of the outcome, the warmists will blame Ag e’Dubalu, their malign god of climate.

Well thankfully the GCM’s picked this spot on……..
otherwise I just might’ve become a tad sceptical…..

Mike McMillan says:

Darn sun’s going weird on us.
We don’t really need another Dalton, not with the population size we’ve got to feed.

Don’t worry Mike, we’ve nearly doubled CO2 thanks to industrial emissions, that’s about 30% more food under similar conditions of heat and moisture. Oh, hang on, they’re trying to tax us into the stone age to stop us boosting the world’s plant growth. Panic Mike!!!

Two short cycles would be expected if we assume that the solar cycles develop like an interference of two sinusoidal curves with similar, but not identical frequencies; resulting in a beat. The moment the beat occurs one extra pass through zero happens.

No way we’re there already. Unpossible…

Its mainly both, obviously sun and earth tilt etc.

onion2 says:
May 8, 2011 at 6:08 am
“Rising CO2 is like eating slightly more cake each day.”
And where’s the postulated, never observed, positive water vapor feedback that the AGW scientists need to maintain their catastrophe predictions in your cake analogy?

This is a highly non-rigourous idea that I tried recently. The methodology is questionable but the result is intersting enough to have a look at.
The idea came as an experiment to see how misleading the IPCCs arbitrary selection of “last 50y of 20th century” was as a period to focus on. (Round number don’t count as a reason in science). It turns out that choice fits their argument perfectly but is not representative.
First I calculated the linear trend for all the possible 50 year periods for HadCrut3 data and plotted the 50 year slopes against the *start* of the 50 year period.
It should be noted that this process itself is transforming the data and the form of the output is quite dependant on the length of the filter. (slopes or around 30 years gives a similar form but with triangular rather than sinusoidal profile).
Anyway, I so struck by the simplicity of the graph that I decided to fit a cosine plus linear trend. It was not perfect but is was a very close fit. So I decided to integrate the function analytically and reconstruct the temperature record from it.
Here’s the reconstructed trends
based on that simple empirical model of the Hadley/CRU data.
It is purely based on the *form* of the data , no physical model or assumptions made.
I don’t think it can be taken too seriously as a predictive model , although I’d give it better odds than a lot of current climate models which failed in the first tens years of extrapolation. 😉
I do not think the form of the 50 years slopes is can be just a coincidence or an artefact of selective filtering, so there is something to made from a closer look.

P. Solar says:
May 8, 2011 at 5:53 am
Even if there were similar external conditions I think a ’63-like event is unlikely since we are starting from a warmer climate that at that time.
Unless I’m mis-remembering the stats from last century, the temperature gains in the 20th Century have been reversed by the cooling of the past decade. So, are we starting a new solar cycle with a warmer climate than ’63?

Total Solar Irradiance from the SORCE instrument is showing a normal solar cycle ramp-up and it didn’t really decline at solar minimum beyond that which would be expected.
SORCE is showing nothing unusual happening in TSI other than than cycle 23 was a little longer than normal.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_640x480.png
The total energy being directed at Earth is changing by such small amounts (a change of +/- 0.4 watts/m2 at the TOA – remember we divide that by 4 for a rotating sphere and 30% of it is just reflected away anyway) so it should make no difference to Earth temperatures.
It needs to change by 10 to 40 times more than that to cause Little Ice Age conditions.

From my layman’s perspective the butterfly diagram that Edim posted earlier:
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif
provides good evidence to suggest that solar maximum is still some way off.
Anyone care to comment? Vuk? Leif? Tallbloke? (glad to see you’re still around).

I could use some help please.
In the second diagram in David’s article the polar magnetic field in both hemispheres each show a dominant 22 year cycle upon which there appears to be a superimposed annual cycle. Are these annual cycles in the polar magnetic field strength caused by the changing vantage point that we have of the Sun’s poles as the Earth moves around the Sun?
Thanks in advance.

tallbloke says:
May 8, 2011 at 6:15 am
Leif Svalgaard says:
May 8, 2011 at 1:59 am
NeilM says:
May 8, 2011 at 1:45 am
“(based on forces that dare not speak their name)” ???
Anyone care to enlighten me?
Astrology…
Coupled with Dynamology.
tallbloke, what is Dynamology? I visualize the center of mass for the solar system (COM) which is in or near the sun and constantly changing as well as the sun’s mass, moving internally, as the COM moves and compensates with the COM. The sun’s internal movement affects its magnetic field.

DirkH says:
May 8, 2011 at 6:25 am
“And where’s the postulated, never observed, positive water vapor feedback that the AGW scientists need to maintain their catastrophe predictions in your cake analogy?”
It has been observed.
In terms of the analogy perhaps it’s the fatter you get the less exercise you want to do.

Dave (UK) says:
May 8, 2011 at 2:54 am
“Irrespective of the outcome, the warmists will blame Ag e’Dubalu, their malign god of climate.”
Manmade CO2 is a sky god. A sky god who controls climate.

Late last night when I saw that David’s post had “outed” me and this model, my first thought was something like, “Now, it’s going to hit the fan.” And that’s ok.
Several people seem to be arguing about whether “my prediction” has any merit without knowing what I actually wrote. Since Anthony has banned (for good reason) discussions over the role of certain forces on the sunspot cycle, I won’t get into that discussion here. For the record, I’m not actually making any prediction.
What my paper in press actually describes is a dynamic simulation using ONE aspect of these forces on a VERY simple model that is NOT intended to actually represent any real aspect of the sun. It is merely a placeholder to explore the hypothesis (not theory) that some aspect of these forces MIGHT have an effect on the sunspot cycle. As a result, I am of the opinion that this avenue is worth pursuing, even though many respectable scientists (again, for good reason) regard this avenue as little more than astrology or numerology. Since I have no reputation in solar physics, I have nothing to lose.
I let this model run out a few cycles into the future, and it did some things in the near future timeframe that it didn’t do at any other time (short sunspot cycles, etc.). What I conclude is that, if this avenue of inquiry has any merit, then the next couple of sunspot cycles may be quite different than anything we’ve seen in the past–at least the cycles we’ve had the instrumentation to study in detail. HOWEVER, the fact that the latest minimum is unique over at least the last century kind of says as much without any model.
When I developed the first iteration of this model in 2008, it showed Cycle 24 starting an upswing around the start of 2010. When the actual sun started showing activity around Dec, 2009, it was gratifying, but hardly any sort of confirmation. David Archibald (who has been hounding me to get this in shape for publication for the past year and a half or so) has presented some current data that MAY correlate with something you might say a posteriori correlates in some way with what my simple model did. Again, interesting and at some level gratifying, but but it will be years before we can say there is any real correlation, let alone rule out coincidence.
What David Archibald does is pull together information from disparate sources and points out the apparent correlations he finds. These correlations may or may not actually mean something, but they are generally interesting, and provoke lots of discussion. And, of course, he isn’t shy about stirring the pot. That can be fun, too–even if you happen to be in the pot.

I really don’t understand these solar cycles at all and I’m not really that interested in learning. But it does strike me a bit strange to claim that the planets effect the sun, but the sun doesn’t effect the climate on the earth.

Re: onion2

Rising CO2 is like eating slightly more cake each day.

Nearly everybody agrees that eating more cake means you will gain weight. The CAGW crowd would also have you believe that gaining weight means you defecate less and therefore an enhanced weight gain feedback mechanism comes into play. This means that if you eat cake your weight gain will spiral out of control.
Eating just one of those wafer thin mints will be okay though. Honest.

Alex says:
May 8, 2011 at 4:17 am
So if you “remove” the sun there wouldn’t be much change?
If I understand the discussion it is that the Sun’s output does not vary enough to cause the climatic shifts (for example, glacial versus interglacial) while Earth’s changing orbital shape and axis orientation do vary enough to produce the observed changes. I think most folks will agree that the Sun has to stay in our solar system for it to exist.

P. Solar says:
May 8, 2011 at 6:30 am
Interesting. It’s good you question what it all means. You can fit part of a cubic curve with a parabola for a while….

Comparing other star types with our star I’ve noticed similarities even with more exotic star types, take our star, it is less dense and it has an irregular pulse being less energetic over a longer time period than that of a Pulsar, neutron stars are very dense objects, the rotation period and the pulse interval between observed pulses are very regular (the regularity of pulsation is as precise as an atomic clock) compared to that of our star which appears to have a less energetic and irregular pulse over a much longer time frame.
So what are the (simplistic) comparable factors between our star and a pulsar?
1. Density (mass)
2. Energy (electromagnetic radiation)
3. Frequency (timing of pulses)
Using these factors a simple interchangeable equation can then be constructed and a more detailed picture of the behavioral similarities of different star types can formed, and once we understand the important similarities we can then understand the irregularities between star types, and with more complex additions to the equation a greater resolution and understanding can be achieved.
This is only a simplistic explanation from my own perspective of a much larger and complex subject that may be of some interest.
Dismiss it if you like but note:
Werner Becker of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics said in 2006, “The theory of how pulsars emit their radiation is still in its infancy, even after nearly forty years of work.”

Re DirkH:
Try:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Dessler_2010_2.gif

How much of this is consistent with the theory proposed by Livingston & Penn?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/02/livingston-and-penn-paper-sunspots-may-vanish-by-2015/

wws says:
May 8, 2011 at 7:24 am
Astrology or Astronomy?
The clock strikes twelve and moondrops burst
Out at you from their hiding place
Miss carrie nurse and susie dear
Would find themselves at four winds bar
It’s the nexus of the crisis
And the origin of storms
Just the place to hopelessly
Encounter time and then came me

Clearly Astronomy by Blue Oyster Cult.
I have owned the vinyl LP since ~35 years ago or so. Great stuff.

Total spot area isn’t that great (so far) and the umbral extent is right along that line:
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/TempGr/uSC24vs13_14.GIF
The butterfly diagram below:
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/TempGr/uvp2324a.PNG
shows a decidedly weak cycle with the Southern Solar Hemisphere component stalled.
The Active Region composite for today:
http://sidc.oma.be/images/combimap800.png
shows much the same (they do have the EIT image upside down …psstt), and you can see how the apparent view of the Sun is heading towards summer solstice looking at a rather limp southern component of SC24.
What do we get from here on out? … a double low maximum? … a single long max or a single short max?
Perhaps David has chosen the correct scenario.

thanks very interesting. After the revelations of how climatology works as a science, astrology must be a mature branch of modern science. I appreciate the observations put forward by Fix and will wait with interest.This is science as I was taught, things that make you go hmmm.

Continued..
Ion-Neutral Collisions in the Interstellar Medium: Wave Damping and Elimination of Collisionless Processes
Steven R. Spangler∗, Allison H. Savage∗ and Seth Redfield†
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1012/1012.4121v1.pdf
..Introduction
..This paper will deal with two topics involving the interaction of ions with neutrals in the interstellar medium.
1. Ion-neutral collisions constitute a damping mechanism for magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves and turbulence in the interstellar medium. As a result, turbulence propagating from a central source of turbulence, such as a supernova remnant, is limited in how far it can go before being attenuated. In the case of the Diffuse Ionized Gas (DIG) component of the ISM [6, 9], which is probably the most extensive in terms of volume and contains the best-diagnosed interstellar turbulence, the dissipation lengths are short and place interesting constraints on the sources and mechanisms for interstellar turbulence. Alternatively, this damping length calculation could point to odd features of turbulent dispersal in the interstellar medium. This issue was discussed four years ago [25]. It remains an interesting topic worthy of attention, and there have been some developments in the last four years which are relevant to this topic.
2. The nearest parts of the interstellar medium are the clouds of the Very Local Interstellar Medium (VLISM) [8, 21]. There are 15 of these clouds within 15 parsecs of the Sun [20], and they have typical dimensions of a parsec to several parsecs. The reason for discussing them in the present context is that astronomical spectroscopic observations [e.g. 18] have provided very good plasma diagnostics, including information on turbulence in the clouds. An obvious exercise is to compare the turbulence in these clouds with the paradigmatic turbulence in the solar corona and solar wind. As we will see, there may be important differences between heliospheric turbulence and turbulence in the Local Clouds. The strongest result is that signatures of collisionless plasma processes in the solar wind and corona are absent in the Local Clouds. As we discuss below, it is plausible that ion-neutral collisional processes are responsible for this difference.
..A COMPARISON OF SOLAR WIND AND VERY LOCAL INTERSTELLAR TURBULENCE
The vicinity of the Sun is dominated by a “Local Cavity” in the interstellar medium, characterized by much lower than average densities [13, 29], and perhaps higher temperatures. However, in the immediate vicinity of the Sun there are many small, tenuous clouds [8, 21]. These clouds do not seem to extend beyond the vicinity of the Sun. Redfield and Linsky [20] report 15 of these clouds within 15 parsecs of the Sun. There are a number of interesting aspects of these clouds, such as the fact that the Sun is within, though close to the edge of one of them, the Local Interstellar Cloud (LIC) [20].
Observations that show the existence of these clouds and provide diagnostics for their properties come from very high resolution astronomical spectroscopy [18]. The spectrometers used in this study, primarily the STIS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope, have resolving powers of .. This allows absorption lines in the spectra of nearby stars to be resolved.
..Reasons for the absence of collisionless plasma processes in the Local Clouds
The turbulence in the Local Clouds of the ISM, as diagnosed by spectral line widths, appears to differ in a number of respects from coronal and solar wind turbulence [26]. In particular, the characteristics attributed to collisionless processes for the interaction of charged particles and turbulence, such as ion mass dependent temperatures and large perpendicular-to-parallel temperature ratios, are not present. These properties have generally been attributed to ion cyclotron resonance processes in wave-particle interactions [10, 7]. In this section, we briefly consider possible explanations for this. The simplest answer is probably that the Local Clouds are collisional via the ion-neutral collision processes discussed in Section 1, whereas the solar corona at heliocentric distances ≥ 2.0R⊙ and the solar wind at 1 astronomical unit are collisionless plasmas.
To accept this suggestion, we need to convince ourselves that the partially ionized plasma media of the Local Clouds are collisional. Following the suggestions of Uzdensky [27], we can define a collisional plasma in two ways.
1. We can first ask if the ion cyclotron frequency greatly exceeds the ion-neutral collision frequency. If this is the case, processes which involve ion-cyclotron resonances can proceed throughmany cyclotron periods before being disrupted by a collision. For example, a distribution function which is unstable to the growth of Alfvén or Fast Mode waves will generate the unstable waves, or large amplitude, resonant waves will substantially modify an ion distribution function on time scales shorter than the collision time. According to this way of defining things, a plasma in which an ion cyclotron frequency is much higher than the ion-neutral collision frequency would be collisionless for that ion.
2. The second criterion of collisionality according to Uzdensky considers the mean free path for collisions and the size of the plasma. If the mean free path for collisions is much larger than the size of the cloud, the typical ion in the medium would not have undergone a collision, and one would expect collisionless physics to be applicable.
In the opposite limit of the mean free path being much smaller than the size of the cloud, the typical ion would have undergone numerous collisions. It seems plausible that collisions would redistribute the energy gained from collisionless processes among different parts of the distribution function, and indeed different species in the plasma. Support for these ideas may be found in [11], where it is noted that collisional parts of the solar wind at 1 AU, such as dense parts of the interplanetary current sheet, lack the collisionless indicators of temperature anisotropy and mass-dependent temperature.
We have enough information about the Local Clouds to apply the above criteria. In Table 2 we list the proton ion cyclotron frequency, ion-hydrogen collision frequency, and mean free path, which are calculated from the plasma parameters listed previously in the table..
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1012/1012.4121v1.pdf

Mike McMillan says:
May 8, 2011 at 11:34 am
Just thought of this. If only one pole reversed, does that mean we have a magnetic monopole? An exceptionally large one, too.
Or a Maunder Monopole?

rbateman says:
May 8, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Mike McMillan says:
May 8, 2011 at 11:34 am
Just thought of this. If only one pole reversed, does that mean we have a magnetic monopole? An exceptionally large one, too.
Or a Maunder Monopole?
~
Great sense of humor..Rob..
One more thing for the cosmic ray enthusiasts,
A, P.Frisch et al fairly recent revision of fairly recent paper (I’ll be back)
Was talking about how when you increase the density in the Very Local Interstellar Medium VLISM, that density increases the Anomalous Cosmic Rays ACR, being produced in the heliosphere by solar wind interactions. I gotta go back .. something about energy levels between the two species of Cosmic Rays CR. Galactic cosmic rays being of higher energies..but both should be in the record..but a higher population of the ACR type..with density increase..

Carla says:
May 8, 2011 at 12:17 pm
I’ve been seeing above the correlation with elliptical orbit and Milankovitch cycles. So then is Pluto’s orbit our first hand example within the system like now! of what an elliptical orbit might look like?
Not sure what you mean.
~
Pluto’s orbit puts the ‘lip’ in elliptical..
“””The orbit of Pluto is unusual in several ways. It is inclined more than 17° from the ecliptic (the plane in which the orbits of the planets lie). The orbit is also more eccentric (far from circular) than any other planetary orbit. At times, Pluto is closer to the Sun than the orbit of Neptune.
Every 228 years, Pluto’s orbit brings it closer to the Sun than Neptune for a period of 20 years. From 1979 to March 1999, Neptune was the farthest planet from the Sun.”””
http://www.nasm.si.edu/etp/pluto/pluto_orbit.html
Pluto and Uranus having similar dipole configurations. The lie down and roll over kind..lol
Your question, myself thought increases of cosmic rays due to that overlap ..
LIC to MIC to G clouds. Our Local ..
But thinning..I don’t know other than they can become trapped in the magnetic fields of many for long times.

http://research.aerology.com/natural-processes/solar-system-dynamics/
Just my 2 cents
*A nameless over view*

“Alex says:
May 8, 2011 at 4:17 am
Leif Svalgaard says:
May 8, 2011 at 2:02 am
No, the Earth’s orbit and axis orientation are.
So if you “remove” the sun there wouldn’t be much change?”
If you remove the sun, Earth would no longer go in an elliptical orbit but would go in a straight line. Any planet that goes in a straight line would approach absolute zero in a matter of time.

Werner Brozek says:
May 8, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Since the Sun is too small to go Nova, I guess we’re stuck with ol Sol.

Given that CO2 does not affect the climate in a significantly, why could another Maunder Min. not happen? Do we have a proof as to why the first Maunder Min happened?
History will repeat itself if the Sun was the cause of the Maunder Min.

Leif Svalgaard says:
May 8, 2011 at 9:57 am
“Pulsars are not like the Sun and any comparison will be rather meaningless”
I didn’t suggest that a pulsar is like the Sun, I wish I had a bigger brain to simplify further such a complex concept that I tried to explain above.
“people are trying to find stars just like the Sun [called solar analogs] and see how they behave”
One obvious problem with this approach is; what knowledge is there to gain and understand between two similar objects, other than what you can already observe with one? Very little!! maybe we could compare subtitle differences which to me is kinda superficial, It would be like comparing two apples, Hmm… They’re both green, similar in size and one a day keeps the doctor away. not too interesting.
But if you compare an apple to an object that is similar in a class in that it is a fruit, then we can try to understand what the differences and similarities are and construct an understanding of the connections between the objects.
If you have a set of predetermined results from Studying one apple then you are only seeking to confirm your results by finding and studying another apple. This is what “rather meaningless” means to me!! 😎

“Since the Sun is too small to go Nova, I guess we’re stuck with ol Sol.”
Earth will be uninhabitable long before the Sun changes enough to really make all that much difference anyway.
The primary cause will be CO2 depletion of the atmosphere. Once Earth cools to a point where plate tectonics stops or greatly slows, CO2 will be removed from the atmosphere at a greater rate than it is added. Once we reach a point where plant life can not sustain animal life, we are toast. Then the water will be lost to space and Earth will look a lot like Mars does today. It will be very dry.
We have probably given things a million years or so of extended life by burning fossil fuel and returning some of that CO2 for another trip through the cycle but it eventually becomes limestone at some point. And with no subduction to cycle that CO2 back through a volcano, the CO2 eventually ends up at the bottom of the sea as limestone and eventually marble. My guess is we have about another 200-300 million years left of life on Earth and that is the end of it.

David Archibald says:
May 8, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Well, David said quite a lot, actually.
Wow. Did I do all that? I’ll have to remember to be humble when I accept my Nobel Prize 🙂
Most of the places you say it “explains…” this or that characteristic, I’d probably say, “Possibly provides a framework for explaining…”. And of course, the model in the form described in the current paper doesn’t really do any of that, but it does hint that it might be possible. That’s a big jump from possible to done.
Anyway, thanks for the vote of confidence, and for cracking the whip to get me to write it up.

crosspatch says:
May 8, 2011 at 7:12 pm
The tidal interactions of sun/moon on Earth should keep things going awhile, but a good solid whack by a large asteroid would also release a lot of CO2 from rock. Some hypothesize that this is what happened to Venus to make it so hot (it hasn’t cooled off yet).

Leif Svalgaard says:
May 8, 2011 at 7:38 pm
“You don’t learn about apples by studying coconuts ”
What the f*** is that supposed to mean within context?
I can’t believe I caught a pathological know-it-all in the wild, Ya gotta catch ’em all!!

“My guess is we have about another 200-300 million years left of life on Earth and that is the end of it.”
Personally, if I get about 30 or so more I’ll be doing great.

the angular momentum of solar system gives a convincing case and a good correlation with the solar activity. Landscheidt does have an astrology background but if you count in gravity this makes sense. Carl Smith made the plot of the angular momentum of the solar system. Based on this angular momentum solar activity can be forecasted in most cases. More info on:
http://www.landscheidt.info/
landscheidt.wordpress.com/

Mike Jones says:

P. Solar – Your approach of fitting cosine+linear is more sophisticated than the IPCC’s linear-only approach, and may well be useful as a short-term predicter (and for longer than the linear model of course), but in the end it suffers from the same problems : it has no physical mechanism and it takes no account of longer cycles. There are longer cycles visible in our temperature history, and if one or more of those are turning now, then your improved predicter could soon deviate from the actual.

Firstly you should note I stressed this is non rigorous and I only posted this because I think the form is too strong to be a pure coincidence or an artefact of the processing.
There is no intention to provide a physical explanation. This is at the level that science calls “observation”. You see effect, then later you try to explain it. Many climatologists work in opposition to science, they start with the explanation then spend 30 years trying to observe it !
I am aware of 200 year cycles and the simple straight line + cosine is clearly only a crude approximation. Especially in the SST data there is a tendency for the amplitude to reduce over the couple of cycles in the sample. This may be better tracked by the pattern of at least two cosines interfering. This would probably lead to a much longer term as well.
A straight line is always nice to fit but here it leads to cubic in the temperature reconstruction which will rise as sharply when extrapolated back into 19th c.
This is the fundamental problem with extrapolating a model beyond the period for which you have data. A fact that the IPCC and all their modellers are wilfully ignoring and underestimating the uncertainly of.
All I think can be gleaned from this is that the recent easing is predictable but won’t last long, so those inclined to think y2k was a turning point may be reading too much into a blip.
It also suggests an underlying and accelerating warming , though much less than GCMs with artificial climate sensitivity.
Scaffeta 2010 does the same thing with three cosines and gets much better results. (see the link posted earlier). It seems I’ve stumbled on something he has already worked on quite a bit, starting from a premise of planetary influence. He found 60% of recent warming was cyclic.
The bottom line here is that a significant part of late 20th c warming was just natural cycles. IPCC are wilfully ignoring the obvious in concentrating their CO2 attribution to this period.
My initial motivation for looking at the slope of all 50-year periods was to see whether this period was cherry-picked. Clearly it was. Tuning the models to fit CO2 based warming to later half of 20th c is a con.
This took me an evening’s work and is a better fit to the full period of available data than 30 years worth of super-computers has managed.

Only thing that happened to me back then was I bought a Sega Dreamcast.

Recent real picture of the Gama ray Sky
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/gammaray_best.html
Looks a lot more active than Lief and Goddard SFC would have you believe. More info and links on page to other Info you might like to look at.

Carla says:
May 8, 2011 at 12:07 pm
Leif Svalgaard says:
May 8, 2011 at 8:36 am
The issue is that tidal effects from Jupiter are about half a millimeter [proportional to the mass]. If Jupiter had the mass of the Sun [1000 times larger than it has], the tidal bulge would be 1000 times larger, i.e. half a meter. This is still insignificant. You have to move the perturbing body closer to the Sun. So let us move it ten times closer [to half an AU], now the effect is a thousand times larger [as it scales with the cube of the distance], or half a kilometer [which is still less than a millionth of the solar radius]. You have to move the body REALLY close to have any effect.
~
You say..let us move it ten times closer to half an AU, now the effect is a thousand times larger..
Perfect Leif, for an introduction to Ion Cyclotron Waves ICW. What if any is your opinion on the role of ICW in the heating and expansion of solar wind? I’m reading they’re ubiquitous in the INTERPLANETARY SYSTEM and the closer you get to the solar corona, the more there is..
Ion Cyclotron Waves ICW..
Ion Cyclotron Waves in the Solar Wind from 0.3 to 1 AU
Lan K. Jian1, C.T. Russell1, J.G. Luhmann2, A.B. Galvin3, B.J. Anderson4, S. Boardsen5,
T.L. Zhang6, A. Wennmacher7
Dublin, IrelandMarch 22‐26, 2010
~
Fairly recent presentation..They compared 1976 solar min to 2008 solar min and found that fewer ICWs (Ion Cyclotron Waves) are being produced this min..
Second paper finds that they are absent from the Very Local Instellar Medium VLISM and that the Interstellar neutral collisions are cited as the reason for destablization of the ICW production.
Ion-Neutral Collisions in the Interstellar Medium: Wave Damping and Elimination of Collisionless Processes
Steven R. Spangler∗, Allison H. Savage∗ and Seth Redfield†
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1012/1012.4121v1.pdf
Third article suggests that the Geomagnetic field/Carbon 14 graph data is muddled due to increases of ACR (which are not taken into account when the graph was produced) , which they suggest increase when the density around the heliosphere bubble increases.
Time-variability in the Interstellar Boundary Conditions
of the Heliosphere: Effect of the Solar Journey on the
Galactic Cosmic Ray Flux at Earth
Priscilla C. Frisch · Hans-Reinhard Mueller
rev. 3 Feb. 2011
I would think that fewer ICWs being produced at the Corona/extended corona during this minimum should send up flags. Less heat being produced in the corona during this min. Fewer ICWs being produced in interPlanetary space as well.
Why is the corona so much hotter than the solar surface? Scientists are still working on this aren’t they Leif? ICWs are very much a part of the heating and acceleration process from Corona to 1 AU where the majority of them are found and observed.

The image sosoon2.png gives the timing of cycle 22 as 8.9 years
The actual figure is 9.7
http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/2/3/2

Always interesting, but the maximum for solar cycle 24 is at least a year, and more likely about 20-22 months or so away.

What I find fascinating is how weak the sun’s magnetic field remains, compared to the previous solar cycles.

Leif,
Great solar dialog.
Of interest to me wrt evaluating sources of decadal length earth cooling periods are the variations in:
a) solar spectral irradiance during the ~22 year magnetic solar cycle and between such cycles
b) solar wind composition, intensity/density and frequency of perturbations during the ~22 year magnetic solar cycle and between such cycles
c) earth magnetic system changes that occur during a) and b) but which are independent of the solar magnetic system cycle . . . . that is coincident with but not correlated with each other.
I am a fisherman for ideas on sources of decadal length earth cooling periods. : )
John

@ Leif Svalgaard said May 9, 2011 at 11:55 am
Leif,
Thanks for the clarification. I can see a distinction in why one would say the geomagnetic activity has a 22-year cycle whereas the solar cycle would be considered 11 years.
Thanks for the reference to your 1977 work. Those were the IBM Selectrixc (golf ball) typewriter days, weren’t they? : )
Question: Does any aspect of solar wind reaching earth vary wrt the earths position relative to the solar equatorial plane? For example such aspects could be things like solar wind intensity/density or duration of maxs/mins or composition or frequency of storms/events (perturbations).
John

Geoff Sharp says:
May 9, 2011 at 6:00 pm
Yes, you are quite right about hindcasting. It must be done as well as forecasting, otherwise one is merely trend-chasing.