Guest post by David Archibald
Dr Svalgaard has an interesting annotation on his chart of solar parameters – “Welcome to solar max”:
Graphic source: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
Could it be? It seems that Solar Cycle 24 had only just begun, with solar minimum only two and a half years ago in December 2008.
The first place to confirm that is the solar polar magnetic field strength, with data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory:
Source: http://wso.stanford.edu/
The magnetic poles of the Sun reverse at solar maximum. The northern field has reversed. There are only three prior reversals in the instrument record. Another parameter that would confirm solar maximum is the heliospheric current sheet tilt angle, also from the WSO site.
The heliospheric current sheet tilt angle has taken a couple of years to reach solar maximum from its current level.
If the Sun is anywhere near solar maximum, the significance of that is that it would be the first time in the record that a short cycle was also a weak cycle, though Usoskin et al in 2009 proposed a short, asymmetric cycle in the late 18th century at the beginning of the Dalton Minimum: http://climate.arm.ac.uk/publications/arlt2.pdf
Interestingly, Ed Fix (paper in press) generated a solar model (based on forces that dare not speak their name) which predicts two consecutive, weak solar cycles, each eight years long:
The green line is the solar cycle record with alternate cycles reversed. The red line is the model output. Solar Cycles 19 to 23 are annotated.
This model has the next solar maximum in 2013 and minimum only four years later in 2017. This outcome is possible based on the Sun’s behaviour to date.
ok. My two cents (and it’s likely worth less).
I vote for complexity, but perhaps not in the same way as others. From what I have read and interpreted, there are probably multiple phenomena that are responsible for climate changes. First, obviously, is TSI, which has likely happened in the far, far distant past. Secondly, orbital mechanics – the perturbations in Earth’s orbit wrt the sun and earth’s tilt wrt the sun. Third, plate techntonics – the climate is drastically different when there are major land masses at both poles than when both poles are open water/ice.
I think there is a quasi-fourth perpetrator: changes in the solar magnetic fields affecting solar wind/sun-earth magnetic field interaction, perhaps including the shielding/non-shielding of earth from cosmic rays (however you want to link it, with sunspots/no sunspots being an associated symptom of those solar changes). I say quasi because I’ve read enough literature (thanks to the Dr. S pointing me in the right direction) to believe that the climate changes were regional, not global. In this scenario, the interactions mentioned above creates some subtle, but impactful, changes on weather, such as driving the jet streams further south in the northern hemisphere (maybe a similar effect in the SH, but we don’t have much data). This would result in some areas, such as Northern Europe, North America, and Northern Asia having much colder regional climes. Areas just to the south of the jet stream would experience no change, and the equatorial regions would be warmer than normal (the jet streams would keep tropical heat from moving as far north as normal). Globally, it would all average out to ‘normal’ – and in keeping with TSI. Since most of our cultural history and scientific historical records are from those living in the regions subjected to cooling, they/we would assume that the earth as a whole must have been colder.
The problem is that if the above scenarios are true, we may never be able to tease out what historical/prehistorical cold periods were caused by what series of events (particularly since more than one of the above things could have happened at the same time). And I think it’s a safe bet that there are other ‘climate changers’ that have left their mark on Earths climate history.
So cheers to all. Many of you could be right, though all of us are undoubtedly wrong.
One of the hotspots seen by IceCube points in the direction of the Vela supernova remnant, a possible source of cosmic rays, but it’s almost 1000 light years away. Cosmic rays coming from such large distances should be constantly buffeted and deflected by galactic magnetic fields on route, and should thus have lost all directionality by the time they reach Earth. In other words, such long-distance cosmic rays should appear to come from all parts of the sky. That’s not what has been observed.
Our Galaxy is not a uniform elliptical, but a rather complicated spiral with a hub.
Why should it uniformly modify the CRF? One can readily observe non-uniformity with a modest telescope. Dust clouds, star clusters, stellar nurseries, nova & supernova, etc.
I don’t get the ‘should be uniform’ thinking.
Perhaps this is something taken for granted and just not explained these days, or a simplification necessary to study other things.
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!!
rbateman says:
May 8, 2011 at 8:51 pm
Our Galaxy is not a uniform elliptical, but a rather complicated spiral with a hub.
Why should it uniformly modify the CRF? One can readily observe non-uniformity with a modest telescope. Dust clouds, star clusters, stellar nurseries, nova & supernova, etc.
I don’t get the ‘should be uniform’ thinking.
Perhaps this is something taken for granted and just not explained these days, or a simplification necessary to study other things.
Cosmic rays are charged particles and are deflected and scattered by the very turbulent and tangled galactic magnetic fields. That is why we can’t tell where they come from. Don’t think that scientists are morons and just take things for granted. There are good reasons for these things. The uniformity of the cosmic rays is an observed fact. Or perhaps was. With the new 1 cubic-km cosmic ray telescope in Antarctica we are [finally – after a century of looking] beginning to see very small asymmetries, that might teach us something about the sources of GCRs.
Sparks says:
May 8, 2011 at 9:04 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!!
It means that we who study this all agree that to learn about the solar dynamo we need to study stars like the Sun [solar analogs – the apples] and a large amount of work is going into finding such stars [we have only found a few so far that are close enough that we can get the resolution we need]. Lots of stars [the coconuts] have magnetic fields and stellar activity cycles and tell us something about them, but not much about the Sun. All kinds of stars give us a broad spectrum of possible configurations, but we need to tease out what is applicable to the Sun.
“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.
Before we measure something, we need an accurate measuring stick. Are we talking “solar max as per sunspot count” or “solar max as per 10.7 cm flux (Penticton)”? Given the Livingstone-Penn observations, we could come up with two different dates for “solar max”? Which one would be more meaningful/accurate?
I’ve downloaded and plotted the Penticton 10.7 cm flux data from 1947 onwards. My favourite graph is the 27-day running mean (approx 1 Carrington rotation to even out the effect of individual disturbances on the solar surface). Looking at the ramp-up of cycle 24 versus 19/20/21/22/23, I don’t think we’re anywhere near the 10.7 cm max 27-day flux yet
rbateman says:
May 8, 2011 at 8:51 pm
Our Galaxy is not a uniform elliptical, but a rather complicated spiral with a hub.
Why should it uniformly modify the CRF?
The image at this link: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/cosmic_rays.html is a map of the Galaxy in cosmic Rays.
Slightly OT:
Two of my research papers that have been lying around for years have been published in the General Science Journal at these URL’s:
http://www.wbabin.net/files/4424_wilson.pdf
Are Changes in the Earth’s Rotation Rate Externally Driven and Do
They Affect Climate?
http://www.wbabin.net/files/4425_wilson1.pdf
Do Periodic Peaks in the Planetary Tidal Forces
Acting Upon the Sun Influence the Sunspot Cycle?
Walter Dnes says:
May 8, 2011 at 10:34 pm
Given the Livingstone-Penn observations, we could come up with two different dates for “solar max”? Which one would be more meaningful/accurate?
I don’t think the timing will be much affected by L&P. The sunspot number will. F10.7 smoothed max is predicted to be somewhere in the range 120-140 [depending on whose prediction]. The last [unsmoothed] 27-day average is F10.7 = 113 so we are getting close.
Leif Svalgaard says:
May 8, 2011 at 9:42 pm
You obviously know everything or you have a need to express to everyone that you know everything. [snip – no need to hurl insults – Anthony]
Give me an equation from my first comment or admit that you had no idea what my initial point was.
Sparks says:
May 8, 2011 at 11:25 pm
Give me an equation from my first comment or admit that you had no idea what my initial point was.
since pulsar pulses and solar cycles are generated by completely different mechanisms they are not describable by the same equation, but you are welcome to enlighten us otherwise.
RE: [snip – no need to hurl insults – Anthony]
That wasn’t an insult or intended as such… It was an opinion!
Sorry!
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/
Leif Svalgaard says:
May 8, 2011 at 11:35 pm
Pulsars belong to their own solar systems, they must and do conform to certain basic principles or they wouldn’t exist, What are the basic laws that prove Pulsars exist?
E=mc2
How do we know pulsars have similarities with our sun?
E=mc2
Warren in Minnesota says:
May 8, 2011 at 7:30 am
tallbloke, what is Dynamology?
A word I gently mock Leif Svalgaard with when he dismisses the study of the effect of the planets on the sun as Astrology. However, I agree with you that the shifting of the COM and the modulating effect this has on the sun’s internal ‘dynamo’ are involved in solar variation.
A couple of NASA scientist think so too…
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/wolff-and-patrone-a-new-way-that-planets-can-affect-the-sun/
Leif Svalgaard says:
May 8, 2011 at 12:55 am
If Ed Fix’s prediction fails it would mean that the ‘theory’ behind it has also failed.
The MSFC panel prediction for cycle 24 failed, spectacularly. Does this mean the ‘theory’ behind it has also failed?
😉
Mike Jones says:
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.
For all those arguing about “angular momentum” what happens when all the planets line up?
Didn’t they do just that in 1999 on the 9th of September at 9 o’clock just before Y2k killed us all?
Will Jupiter always have a giant red spot? and did it always have one or create one?
Was Saturn much larger and create it’s rings a long time ago as it slowly turnd into a star?
If Saturn turned into a star would it effect the orbits of the other planets in our solar system?
If a solar flare destroyed the earth in 2012 couldn’t we live around the planets orbiting Saturn?
Only thing that happened to me back then was I bought a Sega Dreamcast.
It appears that all mechanical (gravity, angular momentum etc) ideas end up with insufficient power.
Electro-magnetic ideas I have been highlighting for some time now are ‘inconvenient truth’, since they conflict with the outdated 1950’s solar ideas.
Powerful magnetic fields of Jupiter and Saturn, aplying the simplest analogy, act as short circuits for billions of Amps of electric current rooted in the sun’s outer layer and looping out to the heliosphere’s furthest reaches. An example of this can be frequently seen in the the Earth’s magnetosphere interactions, when as much as one billion Amps is short-circuited in Arctic in single ‘zap’, releasing 10^24 -10^30 Joules of energy.
For more details
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC5.htm
@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.”
Looking at CET monthly and annual temperatures throughout the year/s preceding: 1709, 1716, 1740, 1763, 1784 etc, I would not advise putting money on it.
CET:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/tcet.dat
P. Solar – Yes I did note that you said your analysis was non rigorous, and please understand that my comment was not intended to be a criticism but an indication of a limit to its applicability. I agree that the form is too strong to be a pure coincidence or an artefact of the processing, that a significant part of late 20th c warming was just natural cycles, and that your work is a better fit to the full period of available data than 30 years worth of a particular set of super-computers has managed.
But having said that, I don’t think you have good grounds for projecting your graph on an ever-increasing trajectory through to 2100, given that the whole formula is based on only about 150 years of data and that cycles and factors other than the one cycle you have identified would have been operating and will continue to operate.
There was a post on WUWT some time ago, mapping observed temperatures to PDO and AMO, and I would suggest that these provide the natural cycle that you have mapped.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/30/amopdo-temperature-variation-one-graph-says-it-all/
Leif Svalgaard says: May 8, 2011 at 12:55 am
If Ed Fix’s prediction fails it would mean that the ‘theory’ behind it has also failed.
Leif Svalgaard says: May 8, 2011 at 1:59 am
Astrology…
It is difficult to tell whether these comments are meant as smears, sneers or observations… should the prediction fails then Ed Fix will be in some very august company… reality has confounded so many established experts – their theories, explanations, prognostications and reputations lie in tatters… However, on the plus side Ed Fix (and vukcevic) both have working formulae that can hindcast and forecast… the hindcasts (at the least) seem to be major advances for solar science… hopefully the professional prognosticators will now revisit reality so that they can demonstrate that they are not soothsayers, clairvoyants and charlatans.
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.