Just published in GRL, a new paper by Lockwood et al that suggests the sun may be headed for a Maunder type minimum.:
The persistence of solar activity indicators and the descent of the Sun into Maunder Minimum conditions
Key Points
- Can we predict the onset of the next grand solar minimum
- Grand minima can be predicted using some solar indices
- The design and operation of systems influenced by space climate can be optimised
Abstract:
The recent low and prolonged minimum of the solar cycle, along with the slow growth in activity of the new cycle, has led to suggestions that the Sun is entering a Grand Solar Minimum (GSMi), potentially as deep as the Maunder Minimum (MM). This raises questions about the persistence and predictability of solar activity. We study the autocorrelation functions and predictability R2L(t) of solar indices, particularly group sunspot number RG and heliospheric modulation potential Φ for which we have data during the descent into the MM. For RG and Φ, R2L(t) > 0.5 for times into the future of t ≈ 4 and ≈ 3 solar cycles, respectively: sufficient to allow prediction of a GSMi onset. The lower predictability of sunspot number RZ is discussed. The current declines in peak and mean RG are the largest since the onset of the MM and exceed those around 1800 which failed to initiate a GSMi.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Leif Svalgaard says:December 2, 2011 at 9:58 pm
………………….
I read Space Science Proposal 2011, impressed with the assemblage of the personage. If you come to some agreement I will relish a great opportunity for more fun.
If the sun-Earth link comes up, it would be wise to consider that both oscillate at the same frequency, but the Earth’s side has a bit of phase modulation due to the ocean currents.
You can put these two in your briefcase and take with you.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-T.htm
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/HMF-T.htm
You got the data; you know it is as good as you can get so no need to elaborate.
If you get stuck you can use temperature to calibrate the sunspot number (smiley face)!
Gail Combs says:
December 2, 2011 at 6:25 pm ””If it happens you can curse the name of Dan Amstutz. He is the S.O.B. who got rid of the US strategic grain reserves via his 1996 farm bill “Freedom to Fail” http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2000/00july-aug/lilliston.html
He also wrote the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Ag while he danced between being VP of Cargill, working for the USDA and working for Goldman Sachs. I doubt it was a coincidence that Goldman Sachs and Cargill profited from the 2008 food riots. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/27/how_goldman_sachs_created_the_food_crisis?page=0,1
=========================
and the above(truncated by me) post of Gails , reminds me of the outcry this year when Russia refused to sell wheat, to make sure they could feed their own,(they did happen to have some billions of tons in their emergency stocks already, about a years worth, -unlike usa with about 40days give or take))
the advisory company that said dont sell, (and made a whole pile of money I bet) is the recently public stocks and trades mob, green??fields trees whatever.swiss based outfit, they seem to be getting a large hold over essentials trades.
Gail Combs says:
December 2, 2011 at 7:44 pm
Unfortunately a lot of the Heritage Breeding stock got wiped out during the UK foot and mouth disease fiasco.
As a Purdue University Prof said the loss of the older breeds could be a major problem in coming years. He was finding “weaknesses” in the commercial chicken strains.
Deliberately engineered to wipe them out? Wasn’t the last sheep cull started on one farm having catching a disease from the local laboratory?
All this ‘envioronmental angst’ against the loss of biodiversity is of the same ilk as accusing sceptics of being funded by ‘big oil’, all the while its the green marxists environmentalists heavily funded by them. Cheap coal is a great competitor, just as real gene diversity is to those wanting to control this in breeding stock and crops.
Joining the EU was Britain’s first taste of all that, the powers that shall no be accountable to anyone grubbed up most of the orchards and gave the apple production to France, from great variety to tasteless French grannie smiths and cox’s, and made it illegal to sell the seeds of old, non EU sanctioned, varieties – kept going through clubs set up to keep these alive, but not for general sale of seed or product. I think there’s been a bit of a change very, very, recently, but it’s limited.
Monsanto wants to control all grain production, forcing farmer in Iraq, just one example, to buy from them only and outlawing the saving of their own seed. Big corporation oil and pharma the bane of all our lives. Pharma determined to outlaw our free use of medicinal plants as they did hemp (medicinal and fuel energy and product such as paper and cloth, so the new ‘nylon’ industry too got behind demonising this great healing herb and general all round plant of life).
tallbloke says:
December 3, 2011 at 2:53 am
The end goal of this effort is to use a vetted record of IMF B (or the Sun’s open flux (Φ)) for the past ~170 years to extend this time series back through the Holocene (~11,000 years before present) using the long-term 10Be and 14C data sets.
I predict Leif’s consensus will confidently demonstrate a solar history with the minimum variation that can plausibly be derived from the data.
The research done by planetary-solar theorists indicates that the Sun itself will probably prove the new consensus wrong within 20 years. If so, I sincerely hope Leif is still with us to witness it.
_________________________________________
Given what the Ice Core types did to the CO2 levels, I am not going to place bets with you.
The sun is constant is one of the foundations of CAGW so that is what will be found.
This peer reviewed paper starts off with a blatant lie, water vapor not CO2 is the most important “Greenhouse” gas. Then it is made clear they are looking for evidence to convict and hang mankind. IMPARTIAL??? Not bloody likely.
The Siple core is treated as a classical proof that the pre-industrial CO 2 concentration in the atmosphere was about 70 ppm v lower than now (e.g. IP C C , 1990). One should note, however, that this core was exposed to post-coring melting. The melting, which must have caused important changes in the gaseous composition , was not reported by Neftel et al (1985) (see discussion in Jaworowski et al., 1992). The data from this core were adjusted to overlay exactly the recent atmospheric concentrations at Mauna Loa (Siegenthaler and Oeschger, 1987). A figure demonstrating this adjustment is reproduced in countless publications (e.g. in IPCC , 1990). The overlaying was achieved by assuming that the age of the trapped air w as 95 years younger than the ice. Without this speculative assumption the Mauna Loa and Siple data do not agree at all. As was indicated by Jaworowski et al. (1992), rather than representing the past atmospheric changes, the results show how the CO 2 concentra tio n s in the Siple core decrease with the increasing load pressure up to about 15 bars, due to clathrate formation, differential dissolution of gases in the intercrystalline liquid brine, and other processes in the ice sheet and in the ice core….
We are not discussing the validity of analytical methods used in the current CO2 studies in
glaciers. We criticize the quality of ice as a closed system , which is an absolutely essential criterion for its use to reconstruct the composition of the pre-industrial atmosphere. We also criticize the methodology of sampling, and biased interpretation of results. Ice is neither a rigid material, nor may be regarded as a closed system , suitable for preserving the original chemical and isotopic composition of atmospheric gas inclusions. Ice core drilling is an extremely brutal procedure leading to drastic changes in the ice samples, precluding their reliability for gas analyses….. In this interpretation differentiation processes in the ice were neglected or downplayed. In fact they were never thoroughly studied, and this is one of the reasons why the glaciological studies were not able to provide a reliable reconstruction of the CO2 level in pre-industrial and ancient atmospheres…. http://www.co2web.info/np-m-119.pdf
OUCH, no wonder Dr. Jaworowski was vilified. The Emperor and his court are NOT happy when someone points out they have no clothes.
What is also amusing is we are lead to believe the Antarctic Ice Core CO2 is representative of the whole earth’s CO2 when NASA SHOWS the Antarctic has a lower amount of CO2 than anywhere else on earth! http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA09269_modest.jpg
M.A.Vukcevic (December 3, 2011 at 3:46 am) wrote: “[…] Earth’s side has a bit of phase modulation due to the ocean currents.”
It’s the wind-driven ocean currents and those winds are driven by equator-pole temperature contrasts.
Sun = crank shaft
Equator-pole temperature gradients = differential transmissions
Westerlies = drive wheels
@Leif Svalgaard says:
December 2, 2011 at 9:58 pm
“Such a record, sanctioned by those who have been passionately debating the issue over the past decade, will be invaluable for modelers of the solar dynamo, cosmic ray modulation, and climate change.” http://www.leif.org/research/Svalgaard_ISSI_Proposal_Base.pdf
With such discrepancies between reconstructions (your fig 1) and observations: http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/tmp/images/ret_13923.gif
I bet one could get a better reconstruction from ENSO phase and El Nino frequency.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 3, 2011 at 12:19 am
I am a bit surprised by Dr. Hathaway not knowing of the Waldemeir’s hockey stick ‘trick’.
He does know:
An interview with David Hathaway mentioning my work on the Waldmeier discontinuity and its importance; It takes some time to get there, starts around 3:57 and ends around
19:00. Some solar discussion before and after:
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 3, 2011 at 3:46 am
If you get stuck you can use temperature to calibrate the sunspot number (smiley face)!
I spent a good deal of 1976 in the Soviet Union lecturing at various universities and institutes. One of those was an asylum for insane people [lunatics they called them] [no kidding]. The director of the asylum kept track of the general level of agitation of the inmates [patients we would say] on a scale from 0 to 5. He showed me a large chart on his office wall depicting the variation of his agitation index with time and claimed that there was a very high correlation with times when the Heliospheric Current Sheet swept over the Earth. He even in all seriousness [no smiley] that we should use his data to fill in the gaps in the spacecraft data…
Ulric Lyons says:
December 3, 2011 at 7:44 am
With such discrepancies between reconstructions (your fig 1) and observations: http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/tmp/images/ret_13923.gif
There is no discrepancy. On the contrary very good agreement, see Figure 3 [upper panel]
of http://www.leif.org/research/Semiannual-Comment.pdf
I bet one could get a better reconstruction from ENSO phase and El Nino frequency.</i<
Since none of those are influenced by solar activity, it would be hard to get such.
Latitude says December 2, 2011 at 6:08 am:
“Can we predict the onset of the next grand solar minimum
====================
……….. no”
====================
Of course we can!
We can also forget we ever made any particular prediction when our predictions never come to pass.- Study Climate Scientists – and learn!
Ninderthana says:
December 2, 2011 at 11:22 pm
surely these are not the words of a scientist with an open mind?
When it comes to the data, one should not have ‘an open mind’. Progress happens when scientists have thoroughly examined the data and agree on what they show so that further research can build on a solid foundation. Especially, as is the case here, when the experts involved have disagreed strongly in the past. An important ingredient is complete transparency and we intend all data, code, and all discussion to be available to the public, scientists and lay people alike [e.g. no paywalls]. Now, you may or may not understand this, but we can live with that.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 3, 2011 at 8:29 am
Since none of those are influenced by solar activity, it would be hard to get such.
Do you mean there is no evidence that these are influenced by solar activity? Or that the evidence is weak? Or that the evidence to the contrary is strong?
To say that there is no influence requires that we know everything there is to know about solar influences, ENSO and El Nino. There would be no reason to train new scientists or do any new studies if that was the case. The taxpayer could save a lot of money on needless research.
ferd berple says:
December 3, 2011 at 9:05 am
Do you mean there is no evidence that these are influenced by solar activity? Or that the evidence is weak? Or that the evidence to the contrary is strong?
Obviously, what is meant is that whatever influence there might be is so drowned in the noise that we cannot say with any confidence [and be honest about it] that there is any measurable or observable influence. This does not exclude people making all kinds of wild claims, just excludes them being taken seriously [except by themselves]
“D. J. Hawkins says:
December 2, 2011 at 3:06 pm
Ferd, I always read your comments with interest, but this is a very tired meme. By the time of the Montreal Protocol, the basic patent on Freon had been expired for about 41 years.”
Regulation and DuPont
In 1978 the United States banned the use of CFCs such as Freon in aerosol cans, the beginning of a long series of regulatory actions against their use. The critical DuPont manufacturing patent for Freon (“Process for Fluorinating Halohydrocarbons”, U.S. Patent #3258500) was set to expire in 1979.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon
@Leif Svalgaard says:
December 3, 2011 at 8:29 am
Ulric Lyons says:
December 3, 2011 at 7:44 am
With such discrepancies between reconstructions (your fig 1) and observations: http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/tmp/images/ret_13923.gif
>There is no discrepancy. On the contrary very good agreement, see Figure 3 [upper panel]
of http://www.leif.org/research/Semiannual-Comment.pdf
I bet one could get a better reconstruction from ENSO phase and El Nino frequency.
>Since none of those are influenced by solar activity, it would be hard to get such.
Fig 3 is also very different to observations.
The only strong exceptions between solar wind speeds and ENSO phase since 1964 is immediately following El Chichon and Pinatubo.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 3, 2011 at 8:24 am
I spent a good deal of 1976 in the Soviet Union ……….. an asylum for insane people [lunatics they called them] [no kidding]…. agitation index with time …… a very high correlation with times when the Heliospheric Current Sheet swept over the Earth.
I always wondered why the years of Maunder minimum were so productive for science and philosophy. Now we know; dr. Lockwood failed to spot connection in his above discussed paper.
Not to mention the Bartel cycle’s effect on fertility on the better half of the human population.
Ulric Lyons says:
December 3, 2011 at 9:38 am
Fig 3 is also very different to observations.
No, the red curve is OMNI observations and the blue curve is the reconstruction. As you can see there is very good agreement: of http://www.leif.org/research/Semiannual-Comment.pdf
The curves show 7 rotation averages to suppress the intermittent noise from the random fluctuations of the solar wind. This is very fitting to do as ENSO is also on the time scale of many months.
“Leif Svalgaard says:
December 3, 2011 at 9:34 am
Obviously, what is meant is that whatever influence there might be is so drowned in the noise that we cannot say with any confidence [and be honest about it] that there is any measurable or observable influence.”
So, we don’t know either way “none of those are influenced by solar activity” because the noise level is too high?
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 3, 2011 at 9:54 am
I always wondered why the years of Maunder minimum were so productive for science and philosophy. Now we know; dr. Lockwood failed to spot connection in his above discussed paper.
Not to mention the Bartel cycle’s effect on fertility on the better half of the human population.
Nonsense, you put yourself in the same category as the director of that insane asylum…
Well, there is one paper that SEEMS so far to show some correlation between UV energy and the AO/NAO but I haven’t seen anything so far that correlates with ENSO. That paper doesn’t have a lot of data collection (less than one full solar cycle so far from some point well into 23 until now ) so the jury is still out on that one.
ferd berple says:
December 3, 2011 at 10:00 am
So, we don’t know either way “none of those are influenced by solar activity” because the noise level is too high?
Scientists deal with what one could call ‘effective’ theories. That means that one takes into account what is clearly shown on the time scales and accuracies involved without worrying obsessively about what takes place below that [in the noise]. For example, it is absolutely certain that Jupitershine has an effect on the climate, because we are receiving light [energy] from Jupiter. But the amount is so minute that we don’t need to take it into account. Your argument is of the nature: “the chances I win the lottery is 50%: either I win or I do not”.
@Leif Svalgaard says:
December 3, 2011 at 9:54 am
The last 40+yrs of your red curve looks nothing like the observations http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/tmp/images/ret_13923.gif.
Smooth out your noise and you have lost the critical data, the ENSO response time is fast. There is nothing random about SW variation either.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 3, 2011 at 10:01 am
————
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 3, 2011 at 9:54 am
I always wondered why the years of Maunder minimum were so productive for science and philosophy. Now we know; dr. Lockwood failed to spot connection in his above discussed paper.
Not to mention the Bartel cycle’s effect on fertility on the better half of the human population.
————
Nonsense, you put yourself in the same category as the director of that insane asylum….
Your lack of a sense of humour is becoming legendary.
crosspatch says:
December 3, 2011 at 10:06 am
but I haven’t seen anything so far that correlates with ENSO
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SOI.htm
New paper suggests sun may be headed for a Maunder minimum
Posted on December 2, 2011 by Anthony Watts
The recent low and prolonged minimum of the solar cycle, along with the slow growth in activity of the new cycle, has led to suggestions that the Sun is entering a Grand Solar Minimum (GSMi), potentially as deep as the Maunder Minimum (MM).
Taking one of the proxies like the reconstruction of A.Mangini et al. 2005, it can be seen that the MM is a ‘nip tide’ phase in a complex tide like function of two plutinos Quaoar and Pluto. The solar nip tide angles on the ecliptic of 90° were exact in the years 1630 AD and 1709 AD.
From this function a similar ‘MM’ will occur again in the
27th century AD. The signs of the solar events can be shown in common with a first maximum of three of a conjunction of the two plutinos, which took place in 1997 and has changed to about a solar tide like angle of 14° into 2011, ongoing with a slightly cooling effect. But there will be no deep minimum as the MM; in 2045 AD the temperatures will be arise and will reach a second maximum higher than today.
Because not only the plutino couple Quaoar/Pluto shows effects of global temperature changes, but also all neighbor planets from Mercury on outwards in the solar system, it is possible to trace and forecast the global temperatures in high resolution (over 6000 years in total).
This can be shown in a graph for the years 1550 AD until 1750 AD.
http://volker-doormann.org/images/ghi_6_lockwood_1.gif
There is a remarkable coherence visible between the reconstructed temperature function in time of A. Moberg et al. and A. Mangini et al. and a simple summation of solar tide functions of the couples from Jupiter outside fits mostly well in the time function.
It can be seen that in the time of no Sun spots, there is still a dynamic in the temperature function working, and these oscillations can be shown all in geometry with solar tides functions.
Maybe in this phase the internal solar oscillator of 1/11.196 years^-1 is free from tide like effects; before the first exact nip tide and after the second (in this graph) Sun spots occur with its nature of phase shifting like today (relaxing).
The similar time coherent function of d14C and d18O high frequency data suggest that these temperature anomalies or heat currents are well based on a periodic physical process. If there is a correlation between solar tide like functions and terrestrial climate, then there is a real connection.
A so called Maunder Minimum MM is not a physical observable. The Sun has its own oscillator, but the hole Sun is in harmony with its planets and must move around the barycenter in respect to the planets.
The point is to show a scientific connection. Sun spot counting for centuries hasn’t give answers about the nature of the terrestrial climate.
V.
Ulric Lyons says:
December 3, 2011 at 10:30 am
The last 40+yrs of your red curve looks nothing like the observations
The parameter that influences the Earth is the product of the magnetic field strength B and the solar wind V speed squared. If one only [incorrectly] plots the speed, the reconstruction matches very well even on a time scale of 27-days. But the ENSO is still a longer-term phenomenon “El Niño is defined by prolonged differences in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures when compared with the average value. The accepted definition is a warming or cooling of at least 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) averaged over the east-central tropical Pacific Ocean. Typically, this anomaly happens at irregular intervals of 2–7 years and lasts nine months to two years” [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o-Southern_Oscillation ] so, it is silly to fret about the short-term variations on the scale of one month [or 27 days].