November Solar Activity Report – sunspots and 10.7cm radio flux up, but the solar magnetic Ap index crashes

William McClenney says:
December 6, 2011 at 8:30 pm

Holocene temperatures started an overall downtrend about 2000 years ago. The medieval warm period was not as warm as the Roman warm period. The Roman warm period was not as warm as the Minoan warm period. The current warm period has not yet been as warm as the medieval warm period. Each warm period is a little cooler than the previous. Each intervening cold period has been a little cooler than the previous with the LIA being a doozy, the coldest period of the Holocene since the Younger Dryas. I would say that the Holocene began ending about 2000 years ago.
I am guessing that the very quick slip into glaciation has to do with the oceans or cloud cover. To slip into glaciation in a period of only a fraction of a century … well within the lifetime of a human being … means something had to reach a very dramatic “tipping” point from which it was impossible to recover. The coming out of these ice ages is extremely fast as well, faster than the going into them. Most of the warming out of the Younger Dryas happened in a single decade. Places that had been tundra were suddenly temperate savannah and then seedling forest in the span of one human’s lifetime.
People have no idea of the scale of thing nature can dish out (or absorb). I’ll tell you what this looks like to me: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg
It looks to me like two frequencies beating against each other that are very close but not exactly the same. So imagine we have a 100K orbital dynamics cycle here with earth and imagine the sun also has a 100K cycle (say active for 10K years on average, quiet for roughly 90K years). But imagine the two are not exactly the same period. They are close, but not quite. Now imagine that one or the other cycle has a little drift … it is slowly changing. Ever “zero beat” a carrier with a radio? As you begin to drift onto the frequency you hear a faint high pitch and as you get closer the frequency drops and becomes stronger. That graph reminds me of that. The frequency of the oscillation is becoming lower but greater in amplitude. If this is what is happening the frequency will shift again, to an even lower frequency with an even more pronounced extreme difference until the cycles line up perfectly in either a very long, very warm period or a very long, very cold period and only very slowly flip a few times between extremely cold and extremely warm, then begin to increase a bit a the drift continues and they lose sync.
I am not putting forth a hypothesis of what I think is happening, only giving a cartoon picture of what that signal reminds me of. It reminds me of what one might see on an oscilloscope measuring the audio as they zero beat one frequency with another. It looks to me like two signals of slightly different frequency where one is drifting toward the other and we are looking at the result.

I often look at the SOHO sun pictures and note the apparent size of spots is very much smaller than sunspots on the previous peak yet they assign the same number value. Is there an archive of actual pictures, not graphics, of sunpots at different cycles?

M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 7, 2011 at 12:28 am
Polar fields not only are not reversing but for the last 12 months have been heading in the wrong direction:

Looks to me like it is doing the same thing now it did in 2008 according to this picture:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PF-latest.gif

@crosspatch says:
December 6, 2011 at 11:26 pm
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Crosspatch
You have to bear in mind that the average temperature of the ocean is about 4 deg Cs. This relatively low temperature comes back to bite relatively quickly if for example there is more cloud cover reducing the solar radiance inputted into the tropiclcal oceans.
It is important to bear in mind that after about 4.5 billion years of solar input, this has only managed to heat the oceans to an average temperature of about 4 deg C and it is because of this that in the geological past ice ages seem to dominate past history, If the average ocean temperature was say 15 degs, I would suggest that ice ages extending over a large area of the land mass would be very rare since ocean temperatures would tend to a;ways keep warm winds circulating.
I consider that there are strong arguments that suggest that it is not correct to consider that the Earth is 33degC warmer with its atmosphere/GHGs than would be the case if GHGs were removed. These arguments would sugggest that some weighting should be given to reflect that the average ocean temperature is only about 4 degC . In other words, these arguments suggest that we should review the average temperature of the Earth over a period of say a billion years and it is this average temperature against which comparisons should be made noyt against its present average temperature which present temperature is no more than a blip in the context of geological time..

“Shocked Scientists Ask: Is The Sun Is Dying?”
I’ve read many articles about changes in solar activity, including emissions of a newly discovered particle that alters radioactive decay on Earth. But, seldom have I seen such overhyped, sensationalistic writing about scientific subjects–except, of course, for climate science.

So the sun is behaving strange, maybe that is the reason fot the extreme temperatures in Europe?
No snow in the alps untill December 5: too hot,
Almost no snow in Scandinavia, too hot
Autumn never hotter than in 2011 in northern Sweden and northern Norway + series of station records.
Extreme late snow in Sweden in November, up to 25th all stations without snow, never occurred before.
2nd warmest November in UK.
More counties in Europe will follow publicing about the hot autumn and hot November.
Of course this has nothing to do with greenhouse gases.
The map with average temperatures in Sweden:
http://www.smhi.se/polopoly_fs/1.19037!image/1111temperaturavvikelse.png_gen/derivatives/fullSizeImage/1111temperaturavvikelse.png

“It is important to bear in mind that after about 4.5 billion years of solar input, this has only managed to heat the oceans to an average temperature of about 4 deg C and it is because of this that in the geological past ice ages seem to dominate past history, If the average ocean temperature was say 15 degs, I would suggest that ice ages extending over a large area of the land mass would be very rare since ocean temperatures would tend to a;ways keep warm winds circulating.”
Yes, but… Water attains its greatest density at 4C. The ocean is clearly first order stratified by density. With large portions of the northern and southern oceans spending large amounts of the year at temperatures at or lower than 4C, there is a constant replenishment (and the complex “conveyer belt” associated with both thermal density and salinity that appears to drive both oceanic currents and heat transport). The time required for the ocean to just come into “equilibrium” in a uniform environment is order of 1000 years, and the environment itself is not stationary over that kind of time frame.
If water attained its greatest density at 0C, the oceans would freeze from the bottom up, not the top down (coldest water, greatest pressure, on the bottom). The Earth would be a big ball of ice. Because it stratifies with the warmest water on top and the depths UNfrozen, and freezes only on the surface (where it does freeze), heat transport never shuts down, the annual temperature variations are limited to around 1 km from the surface, and 90% of the ocean remains very cold, wrapped as it were in insulation from upwelling geothermal heat below and relatively untouched by surface warming.
I suspect that the ocean is very susceptible to negative feedback cooling. Even modest increases in Arctic and Antarctic ice strongly increase the albedo and prevent the active delivery of solar energy into the region above the thermocline. Combatting that is active transport of heat, but the Younger Dryas suggests that any century-scale interruption of the transport can kick us back to millennium-scale cooling even when all other factors favor interglacial warmth.
This is indeed one of the 800 pound gorillas that CAGW folks don’t want to even think about. We do not know all of the factors that regulate global climate, however much they wish to pretend that we do. The Earth is almost certainly possesses multiple locally stable attractors and is capable of what amount to first order phase transitions between them, periods where things relatively suddenly swing from one phase to the other, and such fluctuations can even occur when the strict statistical mechanics favor the other attractor(s). The most important climate catastrophe we can foresee, the one we should be most worried about, is the end of the Holocene. Lacking an explanatory model capable of explaining T_avg for the last (say) 5 million years or hell, the last 15,000 years, one is stuck with numerology, which suggests that the chances that we are within 1000 years of the end of the Holocene are well over 50% at this point (order of 80-90% based on maximum ignorance). This, in turn, suggests that there is very likely a gradually emerging cold phase attractor, and the warm phase system is increasingly unstable with respect to it.
The relatively rapid emergence of a cold phase (beginning of the next ice age) would probably kill several billion people in depressingly short order. CAGW enthusiasts are asserting that there is yet a third locally stable attractor, one with T_avg some 3-10C warmer (where the latter is really highly speculative and rather unlikely based on the 5 MY temperature record). The transition to that attractor might well kill people as well, but probably not kill billions of people quickly (barring that 10C extreme). What it might also do is stabilize temperatures and reduce our vulnerability a cold phase transition.
rgb

I was wondering, not to get off topic, but does anybody think this drop in the Ap Index will allow for this incredulous regime of the current + Arctic Oscillation associated with the near record low 30-70 mb stratospheric temperatures to finally start waning? I believe Scorle covered the implications of this +AO regime, Late Snows/warm Temps in Mid Latitudes except maybe siberia / recently the U.S. West Coast/Upper Plains. Chicago is going to be in the top 5 latest accumulating snows ever as well, I believe. Will the rubber band snap back?

too funny!