The sun is still in a funk: sunspot numbers are dropping when they should be rising

@Peter Miller says:
March 2, 2012 at 2:17 am
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If at the end of the day, it turns out that climate change is driven primarily by natural variations and that CO2 has little if any driving force, I do not see that scientists will be able to hide behind the sun, and claim that it was not foreseeable that the sun could have any significant input in driving climate variations. A claim of how were they to know, to the layman does not sound compelling.
The reason why at the end game, there will be a blame game is due to the stance that politicians took to address the cAGW threat. When the end game pans out, citizens in the West are going to wake up in a very different world. The price paid will be stark to the citizens of the West and regrettably it will be a price that will be paid for decades to come. It is already too late to roll back the clock and unpick the damage done.
The politicians will have left the West significantly de-industrialised and with high energy costs pushing millions to the brink of fuel poverty. The high energy costs will leave whatever small amount of industry that is left in the West at a significant competitive disadvantage. This will result in long term unemployment issues. Politically, the balance of power which was anyway shifting from the West to China has been greatly hastened and widened. There will be the USA and the BRICS. The UK and Europe will be demoted to sweeping the crumbs dropped from the high table and the USA will find itself marginalised since initially the BRICS collectively but then later China alone will run the show.
Given this backdrop, the citizens of the West will demand answers. It will not be a pretty sight, since the political response was so obviously devoid of merit (it should have been limited adaption only as and when absolutely necessary with no wasteful attempts at mitigation) and the science, when viewed with the benefit of hindsight as will inevitably be the case when judging past events, will appear so flakey and devoid of rigorous scrutiny that severe damage will have been done to science generally and the reputation of scientists. The media because of its own complicity in this affair will attempt to keep a lid on matters but given the diminishing importance of MSM, that will ultimately prove unsuccessful.

One downblip doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to end up with a lower max; previous cycles have similar downstrokes at similar phases. What’s definitely clear from the graph is that cycle 24 is slower and later than previous cycles.

What scares me most, is that mankind can deal with a little bit of global warming (mostly beneficial, increased rainfall and new crop growing areas), but it will be very difficult to deal with some global cooling (mostly harmful, reduced rainfall and reduced crop growing areas).
Damn skippy.
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There are several other cycles that had huge up and down swings like this. This is not that abnormal.

SC24 has peaked. You heard it here first.

It looks like it is following Leif’s prediction pretty well:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png

If total energy is the sum of sunspots plus some factor times squared mag field, the sun ihas been in a real slump for the past decade!
(In a harmonic oscillator like a weight bouncing on the end of a spring, total energy is the sum of potential energy (determined by position of the weight) and kinetic energy (from the velocity of the weight). Here sunspot numbers – or their square root times an unobserved sign – and mag field seem to be playing these two sinusoidal roles.)

So, the alarmists were right, after all … in the 70’s, when they were calling for the next ice age. They should have stuck with their original story. A lesson all crooks and grifters eventually learn the hard way.
d(^_^)b
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”

Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago…………….

Being in Northern Vermont, I was cheering on the gradual warming of our hemisphere, but I’ll adapt to whatever comes along. Dr. Jerry Pournelle has been a rational and reasoned skeptic for many years and has recently taken up the topic again with his readers.
His questions and assertions are worth reading at Chaos Manor.

Has anyone looked at monthly Sun Spot Numbers for November and December and compared them with minimum temperatures for the following months January and February?
There is a good match between minimum Sun Spot Numbers and minimum NH temperatures going right back through the data records.
Sun spot numbers are matching individual temperature records from the northern hemisphere during winters, I would guess that the input from the sun was driving temperatures.
Did someone really say that the Sun has no effect on the Earth? it sounds to me like they may have been took out of context, because I don’t believe someone could make such an idiotic comment and actually mean what it infers.