Astronomers: World may be entering period of global cooling

There may be a simple reason the Japanese have overblown their press release. If you don’t get noticed, you don’t get grant money. If your finding is not big enough to be noticed, the money will go to someone with a sexier finding. We often see this in paleontology, if you discover what you claim is an ancient fossil (a few fragments of bone connected with a lot of imagination), you often see claims that it is older than that other guys fossil, the guy with the oldest fossil wins.

SEIJI TANAKA/ Staff Writer for the Asahi Shimbun said:
The sun may be entering a period of reduced activity that could result in lower temperatures on Earth, according to Japanese researchers.
Officials of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Riken research foundation said on April 19 that the activity of sunspots appeared to resemble a 70-year period in the 17th century in which London’s Thames froze over and cherry blossoms bloomed later than usual in Kyoto.
In that era, known as the Maunder Minimum, temperatures are estimated to have been about 2.5 degrees lower than in the second half of the 20th century.
The Japanese study found that the trend of current sunspot activity is similar to records from that period.

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In the newspaper article I did not see any specific cite or link to any specifically named scientists involved in the Japanese ‘study’ nor to any specific paper or study.
Does anyone have the names of the Japanese scientists or papers/studies that support the Asahi Shimbun article?
John

Paul Westhaver says:
April 21, 2012 at 12:37 pm
It is difficult to get a historical record of terrestrial field vectors since they can only be recorded as minerals pass through their curie temperatures as they cool. That happens in volcanicly active locations. With out that record, it is impssible to correlate historical temperature data to pole reversal data or intensity data.
We have a better record of the magnetic field than of temperature. Without the latter it is impossible to correlate…
Legatus says:
April 21, 2012 at 12:42 pm
It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity
And what would those old ideas be?
Further analysis may yet reveal the underlying trigger”
It takes a lot of clues to even be able to pose that question.
u.k.(us) says:
April 21, 2012 at 12:44 pm
@ur momisugly Leif, What is with the paired-up sunspots on the Earth facing solar disk, seems to be an unusual lay-out to my untrained eye ?
The untrained eye is very good at finding patterns where there is none. This is a simple consequence of evolution: “is that a tiger in the grass? better run away”. 99% of the time that is a false positive, but it pays to run away in any case.

John Whitman says:
April 21, 2012 at 1:07 pm
In the newspaper article I did not see any specific cite or link to any specifically named scientists involved in the Japanese ‘study’ nor to any specific paper or study.
Tsuneta at NAOJ and Shiota at Riken

DocMartyn says:
April 21, 2012 at 1:22 pm
Leif, what do you think of measuring the magnetic properties of tree rings, as a proxy for magnetic fields during deposition?
If it works in general it might be yet another weapon in the arsenal. It is a bit bothersome that “the remanent component in this tree may be thermal in origin and was controlled by local thermal condition” making it a bit hard to disentangle thermal and magnetic effects.

vukcevic says:
April 21, 2012 at 1:53 pm
There are 3 graphs there showing various correlations, could you be more specific, so I can identify data for you to plot graphs for yourself.
All of them are spurious. ‘spurious’ here means with no physical connection, just selective wiggle matching.

vukcevic says:
April 21, 2012 at 2:07 pm
I was expecting more specific reply
Number 1 is spurious
Number 2 is spurious
Number 3 is spurious

eric1skeptic says:
April 21, 2012 at 2:45 pm
While #2 and #3 do not appear to be correlated, it looks like #1 is correlated, but also that the “Arctic geomagnetic field” and the solar cycle ought to be correlated.
Look correlated is not the same as is causally related. In fact, they cannot be such for several reasons: e.g. 1) The geomagnetic field is generated deep in the core and solar activity does not penetrate that deep, 2) going back in time, the geomagnetic field was much stronger [like double], but solar activity was not.
This nonsense is a sad comment on the general state of scientific literacy. In addition, Vuk has been shown this several time, but is learning resistant, and never misses a chance to hijack a thread peddling his personal pet theory.

Steve from Rockwood says:
April 21, 2012 at 3:05 pm
Now that was funny. Leif, I know almost nothing about the sun. Can you provide a link so that some of us can get up to speed? Specifically the poles, the changes of the poles and its influence on climate if any. Thanks.
Not sure which poles you mean, but assuming you mean the solar poles, here is a short run-down:
Sunspots are magnetic. When they decay, their magnetic field does not completely disappear. Instead, the field remnants are carried by a circulation of matter from the equator to the poles [somewhat similar to the Hadley cells in the Earth’s atmosphere]. There they concentrate and collect [can’t get further up in latitude] and become measurable by our instruments on Earth [the ‘polar fields’]. The circulation now caries the field into the sun; it is also possible that some of the field sinks on its way to the poles. In any event, the field continues with the circulation and is now amplified by something called a ‘dynamo’ process. The dynamo is a form of induction: a magnetic field moved in a conductor [the solar matter] induces an electric current that creates its own magnetic field, which is turn induces more current and more field, and so on. In this way the weak polar fields become amplified a thousand times. Such a strong magnetic field has a pressure of its own which means that to maintain pressure equilibrium, less hot matter is needed, so a ‘parcel’ of the sun with a strong field has less matter, is less dense, and is thus buoyant and rises [in a few weeks] to the surface. On its way up, the field is shredded by the roiling convection into many ‘strands’ that when arriving at the surface as a lot of small field elements again assemble into the sunspots we see, and the whole process repeats.
Only a very small part of the total magnetic flux [perhaps 1/100th of the total] survives the trip to the poles, so the field up there is much weaker than in a sunspot [like 300 times weaker]. This means that the magnetic field [which normally traps matter in the lower atmosphere [the beautiful loops you see in images from SDO] is not strong enough to prevent the super hot atmosphere to escape the sun. The result is that the polar fields are dragged out with the escaping wind and forms the magnetic field in interplanetary space [the Heliosphere]. That magnetic field is by wind speed differences and solar rotation compacted into tangled shocks which turns away a small fraction [some 10%] of the cosmic rays that comes to us from the Galaxy [generated in supernova explosions].
The magnetic fields on the surface cause a slight brightening and thus a very small variation [1 in 1000] of the solar output of heat and light. That variation in turn causes a variation of the Earth’s temperature of about 0.1 degree over the solar cycle of varying sunspots. This variation is too small to affect the climate, so many people invent creative ‘feed backs’, ‘triggers’, and other fanciful mechanism to help the sun modulate our climate to their satisfaction.

Legatus says:
April 21, 2012 at 12:30 pm
There is really only one way to tell for sure what the sun will do in the future, and that is, wait and see. Currently, people keep making predictions of what the sun will do or not do, and then it does something else….
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Predictions are part of doing science. If we think we understand something ( form a hypothesis) we use that understanding to predict the future. If the prediction does not come true then our hypothesis has been falsified. Lief, based on his knowledge of solar physics, predicted cycle 24 would be a weak cycle. So far he has been correct. Hathaway (NASA) did not do nearly as well. http://i55.tinypic.com/2dj2fc9.jpg
WUWT on the subject back in 2008: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/20/new-solar-cycle-24-goalpost-established/