Astronomers: World may be entering period of global cooling

Leif Svalgaard says:
April 22, 2012 at 12:24 pm
Leif, Thanks for the feedback and the links, I hope to get up to speed on your own research over the coming weeks on this area, I thought this was an active area of research and I’m happy to hear that it is, I consider it to be one of the most important and interesting.
Vuckevic, thanks very interesting, I think the solar related discussion here at WUWT has been progressing quite well thanks to yourself and Dr. Svalgaard and many other contributors as well, at my level (which is still pretty advanced) I don’t feel that I can as yet make any definitive conclusions so most of my time is generally spent understanding all the who, what, where and when of it all. And the contrasting ideas and points being made are invaluable in achieving this.
So keep up the good work, it is appreciated!

In Galileo parlence..
Yet it oscillates nevertheless.

Roger says:
April 22, 2012 at 7:41 am
“Pyers Corbyn probably knows more about the sun than most here (with David Archibald), in relation to future solar activity and weather because they have been correct most of the time. ie Hathaway forecast SSN 170 in 2006, versus 40-50 by Archibald.”
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 22, 2012 at 9:39 am
“So far both Hathaway [his old prediction] and Archibald have been wrong. The past year the SSN has averaged 60 and there is more to come [hasn’t quite peaked yet]. Corbyn predicts very strong tornado conditions in the US next week. Let’s see how that goes.”
Just a reminder that, if I recall correctly, Dr S predicted SSN 72. If we haven”t quite peaked yet, it looks like he is the only one right on the money.

Do I detect a note of “the yellow peril” in the solar establishment response to this Japanese research?

That is not how it works. The magnetic field structure in interplanetary space is determined by the plasma flow close to the sun [a couple of solar radii] and it from there carried out by the solar wind. At the Earth the magnetic field varies by about a factor of two only and the field right now is about average. The various torques have been calculated decades ago and are extremely weak and ineffectual.
Yeah, I thought maybe I should actually go learn how it works by reading some real papers/work on the subject instead of a mix of thinking out loud. I found a dated but free work on Google Books here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=tUQrAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
It appears to be well worth reading, although sadly very little appears to have changed in the solar climate debate per se over the last 30 years. In it the complexity of the magnetic field is explained, which is far greater than a mere “quadrupole” even during transition. One does wonder if there exists a time dependent decomposition of its multipolar moments throughout a solar cycle somewhere. Ah, ask of Google and ye shall be satisfied, I see:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w5460752vh560gn7/
(THE VARYING MULTIPOLAR STRUCTURE OF THE SUN’S
MAGNETIC FIELD AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOLAR
MAGNETOSPHERE THROUGH THE SOLAR CYCLE, by S. BRAVO, G. A. STEWART and X. BLANCO-CANO, or Bravo, S. (1998). Solar physics (0038-0938), 179 (2), p. 223.)
Sadly, the article/book appears to be paywalled, and I’m waiting for the Duke proxy server to apply its magic keys to open the magic door.
Two things that are very interesting in the Solar Variability book (that includes extensive citations of a certain L. Svalgaard, so you know it has to be the real deal:-) are a) The MWP and LIA still are featured in the climate record, as is the dip from the 40s through the early 80s. Amazing what unbiased straight up analysis of the climate record produces when people have no particular hypothesis they wish desperately to see confirmed. and b) “CO_2” as a word only appears a handful of times — 2 or 3 — in the entire book.
Ah, the Bravo article finally came through and it does look like a lovely paper that is just what I was curious about. The paper is 1997, so it is a BIT dated — it would be interesting to see what the multipoles are doing now, that is, to see its figures brought up to date. I did find this: helios.izmiran.rssi.ru/hellab/Obridko/370.pdf (not paywalled) but it doesn’t present the multipolar decomposition itself.
For those who are interested but have no idea what a multipole is: electric and magnetic fields produced by a source with compact support — basically within a ball of finite radius — can be formally expanded in a “multipolar basis”, a series that consists of a monopolar moment (present only for the electric field), a dipole moment, a quadrupole moment, and so on. Because the field of multipoles drops off with radial distance by one over a power of r that increases with the multipolar moment, one expects the “far field” (for r large compared to the dimensions of the source) to be dominated by terms that are important in this order. However, the terms also have a lot of physical meaning, and knowing the multipolar moments of a source often can give one significant insight into what’s going on in the source to produce the fields. At the very least, it gives one a constraint on model explanations — the model has to be able to get the multipolar amplitudes approximately right.
What the Bravo group showed was that at the Sun’s surface the dipole moment is never dominant. Indeed, high order multipoles are completely dominant there — they only present but in this limited series is dominant which suggests that the surface is far more complex and probably gets major contributions in all the high order multipoles down to some very fine surface granularity. This makes some measure of sense — it means that at the surface, surface “feature” magnetism completely dominates the local field, with any large scale field produced in the interior being much less important, much as the magnetic field right next to a running electric motor might well “erase” one’s ability to see the Earth’s basic magnetic dipole field. However, even there there is a distinct oscillation between the dipole and quadrupole moment, which we can interpret as the switching of the poles — during the actual transition quadrupole moment dominates dipole, at the peaks dipole dominates quadrupole. Which makes sense.
This is a “near field” result, where one doesn’t expect the field to be dominant in multipole order, but as one gets farther away and the field transitions into a far field form, the dipole reasserts itself as the major contribution. Far from the sun, even at transition the dipole field dominates the far field. The quadrupole and higher odd multipoles appear to countervary and peak at that time, but their field strength far from the Sun is rather small compared to the dipole field and constitutes a weak perturbation. Finally, the dominance of the dipole moment even during transition in the far field suggests that the magnitude dipole moment never vanishes — its gets smaller, but does not go away. Since it starts out pointing “north” and ends up pointing “south” (so to speak) its component along this axis does vanish, but its perpendicular component does not — the magnetic pole actually tilts continuously from North down to South, shrinking in magnitude as it does so to be sure but never quite going away. Bravo shows a lovely plot of an “equatorial angle” as a function of time for two solar cycles that indicates that the angle is fairly stable North, fairly stable South, and during the transition switches fairly rapidly between the two, which makes a great deal of sense given that the system has a broken symmetry (the axis of physical rotation) that “locks” the direction of North and South.
I still have a rather huge number of questions, of course. First of all, there are multipoles and there are multipoles. If one looks at my online book on electrodynamics:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Class/Electrodynamics.php
I devote an entire chapter to multipoles — in some sense my dissertation was on multipolar expansions in quantum mechanics and I was fortunate enough to have been Larry Biedenharn’s graduate student and inherited his graduate E&M notes, which formed part of the basis for this chapter. It unfortunately looks rather like Bravo et. al. may have used a naive decomposition — in spherical harmonics, not in actual multipoles (e.g. vector spherical harmonics or Hansen multipoles) and if this is the case their multipolar moments are probably incorrectly mixed. This also prevents one from taking a hypothetical current sheet and doing the integrals against e.g. Hansen multipoles to obtain the proper time dependent E&M field associated with said sheets to compare to the observed moments. I would say there are a few Ph.D. dissertations left to be done in this regard (unless it has already been done) because fitting at least the first three or four lowest multipolar moments has to be a constraint on a model of the time evolution of the major interior currents, and there is no doubt some very interesting information to be extracted from the process that allows one’s model to match up the meso-scale features once the gross features are modelled well.
In any event, I am now much less impressed with the top article. To be honest, its pictures of dipoles and quadrupoles are misleading and useless for any purpose but gee-whiz or press release. Lief’s figure of the polar fields, however, is extremely interesting, although it would be a lot more interesting as something that went beyond polar fields on axis.
Here is a very simple observation. We can (apparently) measure or infer the solar magnetic field quite accurately at all points on the photosphere and perhaps beyond, in the far field. If one takes the far field, projects it onto a proper multipolar basis as the time dependent multipolar moments, then one can reconstruct the multipolar field less the surface noise back on the photosphere, just outside the source, in the near field zone. The far field automatically filters, in other words, selecting the gross features. It would also automatically give one the associated far field electric fields induced by the time varying magnetic multipoles, the Poynting vector, and more (although it would then by construction omit the highly local features associated with CMEs and other “discrete” or surface events, which would have to be studied and added back in by hand).
I think that this sort of decomposition would contain all sorts of useful information that is obscured in “just” polar fields. And I would guess that all of this is being done, in spite of the fact that I can’t google up a quick result on it (I’m not doing a proper literature search because I don’t have time and this is just a hobby, as it were, I have professional obligations I’m blowing off to some extent even as I post this). If it is not, however, it most definitely should be. A historical record of the Sun’s primary (properly evaluated) magnetic multipole moments will ultimately give us a retroactive look at the internal state of the sun once we have reliable and consistent information on how they are connected to the interior dynamo, and a solid knowledge of that state over enough cycles might give us the ability to predict its state at least modestly into the future. Dr. Svalgaard may well feel that we (or he) already has that ability based on this or other considerations and I certainly wouldn’t argue, but multipolar decompositions are useful in nearly all other treatments of electromagnetism and I cannot believe that they wouldn’t (or aren’t) similarly useful for the Sun.
rgb

I have been following the colding of the Bearing Sea and the Himalayan glaciers. They didn’t seem to know about the supposed warming of Earth. It appears that this half-hearted effort of the sun to covert poles could stop at both N & S spin axis being positive and the equatorial area sites of negative regions.
I only recently realized that the snap back of the magnetotail was offered as a source of high energy ‘cosmic’ photons in the face of rejection that cosmic rays from exploding nova hundreds of light years across not-empty space could be the source.
I would like to be made aware of a site that offers possible consequences –besides cold– of having negative poles at the equatorial region. May I suggest: since the aurora would then enter the equatorial region where most charge is emitted, that super storms such as the global weather that caused the Stupe valley civilization to site themselves in a valley with all their town BELOW the ringing valley walls. Below for protection from super wind and storms. Also it may well be that this ringed valley offered some protection from the massive electrical storms that roam the surface depleting electrical energy, not giving.

Russ Browne says:
April 28, 2012 at 11:23 pm
“There is not much we can add to the graph, so conclusions are quite obvious. To UNEP and IPPC uncomfort and displease, the cause and effect correlation between solar cycles and terrestrial temperatures is incontrovertible”.
Except that the correlation breaks down when you add recent data to the graph: long cycle and high temperature.
Economist Martin Armstrong and former Chair of the Foundation for the study of cycles, noted that just about every civilization in history rose and fell on a 300 year cycle, He thinks the 2012 Mayan date will be the start of much colder weather on Earth which will be driven by solar output. Comments?
Invoking the Mayan dates does not qualify as science.