Current solar cycle data seems to be past the peak

pkatt says:
April 10, 2013 at 6:09 pm
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.. it may just be a duck.
But that is the problem: it does not. Many people believe it limbs along like a duck, but it doesn’t when you look a bit more closely. Check the exchanges with tumetuestumefaisdubien1 upthread.

Many people were saying back in around 2009 on Fox News that we were heading towards cooler climate… all while the overzealous AGW proponents were sure it was worse than we expected. I am excited at the notion that cooling or lack of warming may continue for some years to come. I’d rather suffer from whatever nature brings us (cooler climate) than be plagued by the control of liars claiming science as a political weapon to destroy our prosperity now. It has done nothing but transfer our wealth to those liars at the expense mostly of the poorest people. I will be OK, as I’ve saved for a rainy day and live below my means.
The needless suffering of the poor by the left wing politicians who will be in power because the poor believe left wing politicians have their best interests in mind is a self fulfilling prophecy it seems.

tumetuestumefaisdubien1 says:
April 10, 2013 at 9:44 pm
“The average length is 11.1 years”
The average solar cycle length for the period of the SC1-23 is 11.03 years
And for all known cycles the last 400 years it is 11.07 i.e. 11.1 to one decimal place.

In reply to
lsvalgaard says:
April 11, 2013 at 12:39 am
Mario Lento says:
April 10, 2013 at 9:48 pm
One thing I’ve not heard in the cosmic ray argument is that it seems most pronounced when we are within one of the spiral legs of our galaxy. When we are in between those spirals, there is much less cosmic activity that can reach us when the sun goes quiet.
Not so, read http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.7314.pdf
Is this the Overholt you are referring to?
TESTING THE LINK BETWEEN TERRESTRIAL CLIMATE CHANGE AND GALACTIC SPIRAL ARM TRANSIT BY Andrew Carl Overholt, Submitted to the graduate degree program in Physics and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master’s of Science.
It should be noted that Shaviv measured the magnitude of the change in GCR and the timing of the change in GCR by analyzing meteoroid fragments. (i.e. There is analytical data to support his assertion.) As we cannot directly observe the Milky Way the models of the Milky Way are theoretical. An expert on galaxy structure which Overholt is not, stated that Shaviv’s assumptions are reasonable and that our knowledge of the Milky Way is not sufficient to prove or disprove Shaviv’s assumptions. It should be noted that Shaviv’s meteoroid analysis showed that the long period increases in GCR correlated with the timing of the ice ages.
It should be noted that Shaviv’s hypothesis (A hypothesis that resolves other paradoxes, is support for assertion that the hypothesis is valid) explains why there are periods during the Ice Epoches of 10s of millions of years when the planet is cold (ice sheets) and atmospheric CO2 is high and periods. There are also periods of millions of years when atmospheric CO2 is low and the planet is very warm.
Again, the paper you link does not disprove the sun-climate hypothesis, it states it is unlikely for GCR to increase as much as Nir Shaviv stated, however, Shaviv’s assumption is consistent with published work, with textbooks, and with his meteoroid analysis.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0209252
Shaviv’s hypothesis also helps to explain the faint sun paradox.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0306477.pdf
The paper you linked has a second logical point, it states that planetary temperature does not correlate with GCR, 2009, which is correct. It did however prior 1993 and did for a period of 20 years. If the paper you linked to was interested in solving a scientific problem, they would have noted the 20 years of correlation and then noted the correlation suddenly breaks in the 1990’s.
It should be noted that the assertion that planetary temperature changes correlate with the solar magnetic cycle is not new. The solar observer Herschel noted that the price of wheat correlated with the solar magnetic cycle. The assertion that planetary temperature changes correlate with the solar cycle is not contested. The question is what is causing the observation?
What changed post 1993 and what changed in solar cycle 24? What is the physical reason for what is observed?
First question did the sun change. Yes.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JA014342.shtml
If the Sun is so quiet, why is the Earth ringing? A comparison of two solar minimum intervals.
Observations from the recent Whole Heliosphere Interval (WHI) solar minimum campaign are compared to last cycle’s Whole Sun Month (WSM) to demonstrate that sunspot numbers, while providing a good measure of solar activity, do not provide sufficient information to gauge solar and heliospheric magnetic complexity and its effect at the Earth. The present solar minimum is exceptionally quiet, with sunspot numbers at their lowest in 75 years and solar wind magnetic field strength lower than ever observed. Despite, or perhaps because of, a global weakness in the heliospheric magnetic field, large near-equatorial coronal holes lingered even as the sunspots disappeared. Consequently, for the months surrounding the WHI campaign, strong, long, and recurring high-speed streams in the solar wind intercepted the Earth in contrast to the weaker and more sporadic streams that occurred around the time of last cycle’s WSM campaign.
The paper you linked to states that a lack of correlation post 1993 proves GCR levels do not modulate planetary cloud cover which is not correct. There are two different additional mechanisms involved. The first mechanism is solar wind bursts. Solar wind bursts create a space charge differential in the ionosphere which removes ions. Now even though GCR is high, if the solar wind bursts occur they remove the cloud forming ions and make it appear that planetary clouds are not modulate by GCR levels. See Palle’s paper. (See figure 2. Note low level clouds are reduced by minus 0.065% per year, starting in about 1993.)
http://solar.njit.edu/preprints/palle1264.pdf
Fig. 2 shows the global annual averages of GCR induced ionization in the atmosphere and low cloud amounts for the period July 1983–June 2000 (ionization data is only updated to December 2000). A quick look at the data reveals the good agreement between those two quantities from 1983 to 1994, however, from 1995 to 2000 the correspondence breaks. … ….However, it is worth mentioning that the new release of ISCCP data covers precisely the period 1995 onward, and increasing the mean level of the new data by only +1% would return the correlation coefficient to 0.89 (99.9% significance level). Some authors have suggested that the new (post-1994) ISCCP data may have a calibration error (Marsh and Svensmark, 2003), however, no such error has been reported by the ISCCP team so far. (William: Palle’s paper goes not to develop an explanation for what is observed. The explanation is that solar wind bursts are removing cloud forming ions. Palle’s paper also notes there is symmetry of the cloud observations North/South hemisphere which supports the assertion that cloud measurement is real and not a measurement problem.)
The second process, considered by Tinsley and Yu (2003), namely electroscavenging, depends on the action of the global electrical circuit (see review by Rycroft et al. (2000)). The transport of charge by rapidly rising convective currents in the tropics and over continental land masses leads to an approx. 200 kV positive charge of the ionosphere compared to Earth. This large voltage difference, in turn, necessitates a return current which must pass through the regions of the atmosphere where clouds are formed.
Thus the electroscavenging process can explain several of the most striking features of Fig. 5, namely: (1) the peak in significant positive correlations at latitudes around 50 degrees North and South (Fig. 5a); (2) the tendency for a less significant but nonetheless evident trend to negative correlation coefficients at low latitudes (Fig. 5a); and (3) the location of the peak in correlation over one of the principal oceans, namely over the North and South Atlantic (Fig. 5c). (William: What Palle is noting the regions where there is a change in cloud cover is the regions where the electroscavenging process is predicted to be strongest.)
http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/pdf/Atmos_060302.pdf
Atmospheric Ionization and Clouds as Links Between Solar Activity and Climate
5. The Global Electric Circuit and Electroscavenging
5a. Modulation of Jz in the global circuit.
The global electric circuit was illustrated pictorially in Figure 3.1, and a schematic circuit diagram is given in Figure 5.1. General properties of the circuit have been reviewed by Bering et al. [1998[. Earlier comprehensive reviews have been given by NAS [1986] and Israël [1973]. The polar potential pattern is superimposed on the thunderstorm-generated potentials. In a given high latitude region the overhead ionospheric potential, Vi is the sum of the thunderstorm-generated potential and the superimposed magnetosphere-ionosphere generated potential for that geomagnetic latitude and geomagnetic local time. During magnetic storms the changes in Vi from the mean can be as high as 30% within regions extending up to 30ｰof latitude out from the geomagnetic poles [Tinsley et al.1998]. As indicated in Figure 5.1, horizontal potential differences of order 100 kV are generated, high on the dawn side and low on the dusk side, producing corresponding changes in Vi and Jz. The dawn-dusk potential difference has a strong dependency on the product of the solar wind velocity, vsw, and the Bz(GSM) north-south solar wind magnetic field component [Boyle et al., 1997].
You link to a paper that stated it is difficult to measure planetary cloud cover. It should be noted that during the period of warming, there is a reduction in planetary clouds, indirectly inferred as there is a reduction in short wave radiation reflected off into space.
Also it should be noted that Palle observed the change reflected radiation by studying brightness changes in the moon. Palle’s moonshine paper results support his satellite data paper results. The problem is not Palle’s analysis or the data Palle used for the analysis, the problem is Palle’s results indicate a majority of the 20th century warming was caused by planetary cloud cover changes not increases in atmospheric CO2.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.org/5/1721/2005/acp-5-1721-2005.html
Analysis of the decrease in the tropical mean outgoing shortwave radiation at the top of atmosphere for the period 1984–2000 All cloud types show a linearly decreasing trend over the study period, with the low-level clouds having the largest trend, equal to −3.9±0.3% in absolute values or −9.9±0.8% per decade in relative terms. Of course, there are still some uncertainties, since the changes in low-level clouds derived from the ISCCP-D2 data, are not necessarily consistent with changes derived from the second Stratospheric Aerosols and Gas Experiment (SAGE II, Wang et al., 2002) and synoptic observations (Norris, 1999). Nevertheless, note that SAGE II tropical clouds refer to uppermost opaque clouds (with vertical optical depth greater than 0.025 at 1.02μm), while the aforementioned synoptic cloud observations are taken over oceans only. The midlevel clouds decreased by 1.4±0.2% in absolute values or by 6.6±0.8% per decade in relative terms, while the high-level ones also decreased by 1.2±0.4% or 3±0.9% per decade in relative terms, i.e. less than low and middle clouds. Thus, the VIS/IR mean tropical (30_ S–30_ N) low-level clouds are found to have undergone the greatest decrease during the period 1984–2000, in agreement with the findings of Chen et al. (2002) and Lin et al. (2004).