From the GWPF and Dr. Benny Peiser
“Weakest Solar Cycle In Almost 200 Years”
The sun is acting bizarrely and scientists have no idea why. Solar activity is in gradual decline, a change from the norm which in the past triggered a 300-year-long mini ice age. We are supposed to be at a peak of activity, at solar maximum. The current situation, however, is outside the norm and the number of sunspots seems in steady decline. The sun was undergoing “bizarre behaviour” said Dr Craig DeForest of the society. “It is the smallest solar maximum we have seen in 100 years,” said Dr David Hathaway of Nasa. –Dick Ahlstrom, The Irish Times, 12 July 2013
The fall-off in sunspot activity still has the potential to affect our weather for the worse, Dr Elliott said. “It all points to perhaps another little ice age,” he said. “It seems likely we are going to enter a period of very low solar activity and could mean we are in for very cold winters.” And while the researchers in the US said the data showed a decline in activity, they had no way to predict what that might mean for the future. –Dick Ahlstrom, The Irish Times, 12 July 2013
“We’re in a new age of solar physics,” says David Hathaway of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, who analysed the same data and came to the same conclusion. “We don’t know why the Gleissberg cycle takes place but understanding it is now a focus.” As for when the next Maunder minimum may happen, DeToma will not even hazard a guess. “We still do not know how or why the Maunder minimum started, so we cannot predict the next one.” –Stuart Clark, New Scientist, 12 July 2013
Those hoping that the sun could save us from climate change look set for disappointment. The recent lapse in solar activity is not the beginning of a decades-long absence of sunspots – a dip that might have cooled the climate. Instead, it represents a shorter, less pronounced downturn that happens every century or so. –Stuart Clark, New Scientist, 12 July 2013
A number of authors think it is probable that the sun is headed for a grand minimum similar to the Maunder-Minimums of 1649-1715. That may already manifest itself in 2020. There have been studies that attempt to project the impacts on global temperatures. Included here is a study by Meehl et al. 2013. The authors look at an approximately 0.25% reduction in Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) between 2020 and 2070: They fed this into a climate model. Result: global temperatures could drop around 0.2-0.3 degrees Celsius with local peak values of up to 0.8°C, especially in the middle and upper latitudes of the northern hemispheres. –Frank Bosse, NoTricksZone, 14 July 2013
When the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show on the road. Global warming became climate change so as to be able to take the blame for cold spells and wet seasons as well as hot days. Then, to keep its options open, the movement began to talk about “extreme weather”. Those who made their living from alarm, and by then there were lots, switched tactics and began to jump on any unusual weather event, whether it was a storm, a drought, a blizzard or a flood, and blame it on man-made carbon dioxide emissions. –Matt Ridley, The Australian, 10 July 2013
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Dr Norman Page says:
July 15, 2013 at 4:13 pm
Schatten and Tobiska were the first to use the “M” word back in 2003:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003SPD….34.0603S
” The surprising result of these long-range predictions is a rapid decline in solar activity, starting with cycle #24. If this trend continues, we may see the Sun heading towards a “Maunder” type of solar activity minimum – an extensive period of reduced levels of solar activity.”
The reason many solar experts are predicting solar cycle #25 will be the start of another Grand Solar Minimum is that the Sun’s Umbral Magnetic Field (UMF-the force that holds sunspots together) has been crashing by about 50 gauss/yr and currently stand at about 2,000.
Penn and Livingston believe that when the UMF falls below 1,500 gauss, the magnetic field will become too weak for sunspots to form and that they’ll virtually disappear altogether as they did during the Maunder Minimum.
Isn’t it amazing that 20th Century warming took place during the strongest 63-yr string (1933-1996) of solar cycles in 11,400 years and that the global warming trend stopped the year after these strong solar cycles ended, despite 1/3rd of all manmade CO2 emissions since 1750 were emitted since 1996?
It’s almost as if solar cycles rather than CO2 controls the Earth’s climate. Imagine that….
We can’t explain why nature is diverging from our confident model forecasts, don’t fully understand long-term solar behavior, and can’t fully account for natural climate oscillations, but we’re absolutely certain that a little ice age is not imminent.
SAMURAI says:
July 15, 2013 at 5:07 pm
Isn’t it amazing that 20th Century warming took place during the strongest 63-yr string (1933-1996) of solar cycles in 11,400 years
Except that this ‘string’ was not the strongest in 11,400 years: http://www.leif.org/research/The%20long-term%20variation%20of%20solar%20activity.pdf
mesoman30 says:
July 15, 2013 at 5:07 pm
We can’t explain why nature is diverging from our confident model forecasts, don’t fully understand long-term solar behavior, and can’t fully account for natural climate oscillations, but we’re absolutely certain that a little ice age is not imminent.
No, you have that all wrong. Because of all the things you mention that we do not understand, we cannot claim that a little ice age is imminent.
Eco-Geek,
Here is an interesting paper about energy transfer between the Sun and the Earth by magnetic means: http://obsn3.on.br/sergio/artigos%20MT/electrical%20conductivity%20models%20of%20the%20crust%20and%20mantle.
DirkH says:
July 15, 2013 at 12:36 pm
I’d like to suggest another possibility, just for giggles: A real glaciation. (We have never left the Ice Age as there is ice at the poles. But we left the last glaciation.) At a certain point, something must trigger the flip into the glaciated stage. Imagine it happens in the next few years. How fast would it be? Allegedly it’s happening within a few years. And it’s overdue – we have no clue why the current warm time persists for so long.
Albedo rules the climate. Which in practice means clouds + snow/ice. Although the relationship between the two is somewhat complex and poorly understood, and differs substantially between the hemispheres.
Antarctic sea is currently 1.217 million sq km or 9% above the anomaly. That is a big albedo change.
An article on hemisphere climate differences during the Holocene, which indicates southern and northern hemispheres warm and cool in opposite phase. Ignore the AGW hand wringing.
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=190231
Antarctic sea ice is currently 1.217 million sq km or 9% above the anomaly.
“And while the researchers in the US said the data showed a decline in activity, they had no way to predict what that might mean for the future. –Dick Ahlstrom, The Irish Times, 12 July 2013”,
This is the result of using statistics [based on the past] to attempt to predict the future! Without a refined PHYSICAL model of the Sun, and of the Sun’s relationship to Earth’s temperature/climate, what else would one suspect?
I gave up Sunspots when I gave up toys. Now I only use 10.7cm Flux.
Remember, measure the area under the Flux curve over the ~11 year cycle to determine energy into the Earth System.
Flux > 130 -> temperature increases.
Flux 100 to 130 -> temperature constant.
Flux 70 to 100 -> temperature declines.
Eco-Geek,
Here is an interesting paper related to energy transfer by magnetic means between the Sun and the Earth: http://obsn3.on.br/sergio/artigos%20MT/electrical%20conductivity%20models%20of%20the%20crust%20and%20mantle.pdf
What IF we enter another Little Ice Age. What will Warmist climate scientists say? What will they blame? Co2? Cow fart methane? Soot? (see Hansen and Chinese coal despite earlier blaming soot for most of the global warming up to 2000). Rest assured they HAVE TO blame man. If they fail on co2 as the main driver of climate, they will slowly shift gear (thinking no one is looking) and try some other con job. Don’t fall for their crap.
@Leif
>Except that this ‘string’ was not the strongest in 11,400 years:
>http://www.leif.org/research/The%20long-term%20variation%20of%20solar%20activity.pdf
Yes, the SSN count was distorted after 1946. But even correcting for that, Cycle 19 still looks big. Especially in solar flux units, where there are no counting irregularities:
http://www.spaceweather.gc.ca/data-donnee/sol_flux/sx-6-mavg-eng.php
How big does a solar maximum have to be before we can call it “Grand”?
Here is Hansen in 2004 blaming soot for most of the global warming. And also in 2000 he blamed non-c02 for most of the warming. It’s worse than I thought.
Yet people have told me that James Hansen is a genius. He is a genius……….of fairy tales and contradictory clap trap rubbish.
isvalgaard
You responded on a previous track to a question by John DAY as follows”
The Maunder- and Dalton solar minima were also associated with some colder climate. Are there any solid reasons to expect any similar cooling with the anticipated Eddy Minimum?
I don’t think so, but such cooling seems to be the prevailing dogma among skeptics.
Leif are you saying that in your opinion, “similar” level of cooling will not happen or that no cooling will happen at all or are you saying we just don’t know. I am one of those who believe cooling will take place but not quite to the level of Maunder Minimum because the earth and the oceans are warmer today than they were then.
Once carbon becomes the new currency to replace the USD for international trade we will be entering the Dark Ages. Cold or warm, we are all going to be a lot poorer.
Our climate history over the past 400K years suggests an ice age is the norm and the warm interglacial wont last long. Average length is 10K and we are at 11K, although the last interglacial lasted 20K. It may very well be carbon emissions will delay the inevitable.
Any study on the economic costs and impact on life from an ice age?
David Hathaway says ” “We don’t know why the Gleissberg cycle takes place…”
Stuart Clark says “We still do not know how or why the Maunder minimum started, so we cannot predict the next one.”
Saying they don’t know! Is this still allowed?
“Now the sun is acting “bizarre” , that gives them an excuse for the models being wrong.”
Bingo. They’re going to claim that their models show the Earth would still be warming due to CO2 if it wasn’t for that pesky sun.
They’re far too heavily invested in Global Warming to be able to drop it when reality changes.
the difference in solar insolation between a normal maximum and minimum in the sunspot cycle is only 0.5%
what we have here is just a low maximum…which is still higher than the normal minimum
by the way the difference in radiation received between aphelion and perihelion…which happens every year…is about 6%…..about 120 times the variation due to the sunspot cycle
I’ve a question to all those who doubt that curve-fitting yields no meaningful results (because it doesn’t take into account the underlying physics):
How is it that “curve fitting” applications such Demand Solutions (a software package that analyses at least 18 months of sales figures for any given product) can produce reasonably accurate forecasts – forecasts that are good enough to “bet your business” – and yet the same form of analysis isn’t good enough for solar predictions?
Yes, this comes across as a passive-agressive question, but I’d actually like to know. Demand Solutions has no understanding of the underlying economics, physics or anything beneath the sales figures; it simply applies over 20 different forecasting algorithms to the given data set, picks the one that predicted the last three months the best and uses that as its forecast.
Unltimately, it is choosing a particular equation with tuned parameters.
If its good enough (and accurate enough) to run a business, why is the same approach not good enough for solar predictions?
The problem here, of course, is that if you were sniffing out some sort of tipping point, you may have found one…….or two……or three etc. etc.
In the 50:50 category we have this:
1. MIS-1, also occurring like MIS-19 and MIS-11 did, will go long like MIS-11 did and MIS-19 didn’t, in post Mid Pleistocene Transition (MPT) time.
In the 12.5:87.5 category we have this:
1. Of the MPT to present allotment of interglacials, 7 of the last 8 have each lasted about half a precession cycle. The precession cycle varies from 19-23kyrs, and we are at the 23,000 year endpoint of that cyclicity now, meaning 11,500 years is half. The Holocene is 11,716 years old now (based on the end of the Younger-Dryas cold interval). About half a precession cycle.
2. Of the end extreme interglacials, MIS-5e clocked-out with the second thermal pulse, right at its very end, with a somewhere between +6M amsl to +52M amsl sea level highstand, or something like 10 to 100 times the 2007 IPCCs AR4 worst prognostication of +0.59M amsl by 2099.
3. If MIS-5e had two thermal excursions right at its very end, MIS-11 had one, and MIS-19 had three, how many will MIS-1 (our Holocene) have?
4. Did we just experience our 1, the grand solar maxima of the late 20th century? Will there be another, and another?
5. Is there any way, any way humanly possible at all, that we could obviate the next glacial, whenever it chooses to arrive?
6. Or would the sun going all quiet on us at the 11,716 year old Holocene, just after a grand solar maxima, make us cogitate whatever in the world might, could, conceivably, possibly, maybe, hopefully prevent onset of the next glacial? One wonders whatever that might be……..
Thinking……. Thinking………
Ding! Got it! We could, you know, strip the late Holocene so-called “climate security blanket” from the said loate Holocene atmosphere 🙂
Uh…. Well…. that would be a bet that MIS-1 would naturally, without our help be the next “extended” (MIS-11 style) interglacial. Which chance is only 50%, at best. What could increase our chances of engineering an extended interglacial?
Well, first, we could have from 1 to 3 thermal pulses in the next few thousand years. Or we might not. Some (Sirocko et al (A late Eemian aridity pulse in central Europe during the last glacial inception, nature, vol. 436, 11 August 2005, doi:10.1038/nature03905, pp 833-836 ) (http://www.particle-analysis.info/LEAP_Nature__Sirocko+Seelos.pdf) say:
“The onset of the LEAP occurred within less than two decades, demonstrating the existence of a sharp threshold, which must be near 416 Wm2, which is the 65oN July insolation for 118 kyr BP (ref. 9). This value is only slightly below today’s value of 428 Wm2. Insolation will remain at this level slightly above the inception for the next 4,000 years before it then increases again.”
To an unkown extent, regardless of whatever funk the sun is in, some say that due to orbital insolation, as calculated at the Arctic circle, all we need to do is somehow “bridge” the next 4 millenia before we might wobble good-to-go again. Is there anything, anything at all, that one might think of that could, theoretically of course, bridge such a millenial gap?
Anything? Anything at all, come to mind??????? (with consideration given to the endpoints of atmospheric decay estimates et al etc.)
Carla says:
July 14, 2013 at 6:49 pm
Cosmic Ray distributions around Interstellar Magnetic Field Lines. These are found in clusters and maybe organize themselves in an asymmetric fashion around a Very local coherent Interstellar Magnetic Field line(s). Kinda like what we see in the heliotail being downwind and having more cosmic rays on the downwind side of the heliosphere.
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No, you have the scales wrong. In the interstellar medium the coherent structures are huge, much larger than the heliosphere. And it takes thousands of years for the solar system to traverse one of those structures.
Carla says:
July 14, 2013 at 8:18 pm
Is there a ‘goldilocks’ size in here somewhere?
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Wishful thinking can always posit one, but I don’t think there is any ‘just right size’. The Galaxy is big, the solar system is small.
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Carla says:
A similar example maybe seen in our own radiation belt. Cosmic rays organized in belts and trapped within ‘a’ magnetic field. Formally from chaos now organized. A distribution of protons and electrons and antiprotons.
Found this today with the help of link left by Clipe. thx.
“””Stranger yet, Voyager 1 detected an increase in galactic cosmic rays — but found that at times they were moving in parallel instead of traveling randomly.”””
Voyager 1’s journey to solar system’s edge upends theories
The mysterious region 11 billion miles away proves to be even stranger than previously thought, according to Voyager’s latest readings.
…
By Monte Morin
June 27, 2013, 6:58 p.m.
“The jumps indicate multiple crossings of a boundary unlike anything observed previously,” a team of Voyager scientists wrote in one of the studies. They labeled the new area the heliosheath depletion region.
Stranger yet, Voyager 1 detected an increase in galactic cosmic rays — but found that at times they were moving in parallel instead of traveling randomly.
“This was conceptually unthinkable for cosmic rays,” said Stamatios Krimigis, a solar physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and leader of another one of the studies. “There is no cosmic ray physicist I know who ever expected that they would not all be coming equally from all directions.”
The confusion hasn’t ended there.
One Voyager project scientist reported in March that the spacecraft had entered interstellar space after more than 35 years of travel. The paper by Bill Webber, a professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University, triggered a media furor in the process.
Scientists including Krimigis and Edward Stone, a Voyager project scientist at Caltech, contended that the probe had not left the solar system. Voyager 1 remained within the sun’s zone of magnetic influence, and therefore within the heliosphere, they said.
“We’re not free yet,” Krimigis said. “This is a new region that we didn’t know existed. We have no road map, and we’re waiting to see what’s going to happen next.”
Theorists are struggling to explain the data. Some say the unexpected increase in magnetic strength is the result of spiraling magnetic fields being compressed against the interstellar medium. Others say this is impossible since there is no solar wind to push them against that boundary, and that there must be another explanation.
Len Fisk, a professor of space science at the University of Michigan, described the studies’ findings as “a complete surprise.” He said Voyager 1’s travels were proving to be both puzzling and exciting.
“It’s causing a fundamental reconsideration of how the heliosheath interacts with the local interstellar medium,” said Fisk, who was not involved in the new analysis.
One of the possible explanations for Voyager’s peculiar magnetic readings is that the sun’s magnetic fields have combined with the interstellar magnetic field in places — a process called magnetic reconnection.
Such reconnection has been observed between the magnetic fields of the sun and Earth, said Stone, a former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. “Maybe that’s what’s happening here, but we really don’t know,” he said.
Adding still more mystery is the fact that Voyager 2 has yet to experience anything like its twin. Both spacecraft are headed toward the forward edge of the heliosphere, but are more than 9 billion miles apart.
Although Voyager 1 was launched 16 days after Voyager 2, it followed a more direct route toward the edge of the solar system. Since 1998, when it overtook Pioneer 10, it has been the farthest man-made object from Earth.
Voyager scientists say they’re in no position to predict when the probe may finally exit the solar system. It could be months, or it could be years.
“I wouldn’t dare to make an estimate,” Krimigis said. “Voyager will probably prove us wrong, again.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-voyager-heliosphere-20130628,0,6860711.story
Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times
Maybe the width of an Interstellar Magnetic Field line, with its accompanying galactic cosmic ray distribution collection, with partially sorted proton and electrons, could be an important for determining a 70 – 100 year Gleissburg Cy cle. or not. gn
I was thinking the cosmic ray should be like helically wrapping. But if the curve is long enough, it might appear parallel..
Philip Bradley says:
July 15, 2013 at 5:36 pm
Antarctic sea ice is currently 1.217 million sq km or 9% above the anomaly.
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You’re making me feel wobbly. Moving my poles and axes. Noted..