Guest essay by David Archibald
The following is a series of graphs that depict the current and past state of the sun.
Figure 1: Solar Cycle 24 relative to the Dalton Minimum
Solar Cycle 24 had almost the same shape as Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum, up to about six months ago and is now a lot stronger.
Figure 2: Monthly F10.7 Flux 1948 to 2014
The strength of the current solar cycle is confirmed by the F10.7 which is not subject to observer bias. Solar Cycle 24 is now five and a half years long.
Figure 3: Ap Index 1932 to 2014
The biggest change in solar activity for the current cycle is in magnetic activity which is now at the floor of activity for the period 1932 to 2007.
Figure 4: Heliospheric Tilt Angle 1976 to 2014
Peak of the solar cycle has occurred when heliospheric tilt angle reaches 73°. For Solar Cycle 24, this was in February 2013. It is now heading down to the 24/25 minimum.
Figure 5: Interplanetary Magnetic Field 1966 to 2014
This looks like a more muted version of the Ap Index. The main difference between them is that the IMF was a lot flatter over Solar Cycle 20 than the Ap Index.
Figure 6: Sum of Solar Polar Field Strengths 1976 to 2014
This is one of the more important graphs in the set in that it can have predictive ability. The SODA index pioneered by Schatten is based on the sum of the poloidal fields and the F10.7 flux. This methodology starts getting accurate for the next cycle a few years before solar minimum. If Solar Cycle 24 proves to be twelve years long, as Solar Cycle 5 was, then the SODA index may start being accurate from about 2016. In terms of solar cycle length, the only estimate in the public domain is from extrapolating Hathaway’s diagram off his image. Hathaway’s curve-fitting suggests that the Solar Cyce 24/25 minimum will be in late 2022. If so, Solar Cycle 24 will be thirteen years long, a little longer than Solar Cycle 23.
It seems that Livingstone and Penn’s estimate of Solar Cycle 25 amplitude of 7 remains the only one in the public domain. The reputational risk for solar physicists in making a prediction remains too great.
David Archibald, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short (Regnery, 2014).
Coincident cycles and oscillations completely disconnected from one another happen all the time in nature as well as in human-created machines. The trick is to know enough about the sciences involved in plausible mechanisms to steel against making implausible and vacuously thin connection statements.
Working with the obsolete SSN numbers is a guessing game, while Reykjavik atmospheric pressure (north component of the NAO, the proper 150 year long instrumental record from a single location) is a good guide to N. Atlantic’s SST, which in turn drives N. Hemisphere temperatures suggests about 0.25C cooling during forthcoming decade.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/RAP-AMO.htm
The Svalgaard – Archibald web’s confrontations will be soon speedily dispatched to history.
From Tom in Florida on June 21, 2014 at 1:08 pm:
It may eventually be of concern when passing nearby a fast-moving rogue black hole if you will be drawn to where it is or where it used to be. Interstellar travel when rationally proposed involves long drifting periods with minimal energy and propellant usage.
Another small tangentially-related issue with gravity occurs. I have read how particle and anti-particle pairs may spontaneously pop into existence:
There is no negative gravity, no opposite charge. The particles appear, gravity provides kinetic energy to the universe by moving matter towards the particles, the particles go away. The mass of the universe was not changed, but wasn’t energy added? If energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed but merely transformed into each other, where did the “extra” energy come from?
PS to last comment: Yes, the kinetic energy vectors would sum to zero as everything moved to the same point, so you could say no energy was added. Except there would still be frictional etc losses so it would still be a net energy release. Entropy always gets a piece of the action.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
June 21, 2014 at 2:29 pm
PS to last comment:
We shouldn’t really be discussing this off-topic issue, but it is very possible that the total energy of the universe is precisely and exactly zero.
From vukcevic on June 21, 2014 at 2:12 pm:
Top graph, blue trend line (SST) looks like you took a linear fit over 2 1/4 cycles, not only full cycles. Fail.
Top graph, red trend line (Reykjavik AP) right endpoint looks like it does align with the right end of the data, but left endpoint aligns with the left end of the blue (SST) data. And you’re still taking a linear fit over about 2 1/4 cycles, not only full cycles. Double fail.
If you had used the proper left red end, the slope would have been considerably less. Except it’s still messed up by not using only whole cycles, so that one won’t count.
True, it is too easy to guess the winner to make them memorable. But Archibald has a cunning strategy to come out ultimately victorious, he’s secretly planning to outlive Leif.
lsvalgaard says:
June 21, 2014 at 12:03 pm
Carla says:
June 21, 2014 at 11:59 am
CURRENT SHEETS AND MAGNETIC RECONNECTION IN ACCRETION DISK CORONAE
1) is not a link and shouting does not help.
2) does not apply to the Sun, but to stars that are still forming [T Tauri stars] where there is a LOT of accretion [the whole star has to form]..
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1) conveys the message – copy, pasted title
2) all stars are evolving and undergo similar processes, rotation + gravity = accretion
What about the stability of the heliocurrent sheet or lack of stability during an evolving low magnetic field period. Heliocurrent sheet at distance must have an evolving, weakening and vulnerable to inward propagating corotation regions. And rotation and changes within the corona where it starts.
Current sheets tear, get pressed in, deformed, develop instabilities associated with corotating interaction regions. They come in all sizes. whew
Come on now.
In the current period 1957-2014 the solar magnetic cycle went from Almost hitting the Ceiling to falling down to the FLOOR. And nobody thinks there could have been changes in solar differential rotation parameters over the period? But we see changes in surface circulations.
polar rotation, equator rotation, corona rotation includes some super corotation region and heliocurrent sheet rotation
How did this happen.
Picture 2 huge rotating magnetic shells with current sheets. Lets call them S1 and S2 super shell and they are nearby our Local Interstellar vicinity. S1 and S2 are merging, overlapping as evidenced by a narrow band cloud called MIC. MIC cloud is between Local cloud and G cloud.
G cloud is part the Apex cloud group moving from a different direction than our headwind from Oph.
Sounds like turbulence.
Carla says:
June 21, 2014 at 5:56 pm
Sounds like turbulence.
Sounds like nonsense.
Heliocurrent sheet at distance must have an evolving, weakening and vulnerable to inward propagating corotation regions.
Current sheet flows outward. Carla, your missives are beginning to sounds like verbal diarrhea, no coherence, regurgitating words and concepts you do not understand. You are a hard case.
Carla says:
June 21, 2014 at 5:36 pm
And nobody thinks there could have been changes in solar differential rotation parameters over the period?
We have all looked at all this. Do you think we are morons?
In http://www.leif.org/research/ast10867.pdf we study solar rotation since 1878 and find [as expected] that the more magnetic the sun it, the more rigid its differential rotation. In any case, all this is controlled from inside the sun, not from the outside.
Dr. S., you can’t compartmentalize the solar system from the galaxy it is embedded in. Nor from the local and circumheliospheric interstellar medium (CHISM) it is embedded in.
By so doing you set limitations on your own understanding of all the different mechanisms at work here and how it all interplays together. hello good night..
Carla says:
June 21, 2014 at 7:26 pm
Dr. S., you can’t compartmentalize the solar system from the galaxy it is embedded in. Nor from the local and circumheliospheric interstellar medium (CHISM) it is embedded in.
Of course one can, when one understands the physics and the energies involved. But in your case, to quote Al gore: “when you don’t know anything, everything is possible”.
lsvalgaard says:
June 21, 2014 at 6:41 pm
..In any case, all this is controlled from inside the sun, not from the outside…
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In that case you make our star the only exception to what rules in the rest of the stellar systems around the galaxy.
Carla says:
June 21, 2014 at 7:31 pm
In that case you make our star the only exception to what rules in the rest of the stellar systems around the galaxy.
You have no idea what ‘rules the rest of the stellar systems’ [you just think you have]. The sun is not special and the same laws and rules apply everywhere when conditions are comparable.
Carla says:
June 21, 2014 at 7:31 pm
In that case you make our star the only exception to what rules in the rest of the stellar systems around the galaxy.
Here is the deal: find us a SINGLE paper that shows and explicitly claims that the interstellar medium controls contemporary solar activity. Then we’ll discuss that and the arguments employed.
This chart shows that Carl is right. This chart shows that the cosmic radiation that reaches the Earth jumps, despite the slow changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. This means that the changes in solar activity and cosmic ray intensity.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3341045/bin/pnas.1118965109fig3.jpg
You can see a clear effect of solar activity on the temperature of the equator. At the turn of 2013 and 2014 activity was high. Activity fell and the temperature dropped.
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/cycle24.png
At the turn of 2013 and 2014 the temperature has increased significantly, but again decreases. There were chances for El Niño, but the situation is changing.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/70mb2525.gif
Such was the temperature from 1997 to 1998.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/archive/70mb2525_1998.gif
Let’s see where they will be polar vortex interference with declines in solar activity. This is the area above the northern Canada and central Siberia and below Australia.
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/75669000/jpg/_75669700_mf624final.jpg
From ren on June 21, 2014 at 10:34 pm:
Equator, which I’ll translate as tropics, seeing if activity drops while temperature drops, and assume the reverse so activity rises while temperature rises.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4tr/from:2000/to:2014/normalise/plot/pmod/from:2000/to:2014/normalise
Sadly PMOD TSI only goes to 2011.75. But it sure doesn’t look like it goes that way.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4tr/from:1980/to:2014/normalise/plot/pmod/from:1980/to:2014/scale:-1/normalise
Note the inverted TSI. From this view you can see TSI does not track tropical (equator) temperatures, as you can get two or three temperature “beats” per solar cycle.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4tr/from:1980/to:2014/normalise/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1980/to:2014/scale:-1/normalise
Looks the same using the International SSN.
Solar activity does not have a clear effect on the temperature of the equator (the tropics).
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: June 21, 2014 at 4:37 pm
…
Mr KD Knoebel, thanks for your interest.
As you well know, the linear trend lines for quasi-periodic oscillations (you referred to as cycles) are next to meaningless for any estimates of the near future projections (discussed extensively in past on WUWT), thus your observations may be ‘interesting’ but as related to the subjects substance, to put it politely, irrelevant.
Having in mind the quasi-oscillatory nature of the variables, the estimate of possible temperature fall is based, not on the above mentioned linear trend lines, but simply on the two end values in the second graph
Kadaka (KD Knoebel) t has no effect? We’ll find out, because the activity decreases.
Such a circulation in the lower stratosphere over the equator cools. What’s more will fall possibility of formation of hurricanes.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/70hPa/orthographic=-108.32,4.76,635
Leif- Can you confirm if the poles of Sun has flipped?
ren says:
June 21, 2014 at 10:24 pm
This means that the changes in solar activity and cosmic ray intensity.
Causality goes from the sun out, so Carla is not right, neither are you.
Crystal says:
June 22, 2014 at 4:33 am
Leif- Can you confirm if the poles of Sun has flipped?
Yes, they have http://www.leif.org/research/WSO-Polar-Fields-since-2003.png
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
June 21, 2014 at 11:34 pm
Sadly PMOD TSI only goes to 2011.75. But it sure doesn’t look like it goes that way.
PMOD is almost up-to-date ftp://ftp.pmodwrc.ch/pub/data/irradiance/composite/DataPlots/composite_42_64_1402.dat
From vukcevic on June 22, 2014 at 1:39 am:
The linear trend lines are so next to meaningless you included them on the first graph, and give indication those next to meaningless trend lines were used for detrending for the second graph. Which would make the second graph next to meaningless, perhaps closer.
What are your data sources? You don’t list them, making attempts at replication quite difficult and open to charges that exact dataset was not used.
Otherwise, what I get from your graph is it roughly shows the surface atmosphere is possibly isothermal over time. When temperature goes up thus more average kinetic energy per molecule, the pressure also drops thus less molecules per volume, thus energy per volume is maintained.
But then the energy content of the sea surface atmosphere is controlled by the water temperature. You had said on June 21, 2014 at 2:12 pm:
So your graph can show how SST controls the temperatures around Reykjavik which strongly influences the air pressure. But it cannot show Reykjavik air pressure predicting North Hemisphere temperatures, causality goes the wrong way.