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).
Meanwhile, back here on Planet Earth, we have this:
June Snow: Winter Storm in Montana, Utah, Wyoming As Summer Approaches
http://www.weather.com/safety/winter/montana-snow-june-20140616
Now that’s cool!
Steven Mosher says:
June 18, 2014 at 9:42 am
REPLY: Perhaps then you and Leif should petition to prevent the group numbers from ever being published, so they they are never used in any capacity.
Since the numbers are out there they will forever be used as misinformation, but the plan is to abandon the Group Sunspot Number and replace it with the Group Number, i.e. simply the average number of groups [which is around 10 so will be very different from the Sunspot Number – which will be renamed the ‘Wolf Number’].
It appears the sun is the prime driver of our climate. It is interesting to see the work of David Evans and Joanne ‘Nova’ in this respect, but also the work of Landscheidt who predicted much of this years ago.
http://bourabai.kz/landscheidt/new-e.htm
I am quite careful when I make statements, and the statement I made was absolutely true. The statement of yours that I was critiquing was false. Admit your fault before waving hands and moving on.
The next time you feel the urge to pull your smug pedantic routine, condescendingly admonishing others for their “imprecision”, direct it at yourself.
I think the part that will suck is that once we get an “I told you so!” it will be because it’s colder and bad for the world.
@William Howard Mason: I agree wholeheartedly. There will be little satisfaction in seeing the world descend into a little ice age. Cold kills.
lsvalgaard: My take on this is that SC24 does not look like SC5, so any conclusion based on a similarity is moot.
Thank you.
JJ says:
June 18, 2014 at 10:49 am
I am quite careful when I make statements, and the statement I made was absolutely true.
I plotted the SIDC sunspot number for 1796-1826 in pink here http://www.leif.org/research/DavidA20.png
As you can see the dark blue curve does not match the pink curve, so so much for your careful absolutely true statement. Enough said on this.
“Perhaps then you and Leif should petition to prevent the group numbers from ever being published,”
I am petitioning.
On my view the most effective way to work a petition is person to person.
so I petition the most powerful voice in the skeptic community. you.
Perhaps then you and Leif should petition to prevent the group numbers from ever being published, so they they are never used in any capacity.
That’s a more complete quote.
I agree with Steven Mosher that petitions should be person to person. That’s how the OISM Petition got 31,000+ co-signers. You know, the petition which stated that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere.
I have an email on file when there was a discussion here about the accuracy of sunspot count. I wrote the SIDC and they replied that this passed century and the Data up to now was 95% accurate. Before that the numbers are not so accurate. It’s possible the present minimum and the Dalton Minimum might match up if there could have been better data 200 years ago.
lsvalgaard
What’s next you anticipate? Will they be large fluctuations Ap?
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/Ap.gif
Do you foresee the growth of ice in the Arctic, or not?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
Is the Great Lakes will freeze in the next year or not? If so, what is the reason?
My statement remains absolutely true. Yours remains false, and the false reasoning that you offer to rescue it is simply another example of your imprecision (that you snottily point out in others) and your willingness to bend the truth when you get caught in it.
This statement of yours:
is false. The red line in Figure 1 graphs SIDC sunspot numbers. Admit the error that you happily and condescendingly call out in others.
And this addendum:
is odd. Comparing SIDC total monthly sunspot number to the numbers graphed on Figure 1 for SC5 shows that Dave’s numbers for SC5 are higher. Is the Group Sunspot Number Higher than the Total Sunspot Number? Do tell.
What were you accusing him of, again?
Let’s see how the Gulf Stream. Will it be cold in Canada?
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/ocean/surface/currents/orthographic=-44.39,37.66,553
Why is this happening? This is because:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_t100_nh_f00.gif
JJ says:
June 18, 2014 at 11:40 am
My statement remains absolutely true.
As you can see the dark blue curve does not match the pink curve, so so much for your careful absolutely true statement. D.A. claims that all data is SIDC. So much for your absolutely true statement.
Comparing SIDC total monthly sunspot number to the numbers graphed on Figure 1 for SC5 shows that Dave’s numbers for SC5 are higher. Is the Group Sunspot Number Higher than the Total Sunspot Number?
Here you admit that D.A. plotted the Group Sunspot Number. So much for your absolutely true statement.
Do tell.
Apart from the spike in early SC5, the Group Sunspot number up to about 1880 is some 50% too low. What D.A. is trying to claim is that we are heading for a Grand Minimum and that it is going to be cold. Unfortunately, SC24 does not seem to comply.
What were you accusing him of, again?
Sloppy, tendentious ‘work’. He seems to have snowed you.
Using one kind of algorithm for SSN for one cycle but another algorithm for a comparison cycle without clearly indicated the switch has a familiar ring to it. I checked that Fig 1 closely and I don’t see any such note explaining the switch. Let me try to remember who else pulled that kind of stunt to further his speculation into a proposed theory…………………………….thinking………………………….
………………………thinking…………………..thinking……………………………thinking…………………thinking…
The average temperature in many places in the high latitude will soon fall by more than 2 degrees C.
Leif, you said that figure 1 does not show the SIDC sunspot numbers, but it DOES, doesn’t it? JJ is trying to point out to you that you were wrong to state that.
ren said “The average temperature in many places in the high latitude will soon fall by more than 2 degrees C.”
Do you have something to back that up ? some graphs / projections etc.
On the extreme right of http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-1844-now.png the red average is now heading down again and from a lower level than any of the previous occaisions when it was below the line. Early days yet but it could turn out interesting.
Please look carefully at the upper chart. It is the height of the jet stream in the tropopause over the Arctic Circle, which determines circulation in the average latitudes.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/SunspotsMonthlySIDC%20and%20HadSST3%20GlobalSeaSurfaceMonthlyTemp%20and%20300mbSpecificHumidity%20Since1960.gif
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
June 18, 2014 at 1:09 pm
Leif, you said that figure 1 does not show the SIDC sunspot numbers, but it DOES, doesn’t it? JJ is trying to point out to you that you were wrong to state that.
No, it doesn’t. It claims that SIDC was used, but the all-important dark-blue curve that D.A. compares with for cycle 5 and 6 is NOT the SIDC values, but the obsolete Group Sunspot Numbers. The Group Sunspot Number stops in 1996, so people are forced to use the SIDC numbers since then [there is no difference since 1996] as the Group Sunspot Number, so in that sense all the values are Group Sunspot Numbers. The important issue for D.A. was that the rapid rise in SC24 seemed to match [the Group Sunspot Numbers] for SC5 in the beginning, but that that match has broken down. One more reason not to say that SC24 is like SC5. In any case, D.A. is cherry-picking [and badly]. What JJ is seeing, beats me.
Ah, I see. But you can understand why a layperson would take Figure 1 to be as it says it is. Thanks for the correction.
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
June 18, 2014 at 1:09 pm
Leif, you said that figure 1 does not show the SIDC sunspot numbers, but it DOES, doesn’t it?
It would be refreshing if D.A. would tell us where he got the data for the dark-blue curve in Figure 1 from. He says [on the Figure] that it was SIDC, but as I have shown it is not.