Allan MacRae says: Thanks to Alberta Jacobs
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A Gleissberg Solar Minimum?
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August 11, 2014 12:18 pm
“Solar physicist Habibullo Abdussamatov predicts the current lull in solar activity will continue until about the middle of the 21st century and lead to a new Little Ice Age within the next 30 years.”
If this is true, then mankind is in for some very, very hard times. We have built our societies and infrastructure based on the mistaken belief that the climate could never return to that of the Little Ice Age but we might be very wrong in that. Feeding 7 Billion people in a little ice age will be demanding at best.
August 11, 2014 12:19 pm
August 11, 2014 12:26 pm
* Solar physicist Habibullo Abdussamatov predicts the current lull in solar activity will continue until about the middle of the 21st century and lead to a new Little Ice Age within the next 30 years.
_______________________
Any attempt to overlay even the most accurate solar cycle prediction onto the dynamic earth climate and then to predict an outcome, is akin to making a wild guess.
August 11, 2014 12:38 pm
@Alan Robertson
Well, Alan, it’s just another piece to the jigsaw. Not sure if you’re being deliberately negative, but it’s interesting, and another dot to join.
August 11, 2014 12:41 pm
I wonder what happens to comments that are not shown?
[They sit in the “To be Looked At” pool until a well-paid, handsome, over-vacationed, healthy, wealthy and infinitely wise moderator gets around to approving them. Since there aren’t any of those this week, the rest of us stumble across them as we get time and sign them in. .mod]
August 11, 2014 12:43 pm
markstoval says:
August 11, 2014 at 12:18 pm
——–
Here in the US we pay farmers to not grow crops as well as paying them to grow crops for fuel.
There are also millions of acres that have allowed to go fallow because they couldn’t compete with richer farmlands in the mid-west.
August 11, 2014 12:54 pm
“The Centennial Gleissberg Cycle (CGC) is a 90-100 year variation observed on the Sun, in the solar wind, at Earth and throughout the Heliosphere. The CGC is expressed as a systematic variation of the amplitude of the 11-year sunspot cycle. The reality of the CGC was a matter of some debate, but the very weak solar wind that occurred during the recent transition from solar cycle 23 to 24 followed by a low cycle 24 maximum sunspot number, strongly supports the concept. In this paper we demonstrate the strong similarities among the CGC minima observed at the beginnings of the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st century. These similarities support the notion that we are now experiencing a typical CGC minimum solar wind that is significantly different from the solar wind observed earlier in the space age. We suggest that the current CGC minimum may be implicated in producing some aspects of the unexpected observations at the heliosphere boundary reported at this conference.”
http://aspbooks.org/custom/publications/paper/484-0036.html
August 11, 2014 12:54 pm
That this Gleissberg cycle is true, can be seen in the second curve here,
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
where I had very good data from the Elmendorff weather station in Anchorage, going back to 1942.
Every place on earth is apparently on its own ca. 88 year curve depending on its specific composition TOA.
August 11, 2014 1:02 pm
‘In Section 3.3we summarized the characterization of the CGC cycle minimum as a period of several years when galactic cosmic-ray fluxes are intense, geomagnetic activity is very low, mid-latitude auroras are rarely seen and high-latitude auroras are common. Figure 2 shows that the period of lowest geomagnetic activity during the 23/24 cycle can be identified as the time when the ring current index Dst is consistently close to zero i.e. from November 2005 until the present i.e. March 2011.
Record breaking cosmic-ray intensities were reported for a 1.5-year period during 2008 – 2010 (Mewaldt et al., 2010). A comparison of the cosmic-ray intensities over five solar minima showed that the estimates for late 2009 exceeded those in 1997 by 20% and those in 1965 and 1987 by about 40 percent. Most neutron monitors were also at record levels during 2009 (Ahluwalia and Ygbuhay, 2010).”
http://www.predsci.com/eswe-workshop/session2_9/The%20Sun%E2%80%99s%20Strange%20Behavior%20Maunder%20Minimum%20or%20Gleissberg%20Cycle.pdf
August 11, 2014 1:03 pm
Groups of sunspot cycles do form longer centennial patterns characterised by about a century (~103 years) of longer and a century (~97 years) of shorter cycles.
Centennial SC pattern
Very recently I also found that the Maunder minimum, although did not have distinct sunspot cycles, spectral analysis of the cosmic rays modulation suggest strong 11 years magnetic cycles were present.
see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/06/recent-paper-finds-recent-solar-grand-maximum-was-a-rare-or-even-unique-event-in-3000-years/#comment-1706707
August 11, 2014 1:22 pm
“Solar physicist Habibullo Abdussamatov predicts the current lull in solar activity will continue until about the middle of the 21st century and lead to a new Little Ice Age within the next 30 years.”
He is already falsified. His WAG depended on the last minimum having a low TSI http://www.leif.org/research/Abdussa1.png but since TSI did not show such a dip [it was an artifact in the PMOD dataset] and since TSI since then [blue trace on http://www.leif.org/research/Abdussa3.png ] has not decreased as extrapolated [‘predicted’ is too strong a word for this], there does not seem to be any basis for Abdussa’s claim.
August 11, 2014 1:29 pm
I have identified the precise heliocentric planetary progression that causes solar minima. This minimum will be shorter like the last two, with the colder years roughly between the sunspot maxima of the first two weak cycles, e.g. 1807-1817, 1885-1896, and 2016-2024. The latter half of SC 25 will not be so cold, and SC 26 will be well past the grand minimum.
I would be pleased to demonstrate these findings to Anthony Watts when he is in the UK in September if he is interested.
August 11, 2014 1:51 pm
SunSword says:
August 11, 2014 at 1:44 pm
However — is it the case that TSI correlates with solar wind and magnetic field strength? Because the magnetic field strength has been decreasing while TSI has not — correct?
It is a little bit more complicated than that. TSI basically correlates with the magnetic field at low latitudes [e.g. with the sunspot number] while the solar wind magnetic field at solar minimum basically comes out of higher latitudes, including the poles: http://www.leif.org/research/AMJ-100-Years-Polar-Fields.pdf
August 11, 2014 2:09 pm
vukcevic says:
August 11, 2014 at 1:03 pm
Very recently I also found that the Maunder minimum, although did not have distinct sunspot cycles, spectral analysis of the cosmic rays modulation suggest strong 11 years magnetic cycles were present.
Vuk, this has been known for 20 years, e.g. http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009GL038004-Breggren.pdf
August 11, 2014 2:09 pm
From a pure science standpoint, having an extended minimum would be very good for categorically testing the solar driven climate hypothesis. From the outside looking in, I think both sides of this argument make some good points but I don’t feel either side has enough data to slam the door on the other side (at least from the arguments / data I have seen presented). Perhaps an extended minimum could provide that data.
August 11, 2014 2:43 pm
Leif Svalgaard says: August 11, 2014 at 2:09 pm
Vuk, this has been known for 20 years
Not exactly.
In your presentation
http://www.leif.org/research/Does%20The%20Sun%20Vary%20Enough.pdf
you quote 12.5 years (page 25), now you have a more accurate value, you are welcome to quote my finding of 11.4 years.
11.4 years with the amplitude of 9.3% is very close to number of cycles with the 11+ years periods.
Additionally I found (of almost equal amplitudes to the 11.5 year one)
two more periods that distinguish the Maunder Minimum epoch from the rest of the solar cycles progression and that was not known 20 years ago, actually was not known not until earlier this morning when it was announced on the WUWI blog.
These two additional periods within the GCR magnetic modulation, strictly specific to the Maunder Minimum are:
16,7 years at 8.5%
16 years is one of the three most prominent component of the Earth’s magnetic field (Jackson & Bloxham based on Jault Gire & LeMouel)
27.5 years at 8.2%
28 years is GCR modulation period quoted by Hiroko Miyahara (University of Tokyo), most likely a cross-modulation product between 5 and 21.3 years, the two other most prominent components of the Earth’s magnetic spectrum.
August 11, 2014 2:50 pm
NZPete54 says:
August 11, 2014 at 12:38 pm
@Alan Robertson
Well, Alan, it’s just another piece to the jigsaw. Not sure if you’re being deliberately negative, but it’s interesting, and another dot to join.
________________
My intent was to comment on the reliability of long range climate predictions, especially since correlations of past climate response to solar influence fail at some point.
In a recent paper “The Centennial Gleissberg Cycle and its Association with Extended Minima”, to be soon published in JGR/Space, Feynman and Ruzmaikin discuss how the recent extended minimum of solar and geomagnetic variability (XSM) mirrors the XSMs in the 19th and 20th centuries: 1810–1830 and 1900–1910.
Edited abstract:
Such extended minima also were evident in aurorae reported from 450 AD to 1450 AD. The paper argues that these minima are consistent with minima of the Centennial Gleissberg Cycles (CGC), a 90–100 year variation observed on the Sun, in the solar wind, at the Earth and throughout the Heliosphere. The occurrence of the recent XSM is consistent with the existence of the CGC as a quasi-periodic variation of the solar dynamo. Evidence of CGC’s is provided by the multi-century sunspot record, by the almost 150-year record of indexes of geomagnetic activity (1868-present), by 1,000 years of observations of aurorae (from 450 to 1450 AD) and millennial records of radionuclides in ice cores.
The “aa” index of geomagnetic activity carries information about the two components of the solar magnetic field (toroidal and poloidal), one driven by flares and CMEs (related to the toroidal field), the other driven by co-rotating interaction regions in the solar wind (related to the poloidal field). These two components systematically vary in their intensity and relative phase giving us information about centennial changes of the sources of solar dynamo during the recent CGC over the last century. The dipole and quadrupole modes of the solar magnetic field changed in relative amplitude and phase; the quadrupole mode became more important as the XSM was approached. Some implications for the solar dynamo theory are discussed.
* Says The Hockey Schtick: If it is true that the current lull in solar activity is “consistent with minima of the Centennial Gleissberg Cycles,” and the Gleissberg Cycle is a real solar cycle, the current Gleissberg minimum could last a few decades before solar activity begins to rise again.
* Solar physicist Habibullo Abdussamatov predicts the current lull in solar activity will continue until about the middle of the 21st century and lead to a new Little Ice Age within the next 30 years.