Open Thread

Antarctic hopefully over 16,000,000 sq K in 3 days.
Arctic also seems to be growing now instead of melting ? another early freeze

jonesingforozone says:
August 16, 2014 at 12:02 am
Note that Usoskin’s method does not rely upon the amplitude and the period of individual solar cycles to measure solar minima and maxima.
Because of the long residence time of 14C the activity has to be modeled on a longer time scale than individual cycles. This is, of course, a severe handicap, but the real problem is the same as with the hockey stick: appending the sunspot number observed on the Sun to the cosmic ray record. For this, it is important to have the correct sunspot number, and that is where his method fails. Now, there are many people who would want a Grand Maximum as support for their own agenda [e.g. ‘it is the sun, Stupid’] so we expect widespread ‘rearguard’ action trying to maintain the notion of a Grand Maximum. To wit, this very exchange.

“Now, there are many people who would want a Grand Maximum as support for their own agenda [e.g. ‘it is the sun, Stupid’] so we expect widespread ‘rearguard’ action trying to maintain the notion of a Grand Maximum. To wit, this very exchange.”
Or, to put it another way:-
Now, there are many people who would want to deny a Grand Maximum as support for their own agenda [e.g. ‘the sun has no effect on the climate, Stupid’] so we expect widespread ‘offensive’ action trying to deny the notion of a Grand Maximum. To wit, this very exchange.
PS I am not a solar physicist, I am a retired former railway engineer (who doesn’t write soft-core porn) who would like to understand more but who is somewhat put off by the eternal bickering. It’s fun, sure, but not very instructive.

trafamadore:
At August 15, 2014 at 8:31 pm you write

Last night Keating finished off the last of his challenges. Noone got the 30K.

Anyone wanting to read each challenge and his response to it can access each of them from here by clicking on it.
My submission was titled “Null Hypothesis” and it, Keatings’s reply, and my response to that reply can be accessed by clicking on that title. My response to that reply says

Mr Keating:
My correct statements that I had provided the required response to your bet were – and remain – appropriate when submitting a response to you when you alone set the challenge, you alone would pay if you admitted your challenge is answered, and you alone have decided that you alone will agree if your challenge is met or not.
And your excuses for refusing to pay are pathetic.
Ice cores lack the temporal resolution to show what you claim.
Atmospheric CO2 concentration is not a climate behaviour.
Ice cores are proxy data not absolute measurements: you are comparing ‘chalk and cheese’.
The scientific method defines the scientific null hypothesis, not me.
You are denying the scientific method and promoting your superstitious belief in AGW as a method to excuse your failure to pay-up for losing your bet. But I expected that.
Richard

Richard

This is interesting. Note cyclic abrupt climate change events in the paleo record (for example the 8200 year before present cooling event) including the termination of interglacial periods, correlate with cyclic abrupt unexplained changes to the geomagnetic field intensity and orientation.
http://news.yahoo.com/earths-magnetic-field-weakening-10-times-faster-now-121247349.html
Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Weakening 10 Times Faster Now
“…Previously, researchers estimated the field was weakening about 5 percent per century, but the new data revealed the field is actually weakening at 5 percent per decade, or 10 times faster than thought. (WIlliam: 10 times faster than physically possible if the cause of the geomagnetic field changes is changes at the liquid core/solid core boundary) As such, rather than the full flip occurring in about 2,000 years, as was predicted, the new data suggest it could happen sooner. Floberghagen hopes that more data from Swarm will shed light on why the field is weakening faster now.”
William: Swarm is the name of three specialized satellites that were launched by the European space agency in November of 2013. The Swarm satellites are capable of measuring the entire geomagnetic field with laboratory accuracy.
What the first release of the Swarm data has confirmed is an astonishing: An extraordinarily rapid and large drop in the field intensity of the geomagnetic field.
The geomagnetic field intensity which had been dropping at 5% per century (the geomagnetic field intensity in the South Atlantic field anomaly has for example dropped 60% which is consistent with the start of a geomagnetic excursion), is now starting sometime around 1995 for unexplained reasons dropping at 5% per decade, ten times faster.
This is astonishing – a paradox – due to the counter emf principal and the physics of the deep earth. By Maxwell’s equations applied to a conductive liquid, a counter emf and a counter electric current is generated if there is a change at the liquid core/solid core boundary. Due to the counter emf principal deep core initiated changes to the geomagnetic field take thousands of years to make large changes to the geomagnetic field intensity and configuration.
In the last decade the geomagnetic specialists have found unequivocal proxy evidence of significant geomagnetic field changes that are ball park 10,000 times too fast and 100,000 times to large in magnitude to be caused by a core based mechanism. These abrupt significant changes to the geomagnetic field are called archaeomagnetic jerks (this is confusing terminology as an archaemagnetic ‘jerk’ geomagnetic field change is orders of magnitude too large and too fast to be caused by changes at the liquid core/solid core boundary which is the assumed cause of geomagnetic jerks. i.e. geomagnetic jerk and archaeomagnetic jerk must therefore have completely different causes.)
The hypothesis to explain paleo geomagnetic field record changes that are called archaeomagnetic jerks (the suffix archae is used as the phenomena was found by studying field changes recorded in fired tiles that were laid in chalets and palaces.) that are ball park 10,000 times to fast to be caused by a core based mechanism is that there is suddenly a plume of liquid from the core moving into the mantel.
The problem with the plume hypothesis is there is no mechanism to suddenly cause liquid core plumes moving into the mantel to explain the observed changes to the geomagnetic field in the last 10 years, using the plume hypothesis. The sudden observed change of the northern magnetic drift velocity and the American continents magnetic field intensity drop would require there to be liquid core plumes moving into the mantel in Greenland and throughout the North and South American continents, starting roughly 10 years ago.
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/BardPapers/responseCourtillotEPSL07.pdf
Response to Comment on “Are there connections between Earth’s magnetic field and climate?, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 253, 328–339, 2007” by Bard, E., and Delaygue, M., Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., in press, 2007
http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/home/files/Courtillot07EPSL.pdf
Are there connections between the Earth’s magnetic field and climate? Vincent Courtillot, Yves Gallet, Jean-Louis Le Mouël, Frédéric Fluteau, Agnès Genevey
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/416/1/gubbinsd4.pdf
Is the geodynamo process intrinsically unstable?
What Caused Recent Acceleration of the North Magnetic Pole Drift?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010EO510001/pdf
The north magnetic pole (NMP) is the point at the Earth’s surface where the geomagnetic field is directed vertically downward. It drifts in time as a result of core convection, which sustains the Earth’s main magnetic field through the geodynamo process. During the 1990s the NMP drift speed suddenly increased from 15 kilometers per year at the start of the decade to 55 kilometers per year by the decade’s end. This acceleration was all the more surprising given that the NMP drift speed had remained less than 15 kilometers per year over the previous 150 years of observation.
http://www.paleomag.net/members/qingsongliu/References/EPSL/Thouveny%20excursions%20since%20400%20ka%20EPSL%202004.pdf
Three directional anomalies occurring during RPI lows chronologically correspond to the Laschamp excursion (42 kyr BP),the Blake event (115 to 122 kyr BP) and the Icelandic basin excursion (190 kyr BP). A fourth directional anomaly recorded at 290 kyr BP during another RPI low defines the ‘Portuguese margin excursion’. Four non-excursional RPI lows are recorded at the ages of the Jamaica/Pringle falls,Mamaku,Calabrian Ridge 1,and Levantine excursions. The RPI record is characterized by a periodicity of approx. 100 kyr, paleointensity lows often coinciding with the end of interglacial stages.

I would like to see a rebuttal of my proposition of how to provide FTL communication by what I call “The Hedgehog Method”. I asked the following question at http://physics.stackexchange.com but it was set on hold being off topic because it could not be answered by parroting mainstream physics and has now been deleted. Here it goes:
—
Suppose we have a photon source at S capable to supply single photons and a detector able to catch and annihilate them. We place a focusing lens between source and detector so that the detector is at the focus; call that point A. We install a second lens beside the first one but some small distance d closer to the source and at a slightly other angle than the first. This creates a second focus, B, for each of the photons. Let’s place a screen between the two focus points to keep them from influencing each other.
A detector placed at B will see the photons with probability p(S→B) and has an advantage in catching photons because they arrive earlier at B than at A. Average probability p(S→A) will be reduced accordingly when the detector is present at B to
p(S→A) [ 1 – p(S→B) ] because that part consumed at B will not reach A.
Questions:
1. If we don’t use a detector but modulate the photon stream arriving at B by either catching photons or keep them alive, can we detect this modulation at A?
2. If so, wouldn’t the modulation appear instantaneously at distance
d = SA – SB from A and reach A in time d/c instead of AB/c?
Using say, a “beam splitter” (or even mirrors) and glass fibers instead of lenses we can adjust the detector very near the point where the modulation appears. Let, for instance, be
AB = 10 km and d = 10 mm, then we talk about
10⁶ c.
—
This would not even be ambitious to realize. There is room for speedup by some orders of magnitude.
The method is very simple. There are no slits, interferences nor entanglements involved. Nor have one to use QMagic to help understand it. Just let each photon move in both directions toward the communication partners before applying a modulation on the shorter optical path. It’s almost depressing if no one had the idea before and tested it.
My budget for investments into test-equipment is very limited but I would like to test the concept. I have a plan for an experiment measuring the signal speed. The setup I used failed so far because handling photons isn’t easy. There are usually too much of them so the detectors become saturated and reflect the remaining ones. This yield a lower signal to noise ratio, in my case less than 0.1% which my instruments couldn’t show.
Some comments on the method would be greatly appreciated. Especially, if someone knows why it will not work. Or if someone has a laboratory and some spare time…