[cogitator]

What's Wrong with the Sun? (Nothing)

"Another way to examine the length and depth of a solar minimum is by counting spotless days. A "spotless day" is a day with no sunspots. Spotless days never happen during Solar Max but they are the "meat and potatoes" of solar minima.

Adding up every daily blank sun for the past three years, we find that the current solar minimum has had 362 spotless days (as of June 30, 2008). Compare that value to the total spotless days of the previous ten solar minima: 309, 273, 272, 227, 446, 269, 568, 534, ~1019 and ~931. The current count of 362 spotless days is not even close to the longest."

Examine the graphic below from the article comparing this minimum to the 1933 minimum.

Orange bars represent the number of spotless days per month. The ongoing solar minimum needs to accumulate another 206 spotless days before it matches the duration of the 1933 minimum, which is considered unremarkable by solar historians.

[palmer]

Orange bars represent the number of spotless days per month. The ongoing solar minimum needs to accumulate another 206 spotless days before it matches the duration of the 1933 minimum, which is considered unremarkable by solar historians.

Since you made your "unremarkable" remark, the sun has accumulated over 300 spotless days (out of 365 or so). It is remarkable now wouldn't you say? There's a theory that blames the lack of spots on solar system center of gravity changes (Jupiter's orbit is 11 years like the normal SS cycle). The other planets would have lesser effects, but I suppose they could enhance each other some way. But what is the effect back on earth?

My unpublished theory is that the solar minimum causes enhancements of nonlinearities in the magnetosphere (explained here http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=16797882) which in turn causes large scale gravity waves (see here http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V3S-4019K4R-RG&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1009542625&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=c22eee69b245f3f576b0458ac5d8aceb)

The large scale gravity waves interact on a small scale with the weather-caused gravity waves to cause even more weather extremes (for example Gravity Waves Make Tornados[sic]) which is often cooling due to concentration of water vapor. Diffuse water vapor is warming, but concentrated water vapor is more neutral (even with warming) and often it is cooling (e.g. subsidence around hurricanes).

I could be wrong, the theory is incomplete and other solar factors could have greater influences.