Posted on 12/04/2009 9:41:40 AM PST by dila813
September 3, 2009: The sun is in the pits of the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century. Weeks and sometimes whole months go by without even a single tiny sunspot. The quiet has dragged out for more than two years, prompting some observers to wonder, are sunspots disappearing?
"Personally, I'm betting that sunspots are coming back," says researcher Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona. But, he allows, "there is some evidence that they won't."
Penn's colleague Bill Livingston of the NSO has been measuring the magnetic fields of sunspots for the past 17 years, and he has found a remarkable trend. Sunspot magnetism is on the decline:
(Excerpt) Read more at science.nasa.gov ...
Look at post 53
Everyone is confused on the Number of Sunspots vs Magnetic Flux including you.
What this article is saying is that the Magnetic Flux is going down regardless of Sun Spots.
In order to have a Sun Spot you need a certain Magnetic Flux.
The Sun Spot count has gone up and down, but the Flux is only going down regardless of the count of Sun Spots.
Read Carefully.
He means until the flux increases.
As long as the flux is too low >>>>> No Sun Spots
So it is permanent in the sense that they don’t see the Magnetic Flux Increasing but they just may not have enough historical data to forecast when it will increase again. It is likely more than 20 Years but it could be never.
Then the current is dying then.
OK. You are right.
The little ice age was caused by the Vikings 4-wheelers and Humvees.
Sorry that I missed that.
Darn it.
I meant to say the end of the little ice age was caused by .....
I know the piece is about the sun. I thought you were talking about Earth’s magnetic field, sorry.
If we can trust the data, (derived from proxies) global temperatures have previously dropped precipitously in a short period. I have heard 6°C in twenty years.
The implications of such a decline are nothing short of cataclysmic. and could certainly alter things on a "temporal scale".
Think about this: The entire history of civilization has taken place during the current interglacial.
Yes, we’ve come a long way in a comparatively short time. Six degrees is a lot. Natural gas may be our best bet for keeping the house warm. ;-)
I REALLY hope that this is some partial quote by a poor “journalist”. As in, “Over the next few years, personally, I’m betting that they are coming back,....some evidence that they won’t.”
If not, I bet this guy will be dancing around the fires on Dec. 21st as well!
The one thing about these VERY low sunspot numbers for such a long time, when the next high cycle comes, it probably (most definitely??) won’t be very high and will be short-lived.
And for those saying we need to drive our SUV’s more - manmade CO2 has NOTHING to do with earth’s changing climate.
“How do you suppose they came by the data for such an extended period?”
For part of it they use ice-core data, and I believe lake bottom sediments as well. Various chemicals get trapped that somehow give an idea of the temperature I think?. CO2 gets trapped in the ice (bubbles?), and the dust obviously.
Thanks, but as it was explained to us and we saw, the solar activity was directly related to the magnetic flux. My point is we have one scientist raising the yellow flag again on something the unwashed public has no idea how to digest, ergo; please send me more grant money!
As a geologist I am very comfortable with the multiple working hypothesis — I would like someone to start publicizing the other ideas out there. Here is mine. The first paper to get is Friis-Christensen and Lassen (Science; 1991) If you can find the entire issue in the reference library, you will see the editors comment referred to this paper as hitting the ball into the anthropogenic court. Friis -Christensen and Lassen (1991) was debunked by Monbiot in an Guardian article a few years ago wherein Monbiot stated the results BACKWARDS. I cannot find that article on the Guardian website.
Svensmark has experiments scheduled for the Hadron collider to test his basement experiment. He believes in muons, but elevated solar flux (> 10 protons per cc) appears to cause fog in the Great Lakes and clouds too.
An important correlation between warming and cooling is the sunspot peak frequency, not the actual number of spots. But correlation is not causation. Cosmic radiation, howevr, is currently at its highest ever measured. This is happening because the earth’s magnetic shield is down; therefore, climate is changing (and it always will). The climate celebrities, however, are linking climate and the economy. We can likely kick much of the carbon economy sometime late the twenty-first century, but we must not rush to judgement for the wrong reason. Yes, there has been warming to end the Ice Age. Climate is a chaotic system; the facts, however, do not support CO2 as a serious ‘pollutant’. In fact, it is plant fertilizer and seriously important to all life on the planet. It is the red herring used to unwind our economy. That issue makes the science relevant.
Sulphate from volcanoes can have a catastrophic effect, but water vapour is far more important. Water vapour (0.4% overall by volume in air, but 1 – 4 % near the surface) is the most effective green house blanket followed by methane (0.0001745%). The third ranking gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves rapidly in cold water and bubbles rapidly out of warm water. The equilibrium in seawater is very high; making seawater a great ’sink’; CO2 is 34 times more soluble in water than air is soluble in water.
CO2 has been rising and Earth and her oceans have been warming. However, the correlation trails. Correlation, moreover, is not causation. The causation is under scientific review, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome.
“Using a box of air in a Copenhagen lab, physicists traced the growth of clusters of molecules of the kind that build cloud condensation nuclei. These are specks of sulphuric acid on which cloud droplets form. High-energy particles driven through the laboratory ceiling by exploded stars far away in the Galaxy – the cosmic rays – liberate electrons in the air, which help the molecular clusters to form much faster than climate scientists have modeled in the atmosphere. That may explain the link between cosmic rays, cloudiness and climate change.”
As I understand it, the hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center goes as follows: quiet sun allows the geomagnetic shield to drop. Incoming galactic cosmic ray flux creates more low-level clouds, more snow, and more albedo effect as more is heat reflected resulting in a colder climate. Active sun has an enhanced magnetic field which induces Earth’s geomagnetic shield response. Earth has fewer low-level clouds, less rain, snow and ice, and less albedo (less heat reflected) producing a warmer climate.
That is how the bulk of climate change likely works, coupled with (modulated by) sunspot peak frequency there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, all the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, as they have been for this century, all the planets cool.
The change in cloud cover is only a small percentage, and the ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that.
Although the post 60s warming period appears to be over, it has allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with more humidity, clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years. Ancient sedimentary rocks and paleontological evidence indicate the planet has had abundant liquid water over the entire span. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat. Nothing unusual is going on except for the Orwellian politics.
Check the web site of the Danish National Space Center
Sometimes (as in this case) the methods of acquiring data is just as interesting as the data itself (not demeaning the Sun’s activity). To have a dataset that goes so far back is...impressive. I appreciate your response as now I know something that I didn’t. Cool.
An excellent post, thanks.
Welcome to Free Republic, hope to hear more from you.
Welcome to FreeRepublic, and thanks for the good post and the links. I am also in the geosciences. A very simple site with some simple explanations is given below. But rather than looking at CO2 on the whole, they look at it as the percentage of greenhouse gases. So - it is a BIT higher of a percentage that it can add to the greenhouse effect.
Even so, the grand sum of mandmade CO2 greenhouse effect is about 0.28%. Still, a REALLY small number that adds diddly-squat to temperature changes. But just think, if we destroy our econonmy we might be able to move that from a 0.28% to a 0.20%!
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
Since two years, the solar spots are no longer following the
predictions.
The so called “experts” at NOAA Space Weather Prediction
Center predicted in January 07 the beginning of the cycle 24
to occur in mid 2008. As this did not occur, they shifted the
prediction one year later to mid 2009.
Now we are at the end of 2009 and still no beginning of
the next sunspot cycle ...
Furthermore, they reduced the predicted maximum from
140 to 90 sunspots, and delayed the predicted peak also
one year.
Now have a look at the latest update of the preditions
(2009 Dec. 8), and you see that still the preditions are
way out of reality ... see:
http://home.datacomm.ch/hb9abx/sunspot-08-09.htm
There you also see the previous predictions that were
revised and revised ...
I ask, why the “experts” still continue to make new
predictions, as the situation is so undecided, that we may
even enter a “maunder minimum” or any kind of solar
spot maximum between 25 and 150 ...
Would it not be wiser if the “experts” would say: We cannot
make any valid prediction, as the present behaving of the sun
is completely out of the our knowledge ?
Felix HB9ABX
“We cannot make any valid prediction, as the present behaving of the sun is completely out of the our knowledge?”
I have been watching the solar cycles off and on (get it!?) since 2007. I know this year that some folks have said that we have entered Cycle 24, and other’s have disputed that. (Maybe they need to take a vote!?)
Regardless, the numbers are real low. And the longer we go with the low numbers, chances are (at least based on most of the past cycles), the next high won’t be all that high, as your link points out.
Have you seen “Knowing” with Nicholas Cage? Dang. I didn’t think it was possible to make a movie that was more depressing than “I am Legend” yet still be entertaining, but it did it. It’s, in part, about a sun spot coming back with a vengeance.
I remember in the early 2000’s when the sun spots were interferring with garage doors here in WA and elsewhere. Now I can’t even get my AM radios to tune in properly.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.