Solar Cycles

There has been a lot of commentary on the current sunspot count with many commentators jumping the gun and predicting a long lived low like the rather famous Maunder Minimum. This timely article puts us back on track and tells us to hold on a minute. Fears of a protracted low are very premature.

Another aspect of the sun spot record that has always bothered me is that although our records since the early 1700’s has been well maintained and certainly meeting today’s standards, the early period of telescope usage between 1609 and 1700 may have been a lot more dicey. At least that was the apparent consensus forty years ago. In other words during the early going and even late into the mid nineteenth century with the advent of Wolf’s methodology, sunspot counting was prone to subjective decisions.

This may not sound like a lot, but you only need to decide among your group of observers that the observed image is one foot across for fifty years and then switch to better equipment and an easier two foot image to change the image usefulness by a factor of four. There were only a handful of observers who all knew each other and it is easy to see how improving equipment would have quietly allowed the sun spot count to creep up.

In other words, the low count for the Maunder Minimum may hugely reflect the limitations of the equipment and numbers of observers. I still think that there was a minimum but I simply do not totally trust the data.

Even today, no one is sitting there counting sun spots. Rather data sampling and formulas are shaking out the current number as they should. It is just a huge mistake to extrapolate that level of precision back over the centuries. Yet it feels like it could be done.

This means that the attempt to link the known event of the Little Ice Age with the shaky Maunder Minimum is unconvincing and similar to the linking of CO2 concentration and Global Warming,

What's Wrong with the Sun? (Nothing)

July 11, 2008: Stop the presses! The sun is behaving normally.

So says NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. "There have been some reports lately that Solar Minimum is lasting longer than it should. That's not true. The ongoing lull in sunspot number is well within historic norms for the solar cycle."

This report, that there's nothing to report, is newsworthy because of a growing buzz in lay and academic circles that something is wrong with the sun. Sun Goes Longer Than Normal Without Producing Sunspots declared one recent press release. A careful look at the data, however, suggests otherwise.

But first, a status report: "The sun is now near the low point of its 11-year activity cycle," says Hathaway. "We call this 'Solar Minimum.' It is the period of quiet that separates one Solar Max from another."

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/images/solarcycleupdate/ssn_predict_l.gif

Above: The solar cycle, 1995-2015. The "noisy" curve traces measured sunspot numbers; the smoothed curves are predictions. Credit: D. Hathaway/NASA/MSFC. [more]

During Solar Max, huge sunspots and intense solar flares are a daily occurance. Auroras appear in Florida. Radiation storms knock out satellites. Radio blackouts frustrate hams. The last such episode took place in the years around 2000-2001.

During Solar Minimum, the opposite occurs. Solar flares are almost non-existant while whole weeks go by without a single, tiny sunspot to break the monotony of the blank sun. This is what we are experiencing now. Although minima are a normal aspect of the solar cycle, some observers are questioning the length of the ongoing minimum, now slogging through its 3rd year.

"It does seem like it's taking a long time," allows Hathaway, "but I think we're just forgetting how long a solar minimum can last." In the early 20th century there were periods of quiet lasting almost twice as long as the current spell. (See the end notes for an example.) Most researchers weren't even born then.

Hathaway has studied international sunspot counts stretching all the way back to 1749 and he offers these statistics: "The average period of a solar cycle is 131 months with a standard deviation of 14 months. Decaying solar cycle 23 (the one we are experiencing now) has so far lasted 142 months--well within the first standard deviation and thus not at all abnormal. The last available 13-month smoothed sunspot number was 5.70. This is bigger than 12 of the last 23 solar minimum values."

In summary, "the current minimum is not abnormally low or long."

The longest minimum on record, the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715, lasted an incredible 70 years. Sunspots were rarely observed and the solar cycle seemed to have broken down completely. The period of quiet coincided with the Little Ice Age, a series of extraordinarily bitter winters in Earth's northern hemisphere. Many researchers are convinced that low solar activity, acting in concert with increased volcanism and possible changes in ocean current patterns, played a role in that 17th century cooling.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/images/solarcycleupdate/ssn_yearlyNew2.jpg

For reasons no one understands, the sunspot cycle revived itself in the early 18th century and has carried on since with the familiar 11-year period. Because solar physicists do not understand what triggered the Maunder Minimum or exactly how it influenced Earth's climate, they are always on the look-out for signs that it might be happening again.

The quiet of 2008 is not the second coming of the Maunder Minimum, believes Hathaway. "We have already observed a few sunspots from the next solar cycle," he says. (See Solar Cycle 24 Begins.) "This suggests the solar cycle is progressing normally."

What's next? Hathaway anticipates more spotless days1, maybe even hundreds, followed by a return to Solar Max conditions in the years around 2012.

Stay tuned to Science@NASA for updates.

Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

Lorne Gunter on the Cold Winter

This was posted today by Lorne Gunter in the National post. The real shock to me is the admission that our climatic model was deliberately corrected for the X factor and that this factor has essentially acted as a smoke screen for the CO2 hypothesis. Instead of saying that we have a previously unexplained climatic anomaly happening that we do not understand, it was allowed to essentially get completely out of hand.

Now we have located natural physical phenomena that conform to the data and wipes out the need for any linkage between CO2 and global warming.

Otherwise, the forty year wind and ocean cycle fits the data very nicely and the sun spot delay is still rather minor and will hopefully kick in shortly.

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

How spoiled are we? Half of all entries into an average are often below average. This is a long overdue cold winter.

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The fact that either source has to be called on is a pretty good indication that it was centuries ago perhaps coincident with the little ice age.

The ice is back. – and it will also be back every winter so long as the earth maintains its tilt.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

This is not a problem per se unless we have a repeat next year. The added thickness conforms to a normal winter freeze up. 2007 was exceptional in every way. A string of normal winters will certainly rebuild the perennial sea ice.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

How in hell could a climate model be generated that failed to recognize the linkage between wind and water movement utterly escapes me. Perhaps the same modeling experts that swore by a linear model for sea ice loss that happily projected an end game one hundred years from now. We are now discovering what a piece of modeling rubbish these folks have been relying on. So far we have three fudge factors having a non linear handshake. I sure hope they do not blame the mathematicians they never hired.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

How the devil can we say that? Our knowledge of sunspot inactivity was utterly non existent for most of the time period described. We have attempted to piece a bit of it together using a proxy or two but our knowledge is no better than conjecture. Current low activity is cyclical and we are now supposedly slightly late in the renewal of activity. This is not a phenomena known to operate on a precise time clock.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

The real question that needs to be answered is where are we in this forty year wind cycle that looks a lot like the forty year hurricane cycle? And is the change over precipitous? It is not to early to know this.