Highly Unusual And Unexpected

This is not about some decline in an economic indicator especially not about the latest trends in unemployment claims. It is about the coming of a quiet sun.

A missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles say that our Sun is heading for a rest period even as it is acting up for the first time in years, according to scientists at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).

As the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, begins to ramp up toward maximum, independent studies of the solar interior, visible surface, and the corona indicate that the next 11-year solar sunspot cycle, Cycle 25, will be greatly reduced or may not happen at all.

Will we be heading for a period of cooling as we have seen in other periods of a dormant sun such as the Maunder Minimum? No one knows. But it does seem stupid to be shutting down coal fired power plants in the face of that possibility.

The Sun Erupts

My post Some Interesting Science Papers drew some sceptical responses. Fine. Theories should be picked apart until we can be sure they will hold water. But we should also be on the look out for new data.

And here is a piece of new (for me) data that will knock your socks off. Vast Solar Eruption Shocks NASA and Raises Doubts on Sun Theory. That would be the old sun theory: the sun is a big ball of mostly Hydrogen gas that gets its energy from the fusion of that gas.

We are forever being told that the sun is a vast gas ball of hydrogen and helium at the center of our solar system. But new evidence may help prove this isn’t the case after all, according to solar experts who say the sun has an iron core.

A stunned NASA admits, “Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big. It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity.”

The vast global solar eruption covers ~10^9 km of the solar photosphere. The US space agency reports, “The whole solar hemisphere erupted simultaneously in an avalanche effect that had been triggered in the tiny solar core and propagated outwards” (NASA: Dec 13, 2010).

That is interesting. To get a whole hemisphere to erupt something has to happen in the core and propagate outward. It can't happen on the surface that way. If it was a surface effect the disturbance would have a different center.

Scientists have confirmed that the explosion that occurred on August 1, 2010 is unprecedented in recorded history and caused filaments of magnetism to snap and explode creating enormous shock waves that raced across the stellar surface. This caused billion-ton clouds of hot gas to billow out into space.

This unprecedented event is claimed to give support to an alternative theory long held by Professor Oliver K. Manuel, a Postdoctoral Fellow of the University of California, Berkeley.

Oliver and I have joined in a number of discussions about Global Warming on the 'Net. He is a sceptic of the CO2 theory (not the effect - the magnitude).

Controversy about our understanding of the sun has been fomenting for years. In 1980, solar science researcher, Ralph E. Juergens lamented, “The modern astrophysical concept that ascribes the sun’s energy to thermonuclear reactions deep in the solar interior is contradicted by nearly every observable aspect of the sun.”

The astrophysics establishment has long shunned the idea of the sun having any such iron core. But this momentous event is consistent with the theory that there is a tiny dense neutron core the size of a city powered by neutron repulsion. Professor Manuel believes there is a super-conducting iron-rich shell the size of a moon or small planet surrounding the neutron core.

Backing the theory is astrophysicist Carl A. Rouse, who calculated a tiny iron-rich solar core from helioseismology data, but he has also been ignored up until now.

Up 'tll now. The times they are a changin. FYI Oliver is the University of Missouri-Rolla and ex-NASA man.

The delighted University of Missouri-Rolla and ex-NASA man says that the event, contrary to modern theory, is new evidence for the Sun’s tiny (~10 km), dense neutron core being powered by neutron repulsion, and/or the super-conducting iron-rich shell (~10^3 km) surrounding the neutron core.

"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before."

The four key points made by the iron core theorists are:

1. We do not “see” the Sun;
2. We see waste products emitting light when they reach the top of the Sun's atmosphere (photosphere);
3. The "smoke" we see is (H and He) from a neutron star;
4. The global eruption was triggered by the tiny, energetic, dense neutron-rich core of the Sun or by the iron-rich mantle that surrounds it.

Time for ‘Truthing’ Says Solar Professor

This monumental solar eruption may finally challenge the accepted theories about how the key driver of Earth’s climate actually works. Manuel sagely observes, “Although NASA seems to be catching up, after decades of ‘group-think’ it will be very difficult for NASA scientists to comprehend the Sun.”

Indeed, this latest evidence is unsettling not just for accepted ideas about how our Sun works but it also impacts assumptions of how the Sun effects Earth’s climate. Oliver insists “ Science is a continuous process of ‘truthing’ without ever claiming that you have the ‘whole truth.’”

So there may be something to the idea that the sun has a neutron/iron core. We shall see.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Spots? I Don't See No Dang Spots

A lot of spotless days have come and gone since the video was made.

At the risk of triggering a new sunspot by talking about it, I’ll cautiously mention that by GMT time midnight tomorrow, August 10th, we will possibly have a 30 day stretch of no sunspots at a time when cycle 24 has been forecast by many to be well underway.

Sun spots are kind of like the weather. Every one talks about them. No one does anything about them.

In any case the sun, like the climate, is not following earlier predictions.

You can read more about the number of spotless days at the link provided. What does it mean in terms of climate? No one knows for sure.

Sun Spot Sighted

You can see a close up here. The folks at Space Weather report it is a spot from the old cycle. The new cycle hasn't really got going yet.

Tiny, old-cycle sunspot 1016 is disappearing over the sun's western limb.

There is a lively discussion of what it means at Watts Up With That?.

A Clean Sun

Yes. Space Weather Dot Com says the sun is still very clean. That is to say spotless. The spotlessness of the sun has become so interesting to the general public that they have added some new numbers about spotless days to their daily sunspot number. Which is zero today. The added information looks like this today:

Current Stretch: 6 days
2009 total: 103 days (88%)
Since 2004: 614 days
Typical Solar Min: 485 days

So what to expect next? No one knows for sure since, like climate, the exact nature of what is going on in the sun is not fully understood. And even if we thought we understood it, new information could turn up that would invalidate our current understanding. Because - unlike colonies - science is never settled.

Stop Global Warming For Free

An easy low cost way of stopping global warming has been found.

All we have to do is keep the sun from having spots. Or at least greatly reduce their number thus weakening its output. It will cause a Little Ice Age.

So far it is working.

Now for the bad news. It seems volcanic eruptions follow solar output. High solar output correlates with fewer volcanic eruptions.

climatologist Cliff Harris and meteorologist Randy Mann, who, amongst other things, run a website called Long Range Weather, have created an absolutely marvelous long-term global temperature chart that wasn't in Gore's movie, and every climate alarmist in the media desperately hopes you never see it.

You can see the chart by clicking the link. It is very interesting.

...we believe that temperatures are beginning to cool again, particularly in north- central Canada where this summer there was only about 2 weeks between damaging freezes from late June into mid-July. One of our Harris-Mann Climatology clients went fishing between July 10-13 in northwestern Saskatchewan and reported "piles of ice" still on the ground in the region and temperatures close to the freezing mark.

Anecdotes are nice. How about some measurements?

How about a graph of earth temperatures. What does the graph show? Sharply declining temperatures with the current "global temp" equal to the global temp in 1940. So I guess reducing solar output is having the desired effect.

It looks like temps are going down very fast. We may need to burn a lot of coal just to keep warm. You don't suppose all this CO2 hysteria is a con, do you?

Sun Spot Link Added

I have added a link to SpaceWeather.Com near the top of the sidebar so you can easily keep track of the current state of the sun re: Sun Spots, plus lots of other neat stuff.

There are no sun spots today. So the official start of cycle 24 is delayed yet again. The few small spots we have seen so far from cycle 24 do not amount to an official start of the cycle. Because that start is computed we will not actually know when it has started until about 6 months after its actual start. One indication though is that we should see some fairly large spots on a regular basis. So far we have seen a few spots (about every month or two) and they are small.

If the solar scientists are right about how the sun affects climate (by its actual output and by its magnetic field modulating clouds) we are in for some cooler weather not to mention a cooler climate.

A Spot Spotted

It looks like we may have a start to Sunspot Cycle 24. Space Weather has a nice picture.

Sunspot activity is thought to influence climate. A lack of sunspots during the Maunder Minimum is believed to have caused a Little Ice Age. There have been other such periods such as the Dalton Minimum.

If this is a weaker sunspot cycle than we have been experiencing lately we may be in for some very cool weather for a number of years. Gateway Pundit has been keeping track of unusual cold and snow incidents lately.

Some scientists believe the recent cooling (.3 to .4 deg C last year) is part of a 30 year Pacific Decadal Oscillation and that we could definitely be in for 30 years of cooling temperatures. Of course that could mean that the 30 years of warming we have recently experienced were the other phase of that oscillation as well. Kind of funny that an effect so well known (since 1996) was not included in the computer models until the recent cooling forced a re-evaluation.

Lubos Motl Looks At Sun Spots

Lubos sent me an e-mail thanking me for Clouds In Chambers and suggesting I have a look at Sunspots. He shows the correlations between sunspots and global temperatures.

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

The Solar Conveyor Has Slowed

NASA says the solar conveyor has slowed. The solar conveyor speed predicts the sunspot level two cycles in advance, about 20 years.

"Normally, the conveyor belt moves about 1 meter per second—walking pace," says Hathaway. "That's how it has been since the late 19th century." In recent years, however, the belt has decelerated to 0.75 m/s in the north and 0.35 m/s in the south. "We've never seen speeds so low."

According to theory and observation, the speed of the belt foretells the intensity of sunspot activity ~20 years in the future. A slow belt means lower solar activity; a fast belt means stronger activity. The reasons for this are explained in the Science@NASA story Solar Storm Warning.

"The slowdown we see now means that Solar Cycle 25, peaking around the year 2022, could be one of the weakest in centuries," says Hathaway.

What does all this have to do with the climate on earth? Let us look at the climate when sunspot levels were low:

...the Sporer, Maunder, and Dalton minima coincide with the colder periods of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1450 to 1820. More recently it was discovered that the sunspot number during 1861-1989 shows a remarkable parallelism with the simultaneous variation in northern hemisphere mean temperatures (2). There is an even better correlation with the length of the solar cycle, between years of the highest numbers of sunspots. For example, the temperature anomaly was - 0.4 K in 1890 when the cycle was 11.7 years, but + 0.25 K in 1989 when the cycle was 9.8 years. Some critics of the theory of man-induced global warming have seized on this discovery to criticize the greenhouse gas theory.

All this evokes the important question of how sunspots affect the Earth's climate. To answer this question, we need to know how total solar irradiance received by the Earth is affected by sunspot activity.

Intuitively one may assume the that total solar irradiance would decrease as the number of (optically dark) sunspots increased. However direct satellite measurements of irradiance have shown just the opposite to be the case. This means that more sunspots deliver more energy to the atmosphere, so that global temperatures should rise.

If sunspots are going to decline in the near future the global warming era may be over. Especially if the sun's effect on Clouds turns out to be affected by solar activity as some scientists have experimentally proved.

So are things warming up now?

1. Since about 2002 there has been NO statistically significant global average warming in the lower and middle troposphere,

and

2. Since about 1995 there has been NO statistically significant cooling in the stratosphere.

The IPCC SPM conclusion that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” is wrong as it ignores the lack of such warming in recent years by these other metrics of climate system heat changes...

Well what do you know? In addition global temperatures have been on the decline for the last few years. We had a spike in 2004 I believe, but otherwise temperatures have been declining since about 2000 or so.