Solar Science

Just a couple of interesting articles that I think deserve wider readership.

Henrik Svensmark on the coming global cooling: “enjoy global warming while it lasts” (this is a Google translation from Danish, so the English is a little crazy)

While the sun sleeps

HENRIK SVENSMARK, Professor, DTU, Copenhagen

Indeed, global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth, on the contrary. This means that projections of future climate is unpredictable, writes Henrik Svensmark.

The star which keeps us alive, has over the last few years almost no sunspots, which are the usual signs of the sun’s magnetic activity.

Last week, reported the scientific team behind Sohosatellitten (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) that the number of sunspot-free days suggest that solar activity is heading towards its lowest level in about 100 years’. Everything indicates that the Sun is moving into a hibernation-like state, and the obvious question is whether it has any significance for us on Earth.

If you ask the International Panel on Climate Change IPCC, representing the current consensus on climate change, so the answer is a reassuring ‘nothing’. But history and recent research suggests that it is probably completely wrong. Let us take a closer look at why.

Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the medieval warmth. It was a period when frosts in May was an almost unknown phenomenon and of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. For example, China’s population doubled over this period. But after about 1300, the earth began to get colder and it was the beginning of the period we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold period all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Swedes [were surprised to see Denmark to freeze over in ice], and the Thames in London froze repeatedly. But more serious was the long periods of crop failure, which resulted in a poorly nourished population, because of disease and hunger [population was reduced] by about 30 per cent in Europe.

Read on here

New linkage between solar cycle and Earth’s atmosphere discovered

Scientists discover surprise in Earth’s upper atmosphere

By Stuart Wolpert

Heejeong Kim and Larry Lyons

UCLA atmospheric scientists have discovered a previously unknown basic mode of energy transfer from the solar wind to the Earth’s magnetosphere. The research, federally funded by the National Science Foundation, could improve the safety and reliability of spacecraft that operate in the upper atmosphere.

“It’s like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun. This discovery is like finding it got hotter when the sun went down,” said Larry Lyons, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a co-author of the research, which is in press in two companion papers in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The sun, in addition to emitting radiation, emits a stream of ionized particles called the solar wind that affects the Earth and other planets in the solar system. The solar wind, which carries the particles from the sun’s magnetic field, known as the interplanetary magnetic field, takes about three or four days to reach the Earth. When the charged electrical particles approach the Earth, they carve out a highly magnetized region — the magnetosphere — which surrounds and protects the Earth.

Charged particles carry currents, which cause significant modifications in the Earth’s magnetosphere. This region is where communications spacecraft operate and where the energy releases in space known as substorms wreak havoc on satellites, power grids and communications systems.

The rate at which the solar wind transfers energy to the magnetosphere can vary widely, but what determines the rate of energy transfer is unclear.

“We thought it was known, but we came up with a major surprise,” said Lyons, who conducted the research with Heejeong Kim, an assistant researcher in the UCLA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and other colleagues.

Read on here

The SOHO instruments are offline while new software commands are uploaded. As the main instruments are offline, the other CCD systems are being baked out (heated up to clear dead pixels)

From Spaceweather.com

Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is having a minor problem. SOHO’s white light solar telescope is temporarily offline while new commands and data tables are uploaded to the spacecraft. Normal operations are expected to resume in a few days.

Hence no updates on the state of the Sun.

The Sun could have a sudden burst of activity and we’d never know.

The Sun has gone back to blank after having had just one sunspot group that caused otherwise rational people to go off their heads…

Here’s the magnetogram of the Sun showing precisely nothing that presages any sunspot formation:

Magnetogram of the Sun 16/07/2009

As a comparison, here is the sun image from the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope at 304 ångstroms for today and near solar maximum in 2000 by way of comparison

Sun at 17/07/2009 (left) and near solar maximum 31/05/2000 (right)

Now its easy to see how quiet the Sun really is at the moment. The prominences are weak, the coronal holes are very small, the corona (the solar atmosphere) shrunken.

All of this can be seen to be normal behaviour for the Sun, except that this hiatus between Solar Cycle 23 finally winding down and the next cycle is unprecedented in nearly a hundred years. (By the way, the overuse of “unprecedented” by climate alarmists has me wincing at using it as a cliché)

Eventually the solar cycle must return. The question is whether solar scientists gain insight into the behaviour of the Sun by understanding why their models failed (see below). The result can only be better science.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Sun Has Spots, Finally (space.com)
• Sun Entering Weakest Cycle Since 1928 (usnews.com)
• Sun’s Strange Lull Explained (space.com)

Hot off the press.

NASA announces yet another explanation for the late arrival of Solar Cycle 24 (nearly two years after it was supposed to have started).

June 17, 2009: The sun is in the pits of a century-class solar minimum, and sunspots have been puzzlingly scarce for more than two years. Now, for the first time, solar physicists might understand why.

At an American Astronomical Society press conference today in Boulder, Colorado, researchers announced that a jet stream deep inside the sun is migrating slower than usual through the star’s interior, giving rise to the current lack of sunspots.

Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, used a technique called helioseismology to detect and track the jet stream down to depths of 7,000 km below the surface of the sun. The sun generates new jet streams near its poles every 11 years, they explained to a room full of reporters and fellow scientists. The streams migrate slowly from the poles to the equator and when a jet stream reaches the critical latitude of 22 degrees, new-cycle sunspots begin to appear.

Original Caption:
Above: A helioseismic map of the solar interior. Tilted red-yellow bands trace solar jet streams. Black contours denote sunspot activity. When the jet streams reach a critical latitude around 22 degrees, sunspot activity intensifies.

Howe and Hill found that the stream associated with the next solar cycle has moved sluggishly, taking three years to cover a 10 degree range in latitude compared to only two years for the previous solar cycle.

The jet stream is now, finally, reaching the critical latitude, heralding a return of solar activity in the months and years ahead.

“It is exciting to see”, says Hill, “that just as this sluggish stream reaches the usual active latitude of 22 degrees, a year late, we finally begin to see new groups of sunspots emerging.”

The current solar minimum has been so long and deep, it prompted some scientists to speculate that the sun might enter a long period with no sunspot activity at all, akin to the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century. This new result dispells those concerns. The sun’s internal magnetic dynamo is still operating, and the sunspot cycle is not “broken.”

So we should be seeing SC24 sunspots appearing now that the jet stream has reached the critical latitude of 22° ?

Let’s check out of the window:

The spotless disk of the Sun

Magnetogram shows little magnetic behaviour

OK, maybe it was just an off day on the Sun. What about the trend?

So far, indistinguishable from zero.

Here’s the 3D view of what the solar scientists are tracking/modelling (click to see the movie):

This movie reveals motions of the Sun’s interior as measured with helioseismology on data from GONG and SOHO/MDI. East to west motion is color coded: blue is slow, red is fast. A red band in the outer third of the Sun moves slowly down from near each pole toward the equator; that band is the jet stream that is associated with sunpot emergence and the solar cycle. As of early 2009 the Cycle 24 jet streams have just reached N/S 22 degrees latitude, and new sunspots are beginning to emerge.

Now I hate to be a killjoy, but all of this effort has failed to convince me that a deep down “jetstream” of charged plasma reaching a “critical” latitude can explain why the Sun remains so very quiet.

On SolarCycle24.com, they’ve got yet another sun speck recorded yesterday, that by today had disappeared. Exactly the same behaviour we’ve been having for 12 months with no end in sight.

This blog has quiet periods just like the Sun

I’ve just been in e-mail correspondance with Dr Kenneth Tapping, asking him to comment on the progress of the solar minimum and his opinion on the likely size of SC24 when it does deign to appear.

Dear Dr Tapping

After you published your rebuke to Investor’s Business Daily, I put your entire reply onto my blog (see http://solarscience.auditblogs.com/2008/04/22/ken-tapping-the-current-solar-minimum/ ) which I notice is the second listing when anyone googles your name. I hope you didn’t mind.

Since that reply the Sun has appeared to have gone into an even deeper slumber than it was when you wrote your article, more than a year ago. You ended that article with a statement

AT THE MOMENT IT IS UNJUSTIFIED TO ASSUME THE SUN IS UNDERGOING A SIGNIFICANT CHANGE IN BEHAVIOUR. ON THE BASIS OF SUNSPOT NUMBER DATA, WE CANNOT ASSUME ANYTHING ODD IS HAPPENING UNLESS THE NEXT CYCLE DELAYS ITS START INTO 2009 OR 2010

Well it’s now nearly mid-2009 and the only spots to be seen very very occasionally are SC23 polarity.

Do you have any further comment on the Sun’s (lack of) activity? Are we close to unusual times in solar activity? Is the sun undergoing a significant change in behaviour?

Best regards

John

He replied [with my emphasis]

Hi John,

I’ve just got back here from the Space Weather Workshop, which was held in Boulder, Colorado. The opinion there is that the next cycle is coming, although forecasts are for a low cycle with a late start.

Our radio telescopes have detected no sign of the new cycle yet. However a statistical study of indices that I have been doing suggests the Sun did show a significant change in behaviour over the last few years, but that things are starting to slip back towards the normal situation, which could suggest the Sun is at least showing signs of waking up again. It’s deciding to take an additional lie-in cannot be ruled out.

Activity is certainly very low.

Regards,

Ken

When I asked for that “statistical study of indices”, Dr Tapping replied that it was being submitted to a journal and he’d let me know when its in pre-print – which is fine by me.

I think it’s fair to say that all solar scientists have been caught out by the length of the solar minimum and the delay to SC24. In subsequent posts I’ll be reviewing the prognostications of solar models, in an effort to understand what exactly goes into predictions of solar cycles.

In other news, as reported on Watts Up With That:

NOAA/SWPC will be releasing an update to the Solar Cycle 24 Prediction on Friday, May 8, 2009 at noon Eastern Daylight Time (1600 UT) at a joint ESA/NASA/NOAA press conference

I can hardly wait.

Not a speck. Not a low latitude could-be-a-SC23 spot.

The real deal.

Sun on 13-10-2008 showing SC24 spot

The polarity is definitely reversed from the previous cycle. Its a high latitude spot. The companion spot is reverse polarity to the main spot.

Looks good to me.

The STEREO image (allows us to look around the limb of the Sun and see what’s coming) suggest an even larger area of activity at about the same latitude.

Stereo Image 12-10-2008

Now we wait to see if the SC24 persists.

The magnetogram shows the SC24 polarity:

Magnetogram from 13-10-2008 showing SC24 polarity

The solar magnetic field for September has just been published (as graphed by Anthony Watts) and shows the magnetic field to be at a historically low level, as NASA had already noted.

This may just prove to be the bottom of the Solar Cycle (yes, I’m sticking my neck out). Now we wait to see what happens next, because I’m not convinced that anyone really has a clue.

Yesterday I pulled this magnetogram picture from the SOHO website

Ignoring the phage in the Southern Hemisphere (which is SC23 polarized, natch) there is no magnetic activity at all to speak of.

Throw in the result announced by NASA in the last few days:

“The sun’s million mile-per-hour solar wind inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system. It influences how things work here on Earth and even out at the boundary of our solar system where it meets the galaxy,” said Dave McComas, Ulysses’ solar wind instrument principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “Ulysses data indicate the solar wind’s global pressure is the lowest we have seen since the beginning of the space age.”

and

In 2007, Ulysses made its third rapid scan of the solar wind and magnetic field from the sun’s south to north pole. When the results were compared with observations from the previous solar cycle, the strength of the solar wind pressure and the magnetic field embedded in the solar wind were found to have decreased by 20 percent. The field strength near the spacecraft has decreased by 36 percent.

“The sun cycles between periods of great activity and lesser activity,” Smith said. “Right now, we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated.”

Its clear that the Sun has entered a phase that we might never have seen before with anything like modern instrumentation.

The spots on the Sun have become so evanescent and small that we now have the ludicrous arguments over whether a darkened spot that lasts a few hours is counted as a spot or a speck. Anthony Watts refers to this as “Speckwatch” and furthermore even these specks have been SC23 not SC24 polarized.

What is clear is that these spots or specks are way below the range at which our scientific ancestors from the 18th and 19th Centuries could ever have detected.

I’ve not updated the blog for a few months, but its doesn’t mean that nothing has happened in solar science. I’ve just been doing other things, OK?

I’m going to be sending through a large number of posts in the next few days and weeks, as there have been a lot of conflicting signals about whether Solar Cycle 24 has really turned up or not, about whether the Sun has gone into hibernation or not, about the effects on the Earth’s climate (or not).

Be back shortly.

I copy this here because strange things happen to comments on scienceblogs.com. This is a response to this post

Its fascinating Josh, that its not that Sarah Palin is denying that
the Earth’s climate is changing. Simply Gov Palin is making it clear
she does believe that ascribing all or most of the climate change to
mankind’s activities. And she’s far from being alone even in the
scientific community.

Of course, the term “climate change” has been radically redefined to
imply “man-made climate change through the increase of greenhouse
gases, principally carbon dioxide”, and so “climate change denial” or
its variants is simply skepticism over the extent to which recent
climate changes can be ascribed to man-made causes. And of course to
use the term “denier” implies moral depravity rather than skepticism.

So there’s nothing at all in Gov. Palin’s remarks that she needs to
retract, for she, unlike you Josh, does not believe that the climate
change of the last few years is anything out of the ordinary. In that
respect she is solidly with the scientific mainstream and you are very
definitely on the extreme lunatic fringe.

The only reason why this is even controversial is because of the
Mann Hockey Stick – the totem of climate change alarmism – has been
shown to be a shocking fake. What the Hockey Stick did (and like
lemmings, the IPCC followed) was allege that natural climate change in
the last thousand years or so was tiny and benign. And you believed it
Josh.

What has now been fully shown is that the Hockey Stick is actually
an impression of the growth pattern of a group of bristlecone pines in
Colorado. In trying to justify the extraordinary weight given to these
trees in the reconstruction Michael Mann even claimed that these trees
occupied a “sweet spot” to be able to respond to “the global
temperature field” – a remarkable claim that neither you nor any of
your friends can be bothered to explain how a group of trees on a
mountain side in Colorado can fail to respond to local temperature
change yet can somehow respond to a statistical index called “global
temperature”. There’s probably a group of trees somewhere in the world
which show a growth record similar to the Dow Jones 30 – a spurious
correlation like the Bristlecone Pines of Colorado.

That’s because it is magic. Real voodoo. Not science.

So while you’re trying (and failing) to find a single ice core that
shows carbon dioxide rise PRECEDING temperature rise [they all show the
reverse Josh and by around eight centuries], while you’re finding that
an acknowledged expert on PCA (who incidentally believes in AGW) finds
that the Mann Hockey Stick’s decentered PCA to be simply wrong and the
Stick itself to be the result of “dubious statistics”.

I can criticize Gov Palin on many other issues, for I am no
Republican in the American sense of the word. But on the issue of
climate change she is the one talking sense and not you.

The Mann Hockey Stick and its variants are all instruments of real
climate change denial – the preposterous and false notion that the
large scale climate changes of the past never happened while the
present minor changes in climate are hyped up to ludicrous levels. Just
last week James Hansen testified that the opening of one coal-fired
power station in England would lead to the extinction of 400 species -
an extraordinary claim that you will spend exactly no time on verifying
because hey! Life’s too short.

The Prologue

Although some might construe this as an attack upon people I like and respect, that isn’t the intention and I don’t believe that the people I quote here would take it as a personal attack because they’re grown-up, mature people. If its a criticism of them, then its also a criticism of myself.

The Apocalyptic Temptation

It is historically axiomatic that humankind is obsessed with the future, the “undiscovered country”. It is also axiomatic that humankind has tended to fear the future, based mainly on a lack of imagination coupled with a willingness to extrapolate current trends well into the future, often beyond all reason.

If the Global Warming Panic has taught us anything, its taught us the strong propensity of highly educated people to construct trends from noisy data and make startling pronouncements, projections, predictions of future catastrophe if current trends continue. This latest Apocalyptic scare has come at a time when, at least in the Western culture, formerly dominant religious beliefs have fallen by the wayside – those beliefs of course having an Apocalyptic Day of Judgment to represent the final gambit to believe in the final triumph of a particular religious orthodoxy over its enemies, ie non-believers.

It also appears to be a constant of human history that those who claim to be able to predict the future are given unusual privilege within the society, rather than scorn or skepticism. Apparently successful short term predictions give the would-be prophet a measure of gravitas and even elevated position within the society. It appears that no society is immune to this process – from the earliest recorded stories about the Pharoahs of Egypt through to the current President of the United States, the person or group who makes successful short-term predictions gains political, social and economic power.

Its not difficult to see why.

The obsession of any State, of any civilization is focussed upon a few key levers to retain power. Amongst them, possibly the most important lever of power is the price and availability of food to the population – lose control of that key lever and without exception that State or civilization will fall soon after, regardless of the might of the military to suppress dissent, because even soldiers have got to eat.

A lesson from ancient history

A classic example of the power of the prophet and the realities of political power occurs in the book of Genesis. The Pharoah came from a long dynasty of people who were credited by some divine power with mastery over the course of the climate including the regular flooding by the Nile which would restore soil fertility. The Pharoahs were believed to cause the rising and setting of the Sun, and were believed to be avatars of the Gods of Ancient Egypt.

So when a particular Pharoah has a recurrent dream about seven fat cows, followed by seven thin cows who ate the fat cows but remained thin, followed by seven big ears of wheat and seven withered stalks of wheat that appeared to eat the fat stalks but remained withered, the Pharoah knew that this vision was important and checked through with all of his regular entourage of soothsayers, astrologers and scryers, none appeared to give a reasonable answer until Joseph, a jewish slave offered to interpret and what he said (in effect) was this:

The seven fat cows and seven fat ears of wheat represent seven years of agricultural properity, but then the thin cows and the withered stalks represent seven years of famine.

So what did Pharoah do? He instituted an immediate agricultural intervention program to build and maintain grain stores and set a price floor in food commodities to encourage the farmers to grow as much as possible knowing that there was a minimum price upon it.

Why did Pharoah do that? Basic economics – had he not started the intervention program then during the seven years of abundance the price of food would have fallen through the floor and the farmers would have planted and herded less and less otherwise they would have lost a lot of money. Then, when the famine hit, the price of food would rocket, the people would go hungry, then so would the army and then Pharoah’s dynasty would end in a bloodbath.

What happened to the prophet? He became part of the Pharonic Entourage, given power and prestige (and one of the Pharoah’s daughters as well). Joseph, according to Genesis, became the key person in charge of the Egypt Food Intervention Programme, a Bronze Age version of the EU Common Agricultural Policy. He died a wealthy man.

Price stability in food is all important in the stability of nations, always has been and always will. Civilization collapse is intimately related to the price and availability of food, and by extension to the vagaries of climate change.

So from the very earliest times, the importance of predicting future climate (or appearing to) is a key lever to the continuation of power by any State. When control over the price and availability is lost, then down comes the State, like the Soviet Union in 1989 or Suharto’s Indonesia in the 1990s after the price of food skyrocketed when it became scarce. Its happening now in Zimbabwe and if it wasn’t for China, it would be happening in Burma as well.

Little wonder therefore that people who appear to predict the future course of food production (or at least construct scenario that point to the same thing) are given extraordinary credence by people in power. That’s how a mountebank named Trofim Lysenko managed to become President of the Russian Academy under Stalin and have Russian orthodox geneticists sent to gulags when they opposed his pseudoscience – because he promised Stalin a quick agricultural fix that would feed the masses.

If the lure of being a saviour to a civilization didn’t mesh so well with the needs of leaders of all kinds to maintain political power, then its doubtful that anyone would do it. The risks are extremely high that circumstances will turn against the prophet, and the leader anxious to preserve his or her own skin, will very quickly dismiss a prophet who failed in his forecasts.

I’m sure that everyone who reads this, can think of many occasions in history where leaders have been beguiled, for a time, by a charlatan who foretells certain disaster unless a certain program, usually having political or economic ramifications,  and must be enacted with that very person in charge.

The modern cause of science using the scientific method, which we think of as foundational to our Western societies is a relatively recent iteration of a process which has been going on for centuries. It is not perfect, nor has science ever eliminated the human factors that distort science and bring discredit to its practitioners.

In the next part, I want to discuss the modern fascination with prophecy and the failures to enact even basic safeguards against charlatanism and the latent human desire for apocalyptic sensationalism.

And it involves all of us.