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

Some Interesting Science Papers

My friend Physicist Oliver K. Manuel has a paper out explaining that the sun is not an ordinary star that "burns" strictly Hydrogen, but a neutron star with a Hydrogen mantle. The paper is rather technical but I can give you the flavor of it with an excerpt from the Conclusion.

Dynamic competition between gravitational attraction and neutron repulsion sustains our dynamic universe, the Sun, and life on planet Earth. Nuclear matter in the solar system is mostly dissociating rather than coalescing (fusing together). As shown in the above table, the potential energy per nucleon in the solar core is almost twice that available from hydrogen fusion. If the bulk of the Sun's mass is in a central neutron star and luminosity comes from the reactions listed above, then solar luminosity might have been higher by ~1-2% during the critical evolutionary period when the Standard Solar Model predicts frozen oceans and a "faint early Sun" [121]. Circular polarized light from the neutron star may have been separated d- and l-amino acids before the appearance of life [101].

The paper seems to explain a lot of things about our solar system and the sun. Like why life on Earth is made up of almost exclusively right hand molecules.

The second paper deals with superconductors. The Talk Polywell guys gave me the hint. What is so special about the new superconductor? It is made by shining laser light on a non-conductor.

The team from Oxford[England - ed.], Germany and Japan are said to have observed conclusive signatures of superconductivity after hitting a non-superconductor with a strong burst of laser light.

‘We have used light to turn a normal insulator into a superconductor,’ said Prof Andrea Cavalleri of the Department of Physics at Oxford University and the Max Planck Department for Structural Dynamics, Hamburg. ‘That’s already exciting in terms of what it tells us about this class of materials. But the question now is can we take a material to a much higher temperature and make it a superconductor?’

The material the researchers used is closely related to high-temperature copper oxide superconductors, but the arrangement of electrons and atoms normally act to frustrate any electronic current.

In the journal Science, they describe how a strong infrared laser pulse was used to perturb the positions of some of the atoms in the material. The compound, held at a temperature just 20 degrees above absolute zero, almost instantaneously became a superconductor for a fraction of a second, before relaxing back to its normal state.

Why is this important? After all we already have superconductors that operate continuously at that temperature without lasers.

‘We have shown that the non-superconducting state and the superconducting one are not that different in these materials, in that it takes only a millionth of a millionth of a second to make the electrons ‘synch up’ and superconduct,’ said Professor Cavalleri. ‘This must mean that they were essentially already synched in the non-superconductor, but something was preventing them from sliding around with zero resistance. The precisely tuned laser light removes the frustration, unlocking the superconductivity.’

The advance immediately offers a new way to probe with great control how superconductivity arises in this class of materials.

The researchers are hopeful it could also offer a new route to obtaining superconductivity at higher temperatures. If superconductors that work at room temperature could be achieved, it would open up many more technological applications.

So right now it is all about research. But you never know what you might learn if you start poking with the proper stick in the right places.

Some books:

The Diversity Of Neutron Stars: Nearby Thermally Emitting Neutron Stars And The Compact Central Objects In Supernova Remnants

Superconductivity: A Very Short Introduction

Introduction to Superconductivity: Second Edition

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?.

Sun Dims - Bush Responsible

Charles Osgood takes a look at the dimming sun. And it has him worried.

I know you've already got a lot to worry about as it is, but something rather odd is going on --- on the Sun.

The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity --- and last year, it was supposed to have heated up --- and, at its peak, would have a tumultuous boiling atmosphere, spitting out flares and huge chunks of super-hot gas.

Instead, it hit a 50-year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity. Right now, the sun is the dimmest it's been in nearly a century.

Did you know that? It's true. Astronomers are baffled by it, but has the press covered the story? Hardly at all. Is the government doing anything about it? No, it's not even in the Obama budget or any Congressional earmarks.

But Obama has only been in office about 3 months (Three Years 8 months 3 weeks and 6 days to go). We know whose fault it really is.

...in Washington, where everything is political, they'll note that it began before President Obama took office --- perhaps "another example of the failed policies of the Bush Administration."

Whew. Now that we know who to blame I think it absolves the current administration of all further responsibility. Thank the Maker.

H/T Watts Up With That

Sun, Sun, Sun, Here It Comes

Click on the picture for an explanation. The big deal is in the lower left.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Tracking Solar

I was looking at a site touting solar energy and remembered an outfit from my hippie days. Zome Works. They have a solar tracker that uses no moving parts. Just liquid in pipes. The liquid is moved by solar energy and because the solar cell holders are balanced it follows the sun. They claim that cell output can increase up to 25% over the course of a day by using their tracking mechanism. Neat stuff.

Steve Baer was the inventor of the Zome Works tracker. He also invented something called Zome Geometry based on the Fibonacci series. Also called the Golden Mean or phi. Its value is equal to the square root of five plus one divided by two. (√5+1)/2 or approximately 1.61803398875. The cute thing about buildings built with parts made in that ratio is that any errors in construction (if they are not too great) tend to cancel out in structures made of many parts. All that happens because the Fibonacci series is self healing. You can learn more about this amazing construction method and Zome construction "toys" at Zome Tool.

Right now the only embodiment of the Zome construction concept is the the Zome Tool "toys". It is too bad the construction industry is so right angle oriented. With a standard set of Zome Panels housing could be much more modular and creative. There is a nice picture of one of Steve Baer's housing constructs at Zome Tool History. Have a look.

I have created a Fibonacci Spread Sheet for those who want to play around. A friend sent a link to The Fibonacci Series which is full of a lot of simple math and interesting observations.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

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.

Climate: The Astrology Model

I was doing some browsing around at Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre's blog and came across a comment from Steve saying the discussion of astrology in relation to climate science was banned. Well you know me. I can't resist a challenge.

OK. I’m going to bite the astrology thing and risk banning.

It seems that reliable ionosphere predictions re: short wave communications can be made by the relative positions of the Earth Mars and Jupiter.

A cursory search did not turn up the “astrology” connection to the ionosphere. I believe I read the piece in Analog Magazine 20 or 30 years ago in a science fact article. I’ll report back if I find a reference.

I found it here at Climate Audit.

Cross Posted at Classical Values


With cites.

CA is the best!

Let me quote a bit from the CA comment linked above:

J.H. Nelson received acclaim from people all over the globe - from those who are interested about what is happening in the earth’s ionosphere. The acclaim is the result of Mr. Nelson’s achievement of 85% accuracy in predicting magnetic storms affecting radio signals. In this book, long awaited by the scientific community, Mr. Nelson discusses in detail his unique method of charting planetary angles to make his predictions. J.H. Nelson became the president of RCA.”

There is little doubt that Nelson’s methods were effective, and to this day the RCA forecasts derived by Nelson’s methods are accepted as reliable by their users, particularly airborne geophysical survey contractors and the like who are very sensitive to the impact of magnetic storms.

An interesting test for scientists is whether they are prepared to look into Nelson’s work from a scientific viewpoint. Unlike certain other scientists, Nelson provided his data and methods, and it has turned out that they are indeed replicable. However, we can anticipate that many “scientists” will dismiss his work as “astrology” or similar pejorative terms, without bothering to actually look at the work.

Climate is much more complicated than the IPCC scientists even imagine.

I found an article on Nelson's work published in the late 40s or early 50s. The accuracy given is around 80% not the 85% the commenter mentioned.

Here is an article about a guy who predicts stock market peaks and troughs by a similar method. According to reports I have read he seems to get good results.

Another article about a scientist, Dr. Landscheidt, who makes climate predictions based on planetary positions. Unlike the above guys who are empirical, he bases his theory on a model of the sun which seems to have some validity.

Here is a more technical explanation of Dr. Landscheidt's theories. Let me just quote from the grabber at the top of the article:

Abstract: Analysis of the sun’s varying activity in the last two millennia indicates that contrary to the IPCC’s speculation about man-made global warming as high as 5.8° C within the next hundred years, a long period of cool climate with its coldest phase around 2030 is to be expected. It is shown that minima in the 80 to 90-year Gleissberg cycle of solar activity, coinciding with periods of cool climate on Earth, are consistently linked to an 83-year cycle in the change of the rotary force driving the sun’s oscillatory motion about the centre of mass of the solar system. As the future course of this cycle and its amplitudes can be computed, it can be seen that the Gleissberg minimum around 2030 and another one around 2200 will be of the Maunder minimum type accompanied by severe cooling on Earth. This forecast should prove skillful as other long-range forecasts of climate phenomena, based on cycles in the sun’s orbital motion, have turned out correct as for instance the prediction of the last three El Niños years before the respective event.

I still wonder if the climate change guys are using a valid model to predict the effects of solar output on the earth. Not just raw power output, but geomagnetism, and currents in space.

One interesting thing I learned through all this is that the orbital period of Jupiter, 11.9 years, is not too far off from the average sunspot cycle which is 11 years. It may just be a coincidence. Or it may be significant. The thing is the IPCC doesn't even address such questions.

I mean really. If climate change is strictly solar driven what will the Climate Changers do? Tax the sun?

Global Cooling

I was reading the Netscape Blog today and came across an interesting post on the politicization of climate science. They report:

More than 120 scientists across seven federal agencies say they have been pressured to remove references to "climate change" and "global warming" from a range of documents, including press releases and communications with Congress.

As usual there is a Usenet type discussion going on. Flame wars (not too bad - Netscape is somewhat moderated). And just people with out a clue. Fun to visit. On the odd occasion.

So out of that discussion I pulled a couple of interesting urls.

The first is from Russia

ST. PETERSBURG, August 25 (RIA Novosti)- Global cooling could develop on Earth in 50 years and have serious consequences before it is replaced by a period of warming in the early 22nd century, a Russian scientist said Friday.

Environmentalists and scientists today focus on the dangers of global warming provoked by man's detrimental effect on the planet's climate, but global cooling - though never widely supported - is a theory postulating an overwhelming cooling of the Earth which could involve glaciation.

"On the basis of our [solar emission] research, we developed a scenario of a global cooling of the Earth's climate by the middle of this century and the beginning of a regular 200-year-long cycle of the climate's global warming at the start of the 22nd century," said the head of the space research sector of the Russian Academy of Sciences' astronomical observatory.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov said he and his colleagues had concluded that a period of global cooling similar to one seen in the late 17th century - when canals froze in the Netherlands and people had to leave their dwellings in Greenland - could start in 2012-2015 and reach its peak in 2055-2060.

I first did a piece on increased solar output in November of 2004. In that piece I suggested that the global warming we have been experiencing is mainly due to increased solar output. Since then further reports have come out adding more weight to the evidence.

Here is a report with links showing the connection between solar activity and climate for the last 1,000 years.

During the Medieval maximum of 1000-1300 there was an extremely large Sunspot which is believed to have warmed the Earth higher than normal. There were no accurate measurements of the weather to call upon during this time but the discovery and colonization of Greenland by Eric the Red supports this hypothesis. Eric was exiled from Iceland for manslaughter and sailed west discovering Greenland. He then led many ships, filled with people who wanted to make a fresh start, to this new land. For 300 years Greenland flourished, new communities settled, trade with other countries grew, and the population increased. Around 1325 the climate cooled down considerably, people started to abandon the northern settlements. By 1350 glaciers covered the northern settlements, and the southern most settlements were dying out as well.

The Sporer minimum of 1400-1510 and the Maunder minimum of 1645-1715 were each known as a "little ice age." They were both droughts in Sunspot activity, and a link to a time of abnormally cold weather on Earth. In addition to finishing off the Greenland colonies, the Sporer minimum showed increased rates of famine in the world, and the Baltic Sea froze solid in the winter of 1422-23. Some of the more notable effects of the Maunder minimum included the appearance of glaciers in the Alps advancing farther southward, the north sea froze, and in London there was the famous year without a summer where it remained cold for 21 consecutive months.

That was posted in 2004. What did the poster expect for the future?

The Sun could start going through a down trend in sunspot activity at any time. We could find ourselves back in a state similar to the Maunder Minimum with decades of much colder weather. Or sunspot activity could increase to an even higher level and temperatures could rise more than the amount some models project as a consequence of higher atmospheric carbon dioxide.

My guess is that the chances are greater for a reduction in sunspot activity than for an increase. Why? Most of the time the planet Earth is in an ice age. This is suggestive of the possibility that the Sun just doesn't put out enough heat to keep the Earth out of ice ages most of the time. Also, the higher sunspot activity reported above is at the high end of an over 1,000 year period. Therefore the odds seem greater that we will have more future years with lower sunspot activity than with higher sunspot activity.

My further guess is that a reduction in sunspot activity would cause more harm to humans than a further increase in sunspot activity. A decrease could put large amounts of farm fields out of production and would reduce the useful length of the growing seasons for other fields. The freezing over of rivers and seas along with snows and ice would interfere with transportation more than higher temperatures would.

Which is exacly what is being predicted by the Russian scientist.

He is not alone.

The New Scientist report, along with other scientific assessments warning of global cooling, also come as a blow to the campaign -- led by David Suzuki and one of the directors of his foundation -- to portray all who raise doubts about climate change theory -- so-called skeptics -- as pawns of corporate PR thugs manipulating opinion. If the Suzuki claim is true, then the tentacles of Exxon-Mobil reach deeper into science than anyone has so far imagined.

Dramatic global temperature fluctuations, as New Scientist reports, are the norm. A Little Ice Age struck Europe in the 17th century. New Yorkers once walked from Manhattan to Staten Island across a frozen harbour. About 200 years earlier, New Scientist reminds us, a sharp downturn in temperatures turned fertile Greenland into Arctic wasteland.

These and other temperature swings corresponded with changing solar activity. "It's a boom-bust system, and I expect a crash soon," says Nigel Weiss, a solar physicist at the University of Cambridge. Scientists cannot say precisely how big the coming cooling will be, but it could at minimum be enough to offset the current theoretical impact of man-made global warming. Sam Solanki, of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, says declining solar activity could drop global temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius. "It might not sound like much," says New Scientist writer Stuart Clark, "but this temperature reversal would be as big as the most optimistic estimate of the results of restricting greenhouse-gas emissions until 2050 in line with the Kyoto protocol."

Funny thing is that solar output is not handled well in current climate change models.

That was discussed at length at Winds of Change. In fact the discussion basically evicerates the whole cimate change modeling community for over promising on the reliability of their results.

The more I look into this the more I find it is old news. From October of 2000 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

Although the processes of climate change are not completely understood, an important causal candidate is variation in total solar output. Reported cycles in various climate-proxy data show a tendency to emulate a fundamental harmonic sequence of a basic solar-cycle length (11 years) multiplied by 2^N (where N equals a positive or negative integer). A simple additive model for total solar-output variations was developed by superimposing a progression of fundamental harmonic cycles with slightly increasing amplitudes. The timeline of the model was calibrated to the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary at 9,000 years before present. The calibrated model was compared with geophysical, archaeological, and historical evidence of warm or cold climates during the Holocene. The evidence of periods of several centuries of cooler climates worldwide called "little ice ages," similar to the period anno Domini (A.D.) 1280-1860 and reoccurring approximately every 1,300 years, corresponds well with fluctuations in modeled solar output. A more detailed examination of the climate sensitive history of the last 1,000 years further supports the model. Extrapolation of the model into the future suggests a gradual cooling during the next few centuries with intermittent minor warmups and a return to near little-ice-age conditions within the next 500 years. This cool period then may be followed approximately 1,500 years from now by a return to altithermal conditions similar to the previous Holocene Maximum.

You have to ask yourself, why isn't this being discussed? Why wasn't it in Al Gore's movie on climate? Which I'm told is set to recieve an Oscar this year. I'm willing to bet Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth will go down with Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. A triumph of propaganda.

More on the 1,500 year solar cycle



Cross Posted at Classical Values