Dim Sun Anyone?

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joedead
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Location: Manhattan, NY

Dim Sun Anyone?

Post by joedead »


IntLibber
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Re: Dim Sun Anyone?

Post by IntLibber »

Personal favorite names for the current solar minimum are Ad Ho Minimum and Politically Incorrect Minimum.

pfrit
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Post by pfrit »

I liked the Colbert Minimum
What is the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don't know and I don't care.

PolyGirl
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Post by PolyGirl »

Even though the “Gore Minimum” has the ironic implications associated with it. There are other notable suggestions from the responses to the article Wattsupwiththat that Joedead refers to. Some suggest and a very notable one is the Landscheidt Minimum. Another response refers to an interview with Jack Eddy. Who initially coins the term the “Maunder Minimum” and how the title came about.

These are two interesting articles. So I would go with either the “Eddy Minimum” or the “Landscheidt Minimum”

Msimon mentioned or referred to in one of his posts, the following web site Space Weather, which provides the current sunspot numbers. After digging around the various links associated with this site I came across this graphical image. This image came from this web page

There are various other media articles that are referring more frequently to the current levels of sunspots and the association with the Maunder Minimum. Interesting times ahead, I must say.

Regards
Polygirl
The more I know, the less I know.

PolyGirl
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Sunspots detected

Post by PolyGirl »

The Space Weather site is reporting sunspot activity.

Regards
Polygirl
The more I know, the less I know.

Betruger
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Post by Betruger »

Its magnetic polarity identifies it as a member of old Solar Cycle 23
?

D Tibbets
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Post by D Tibbets »

The Sun still cannot decide if it is ready for a new cycle? This may be an added indication that this solar minimum is more pronounced than the average. I came across this reference on the effect of the solar cycles on the climate.

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/solarcyclestory.pdf

Dan Tibbets
To error is human... and I'm very human.

IntLibber
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Post by IntLibber »

Betruger wrote:
Its magnetic polarity identifies it as a member of old Solar Cycle 23
?
Cycle 23 is the one that is ended/ending. While a few cycle 24 sunspots have appeared over the past year (maybe 2-3) in the northern hemisphere, the new cycle just can't seem to get going until the southern hemisphere decides to stop piddling along.

IntLibber
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Post by IntLibber »

D Tibbets wrote:The Sun still cannot decide if it is ready for a new cycle? This may be an added indication that this solar minimum is more pronounced than the average. I came across this reference on the effect of the solar cycles on the climate.

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/solarcyclestory.pdf

Dan Tibbets
Yes, meawhile NASA can't seem to admit that they have no clue what they are doing making predictions for cycle 24. They FINALLY admitted today, a year after their last prediction, that 24 MIGHT peak at 90 spots per month avg in 2013 but without any rationale to support such a prediction, and admitting that their old models are all out the window.

Some of the more historically accurate solar astronomers are predicting between 40-75 peak in 2014, some are predicting a Maunder Minimum and no peaks.

Nik
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Slightly OT: Earth's mag field reversals. Also tidal ranges

Post by Nik »

http://www.physorg.com/news159704651.html

“We have found a mechanism that gives simple explanations of many features of the reversals of Earth’s magnetic field,” François Pétrélis of Ecole Normale Supérieure told PhysOrg.com. “In particular, it explains the existence and the shape (slow phase followed by fast phase) of reversals, the existence and the shape of aborted reversals (‘excursions’), the statistical properties of reversals, and the possibility for very long durations without reversals (‘superchrons’).”

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articl ... rtid=18099

The 1,800-year oceanic tidal cycle: A possible cause of rapid climate change.

Abstract:
Variations in solar irradiance are widely believed to explain climatic change on 20,000- to 100,000-year time-scales in accordance with the Milankovitch theory of the ice ages, but there is no conclusive evidence that variable irradiance can be the cause of abrupt fluctuations in climate on time-scales as short as 1,000 years. We propose that such abrupt millennial changes, seen in ice and sedimentary core records, were produced in part by well characterized, almost periodic variations in the strength of the global oceanic tide-raising forces caused by resonances in the periodic motions of the earth and moon. A well defined 1,800-year tidal cycle is associated with gradually shifting lunar declination from one episode of maximum tidal forcing on the centennial time-scale to the next. An amplitude modulation of this cycle occurs with an average period of about 5,000 years, associated with gradually shifting separation-intervals between perihelion and syzygy at maxima of the 1,800-year cycle. We propose that strong tidal forcing causes cooling at the sea surface by increasing vertical mixing in the oceans. On the millennial time-scale, this tidal hypothesis is supported by findings, from sedimentary records of ice-rafting debris, that ocean waters cooled close to the times predicted for strong tidal forcing.
---

Okay, folks, place your bets:

So, is the twitchy solar cycle the result of pseudo-random sub-poles tumbling, turning and forming alignments, or 'grand cycles' combined with climatic trip-points ??

( Notice how pundits are *very* careful to avoid mention of 2012 lest the foil-beanie brigade run riot ;-)

IntLibber
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Re: Slightly OT: Earth's mag field reversals. Also tidal ran

Post by IntLibber »

Nik wrote:http://www.physorg.com/news159704651.html

Okay, folks, place your bets:

So, is the twitchy solar cycle the result of pseudo-random sub-poles tumbling, turning and forming alignments, or 'grand cycles' combined with climatic trip-points ??

( Notice how pundits are *very* careful to avoid mention of 2012 lest the foil-beanie brigade run riot ;-)
The poles tumble on a much less frequent basis than that, on the order of millions of years. There are on occasion significant geomagnetic excursions that are caused by: subduction of major continental slabs, new mantle plumes (like Hawaii), and shear forces in the mantle caused by major impact events. The magnetic field eventually sorts it self out either one way or the other, and if the result is in the opposite direction, it is seen as a reversal (which happens 50% of the time after a geomagnetic excursion).

Generally most talk about reversals today is inherently tied in with the whole millenialist/chiliast disasturbationist movement (which includes the 2012 kooks).

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

I guess that makes me a member of the foil beanie brigade, but for a slightly different set of reasons.

I know the world is going to end in 2012 because the world exists to make my life nothing but trouble, and I retire in 2012. So obviously the universe will never let me enjoy my retirement so the world will end in 2012! QED. :D

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

The Current minimum is more Maunder than Dalton:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/08/m ... an-dalton/

Nice graph at the link.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

tomclarke
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Post by tomclarke »

From realclimate - you know that web site corrupted by propagandists who believe what the climate scientists are saying. Some of them even are the "consensus" climate scientists responsible for the whole thing in the first place.

I post it here - it has only slight relevance to this thread - as a salutory example of how bad the pro-AGW propagandists now are! They think their propaganda has so poisoned rational discourse amongst the so-called "liberal intelligentsia" (those sandal-wearing, bearded, anti-enterprize atheists) that they can joke about these issues!
realclimate wrote: Imagine a group of 100 fisherman faced with declining stocks and worried about the sustainability of their resource and their livelihoods. One of them works out that the total sustainable catch is about 20% of what everyone is catching now (with some uncertainty of course) but that if current trends of increasing catches (about 2% a year) continue the resource would be depleted in short order. Faced with that prospect, the fishermen gather to decide what to do. The problem is made more complicated because some groups of fishermen are much more efficient than the others. The top 5 catchers, catch 20% of the fish, and the top 20 catch almost 75% of the fish. Meanwhile the least efficient 50 catch only 10% of the fish and barely subsist. Clearly, fairness demands that the top catchers lead the way in moving towards a more sustainable future.

The top 5 do start discussing how to manage the transition. They realise that the continued growth in catches - driven by improved technology and increasing effort - is not sustainable, and make a plan to reduce their catch by 80% over a number of years. But there is opposition - manufacturers of fishing boats, tackle and fish processing plants are worried that this would imply less sales for them in the short term. Strangely, they don't seem worried that a complete collapse of the fishery would mean no sales at all - preferring to think that the science can't possibly be correct and that everything will be fine. These manufacturers set up a number of organisations to advocate against any decreases in catch sizes - with catchy names like the Fisherfolk for Sound Science, and Friends of Fish. They then hire people who own an Excel spreadsheet program do "science" for them - and why not? They live after all in a free society.

After spending much energy and money on trying to undermine the science - with claims that the pond is much deeper than it looks, that the fish are just hiding, that the records of fish catches were contaminated by being done near a supermarket - the continued declining stocks and smaller and smaller fish make it harder and harder to sound convincing. So, in a switch of tactics so fast it would impress Najinsky, the manufacturers lobby suddenly decides to accept all that science and declares that the 'fish are hiding' crowd are just fringe elements. No, they said, we want to help with this transition, but …. we need to be sure that the plans will make sense. So they ask their spreadsheet-wielding "advocacy scientists" to calculate exactly what would happen if the top 5 (and only the top 5) did cut their catches by 80%, but meanwhile everyone else kept increasing their catch at the current (unsustainable rate). Well, the answers were shocking - the total catch would be initially still be 84% of what it is now and would soon catch up with current levels. In fact, the exact same techniques that were used to project the fishery collapse imply that this would only delay the collapse by a few years! and what would be the point of that?

The fact that the other top fishermen are discussing very similar cuts and that the fisherfolk council was trying to coordinate these actions to minimise the problems that might emerge, are of course ignored and the cry goes out that nothing can be done. In reality of course, the correct lesson to draw is that everything must be done.

In case you think that no-one would be so stupid as to think this kind of analysis has any validity, I would ask that you look up the history of the Newfoundland cod fishery.
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?507
It is indeed a tragedy.

And the connection to climate? Here.
http://masterresource.org/?p=2355

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

From realclimate - you know that web site corrupted by propagandists who believe what the climate scientists are saying.
Actually they are corrupted by not having any solar scientists on their team.

And there are reputable climate scientists and mathematicians (Anthony Watts, Lindzen, MaIntyre, etc.) who disagree.

And as Prof. Einstein said: "It only takes one."
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

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