NASA now admits that a Dalton Minimum is possible

Graphic courtesy Wikipedia Commons


What a difference two or three years make!

It appears that NASA may be pulling it's help out of the sandbox built by lefty enviro-whackos.

From David Archidbald:

The oceans are losing heat, so the Canadian wheat belt will just get colder and drier as Solar Cycle 24 progresses. As Mark Steyn recently said, anyone under the age of 29 has not experienced global warming. A Dalton Minimum repeat will mean that they will have to wait to the age of 54 odd to experience a warming trend.

Where to now? The F 10.7 flux continues to flatline. All the volatility has gone out of it. In terms of picking the month of minimum for the Solar Cycle 23/24 transition, I think the solar community will put it in the middle of the F 10.7 quiet period due to the lack of sunspots. We won’t know how long that quiet period is until solar activity ramps up again. So picking the month of minimum at the moment may just be guessing.

Dr Hathaway says that we are not in for a Maunder Minimum, and I agree with him. I have been contacted by a gentleman from the lower 48 who has a very good solar activity model. It hindcasts the 20th century almost perfectly, so I have a lot of faith in what it is predicting for the 21st century, which is a couple of very weak cycles and then back to normal as we have known it. I consider his model to be a major advance in solar science.

Source: What's Up With That?

As I've been blogging for the past four years...the evidence is mounting and it is looking to get even cooler.

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Solar Cycle 24: Code Blue Alert

The graph above is of two year windows of the F 10.7 radio flux centered on the last five solar minima.  They are stacked up so that they are 20 solar flux units apart on the same vertical scale.  The original data is from: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/ftpsolarradio.html#qbsa

Source: Watts Up With That?

Just a reminder to the lefties that there is evidence that the sun affects our climate far more than we do, and the next few years look to be a continuance of the cooling trend.

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Profiles in Cowardice, Profiles in Deceit, and Profiles in Global Governance

The intimidation tactics and belittling words of those in global warming alarmism are only a means to cloak the weaknesses of their arguments, especially now that the scientific and economic evidence has found a broader, more receptive audience -- check the latest poll results if you don't believe me.

Put succinctly, their efforts to silence opposing viewpoints to their dogma have only proven that they are a bunch of chicken-twits. Now that doubting Dorothy has doused Elmira Gulch's other ego with a cocktail of moderating temperatures and an economy in distress, the cries that their forecasts are "melting, melting, aagghhhh" approach a shrill peak.

What has happened in Arkansas the last few weeks is illustrative...

Source: Paul Chesser, writing in American Spectator

Hat Tip: ICECAP

Photo Credit: Solar Cycle 24

Notice anything wrong with the latest solar image above? A lack of sunspots. Solar Cycle 24 is getting off to a seriously slow start.

As far back as 2005, this NASA webpage was forecasting that the period of sunspot minimum would be in 2006 or 2007:

The Solar Cycle: Sunspots increase and decrease through an average cycle of 11 years. Dating back to 1749, we have experienced 22 full solar cycles where the number of sunspots have gone from a minimum, to a maximum and back to the next minimum, through approximate 11 year cycles. We are now well into the 23rd cycle, with the 24th cycle right around the corner. The number of sunspots in this cycle reached a peak in May, 2000 where the number of sunspots were measured at near 170. A secondary sunspot maximum occurred near the beginning of 2002 where the sunspot number was about 150. The next sunspot minimum is forecast to occur in late 2006 through mid 2007. A chart of cycle 23 is available at the NOAA Space Environment Center.

Let me remind you...it's January 2009, and we are still seeing a very low sunspot count. In fact, one so low for so long a period of time, that there is some concern that we could be in for another long term period of decreased sunspots like a Dalton or Maunder Minimum. Ice Age, anyone?

I have blogged about this possibility at least since October of 2007, and became aware of the possibility of a Landscheit Minimum in June of last year.

I wonder if lefties will still hold Global Warming protests as it becomes ever more evident that the earth is entering a cooling trend?

I give you Global Warming or Global Governance:

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What is Wrong with the Sun?

Take a look at this graph:

Graph Courtesy of Watt's Up With That?

The graph is a plot of the A_p Index since 1932, which is useless unless we know what the A_p Index is and what it represents. 

I did some poking around, and here is what I have found:

The Ap index is a measure of the general level of geomagnetic activity over the globe for a given (UT) day. It is derived from measurements made at a number of stations world-wide of the variation of the geomagnetic field due to currents flowing in the earth's ionosphere and, to a lesser extent, in the earth's magnetosphere. The official values for Ap (and other related indices of geomagnetic activity such as the three-hour Kp index) are calculated by the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam Adolf-Schmidt-Observatory for Geomagnetism, D-14823 Niemegk (Germany), and are available from the GFZ Indices of Global Geomagnetic Activity with near real-time "quicklook" values and definitive values updated twice a month (once during the days 16-20 with the first 15 days of the current month and once during the days 1-5 with the second half of the previous month).

Source: NorthWest Research Associates, Inc. 

According to Anthony Watts:

The last time the Ap index was this low was 1933. The December 2008 Ap value of 2, released by SWPC yesterday, has never been this low. Further, the trend from October 2005 continues to decline after being on a fairly level plateau for two years. It has started a decline again in the last year.

This Ap index is a proxy that tells us that the sun is now quite inactive, and the other indices of sunspot index and 10.7 radio flux also confirm this. The sun is in a full blown funk, and your guess is as good as mine as to when it might pull out of it. So far, predictions by NOAA’s  SWPC and NASA’s Hathway have not been near the reality that is being measured.

The starting gate for solar cycle 24 opened ayear ago today, when I announced the first ever cycle 24 sunspot. However in the year since, it has become increasingly clear that the horse hasn’t left the gate, and may very well be lame.

Source: Watts Up With That?

Just another indicator that mankind has less of an effect on our weather and climate than man (in his hubris) imagines.

I can't help but wonder what this means for our weather, and if it will have any impact on the climate.

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The American Phsyical Society Reverses View On Global Warming, Will Sponsor Debates To Test Validity

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”

In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,”There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”

Source: Watts Up With That?

Commentary

I note that today is the 74th day in a row without a sunspot, and what may be a Cycle 23 spot is coming around the western limb of the sun. And for all you lefties that keep quoting the various IPCC Reports, read this devastating analysis [pdf download] of that flawed organization:

The IPCC is a single-interest organisation, whose charter presumes a widespread human influence on climate, rather than consideration of whether such influence may be negligible or missing altogether. Though the IPCC’s principles also state that a wide range of views is to be sought when selecting lead authors and contributing authors, this rule has been honored more in the breach than in the observance. More than two-thirds of all authors of chapter 9 of the IPCC’s 2007 climate-science assessment are part of a clique whose members have co-authored papers with each other and, we can surmise, very possibly at times acted as peer-reviewers for each other’s work.

Of the 44 contributing authors, more than half have co-authored papers with the lead authors or coordinating lead authors of chapter 9.It is no surprise, therefore, that the majority of scientists who are skeptical of a human influence on climate significant enough to be damaging to the planet were unrepresented in the authorship of chapter 9. Many of the IPCC authors were climate modelers - or associated with laboratories committed to modeling - unwilling to admit that their models are neither accurate nor complete.

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No Warming For Last Eleven Years

Charts are included at Watts Up With That? that show no global warming for last eleven years, despite a continued increase in CO₂ levels. Hmmm. No wonder lefties have been in a bad mood lately.

Al Fin has reported on the quiet Sun, which may be to blame for the recent slide of global temperatures, and we may be getting colder yet.

And, let me ask, where are the sunspots of Solar Cycle 24? And why are there so very few of them?

**update** 2.05pm

I forgot to add that there is already talk of calling the potential Solar Minimum we are entering the Landscheidt Minimum because he predicted it.

The more politically inclined among us might want to call it the Gore Minimum, or even the Gore-Hansen Minimum to mock those who were so very wrong about Global Warming, and man's impact on global temperatures.

For more reading on Landscheidt, I suggest a series of five articles:

My Random March Through the Insanity of Solar Cycle Research (aka - Explanation of Landsheidt’s first paper, part 1)

Landscheidt Part 2

Landscheidt, Part 3

Landscheidt, Part 4 (Summary of Eddy’s “The Maunder Minimum”)

Landscheidt 5 (Review of Eddy’s “The Case of the Missing Sunspots”)

And most of his papers can be found at Landscheidt Cycles Research.

And, in all my "debates" with lefties one thing is very clear...despite all the evidence you may present them, they will always try to find another way to justify their attacks on Capitalism, Western Civilization, and try to get us to volunteer to change our lives to suit their political agenda.

Don't let them. They are liars, and their ultimate goal is to destroy our way of life. And I will bet you something right now. When it starts to become obvious that the earth's climate is going into a cooling cycle...they will continue their attacks on our way of life, despite being proven so utterly and completely wrong. That is one reason why they have started to refer to "Climate Change" instead of "Global Warming".

I refer you to the excellent Gateway Pundit "Brrrr" series of posts chronicling the cooling earth. The latest one notes the record snowfall in Spokane, Washington!

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