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Sometime around 2007 or 2008 the sun’s magnetic field should’ve become more active again as part of the cycle it had been roughly following for at least 80 years. Instead it fell. The current solar cycle is not like all the other ones…
David Archibald has drawn my attention to the Ap Index and just how remarkably different the current solar cycle is. He also points out that solar physicists were cranking out predictions about this cycle during the last cycle, but now hardly anyone wants to stake a claim on what the sun will do in the next cycle.
Ap Index 1932 – 2014 | Click to enlarge
From David Archibald
The Ap Index is a measure of geomagnetic activity from eight stations around the planet and reflects disturbances in the horizontal component of the Earth’s magnetic field. Activity for the current solar cycle has peaked at about the floor activity for the prior solar cycles back to early 1930s.
David Archibald writes that solar physicists have hit a quiet cycle too.
“The solar physics community has gone very quiet. There are almost no predictions of Solar Cycle 25 maximum.
January 15th, 2015 | Tags: Solar Cycle Length | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
In a followup to the post If the BOM was incompetent, the ABC would be the last to find out, Ken Stewart has a reply from the BOM.
The news story run by the ABC said the current Queensland drought was the worst in 80 years. When Ken pointed out that the BOM’s own graphs showed that the drought in 2003 was even worse, and the conditions were not that unusual, the ABC effectively said they were parroting BOM statements which, ahem, is all any public broadcaster could be expected to do, right? It’s not like we pay the 1.1 billion-dollar-ABC to ask our bureaucrats hard questions, is it?
Ken wrote to the BOM, who have now replied, and he’s posted it: “How not to admit a mistake”. The BOM blandly point him at their official drought statement which contradicts what their spokesman said:
The current drought in Queensland is comparable to the 2002–2003 drought, which was perhaps more severe in terms of rainfall deficiencies that occurred at times over a very large area. Historical data shows that the current drought is perhaps a one in ten or twenty year event over a significant part of inland eastern […]
Get ready for the startling news that Australians have been great corporate “green” citizens — on a per capita basis, all of us are so much more carbon-efficient (sic) than we were 25 years ago. Back then, in those dark days, people frivolously heated and cooled their homes without a thought to how many sinful cyclones they were creating in the Philippines. They drove recklessly in fossil fueled cars, and windmills were used to pump water a mere 10 metres, not to stop floods in Pakistan.
The amazing thing is that Australia’s population has grown by a whopping 38% since 1990. And our emission have grown with that, but the emissions per person has declined by 28% per person. Why aren’t the Greens more excited?
As with all these statistics, watch the pea for the real story. Most of that decline is not due to solar panels, pink batts, bird blending wind towers, energy efficiency, or even economic trends — it is predominantly due to cutting down fewer trees. The “improvements” are in the “land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF)” sector, of which the “LUCF” basically means deforestation, afforestation and reforestation. The decline is mostly thanks to farmers like […]
David Archibald points at a very interesting paper that suggests that children conceived during solar activity peaks were less likely to survive and had a whopping 5 year deduction from their lifespan. But don’t panic if you were a peak baby, the affected people were born to poorer women in Scandinavia in the 18th and 19th century. Mortality was 8% in the first year. One in twelve babies didn’t make it. Things were different then. Richer women were somehow able to compensate, or repair the damage. The authors seem fairly sure it has something to do with UV, but I’m not convinced. Solar effects include magnetic effects, solar wind, neutron bombardment, and cosmic rays. There are plenty of things to choose from. Lots more papers to come on this.
Marvel that the sun might influence our lifespan and fertility, but not “do much” to the climate. ;- )
There is much to discuss in comments — many of us wondered if there is a dietary connection, but this effect does not seem to be due to famine, or less food (wheat was cheaper at solar maxes).
— Jo
Guest Post by David Archibald
Solar Activity At Birth
It is now […]
The worst paper ever published has competition. I was going to mock this, but it has all rather slipped beyond the Plains of Derision and sunk in a parallel universe. Researcher Jose Duarte is flummoxed, he simply can’t explain why a paper so weak was written, but moreso why it was ever published, and why everyone associated with it is not running for cover. It’s not so much about the predictable flaws, biased questions, and mindless results, it’s now about why UWA, The Uni of Bristol, PLOS, and the Royal Society are willing to wear any of the reputational damage that goes with it.
Lewandowsky, Gignac and Oberauer put out a paper in 2013 which was used to generate headlines like “Climate sceptics more likely to be conspiracy theorists”. The data sample is not large, but despite that, it includes the potential Neanderthal, as well as a precocious five year old and some underage teenagers too. The error was reported on Lewandowsky’s blog over a year ago by Brandon Shollenberger, then again by Jose Duarte in August 2014. Nothing has been corrected. The ages are not just typos, they were used in the calculations, correlations and conclusions. The median age […]
We had a an excellent few days holiday this week in the South West of Australia. What still surprises me is how these giant trees seem to sneak up on you. One minute you’re driving through normal forest and the trees don’t seem to “get big” but you suddenly notice the scale of everything has changed. Like the car and road shrank instead.
Karri trees are some of the tallest trees in the world. See the trunk girth of a medium specimen. Try to imagine this tree in your yard.
Karri Forest, Caves Road, Western Australia
They must be the most beautiful.
Karri Forest, Caves Road, Western Australia | Click to enlarge.
9.4 out of 10 based on 37 ratings
According to the ABC the Bureau of Met tells us that Queensland has experienced “the worst drought in 80 years” and that “37.3% of the state was covered by the lowest rainfall on record”. (Watch it on iview if you can bear to).
These exacting facts are easy to check, and Ken Stewart did, but the 1.1-billion-dollar ABC did not.
Ken used the BOM’s own websites (Climate Maps and Climate Change and Variability) and shows that the current drought is the worst in 9 years, not 80, and even if it is very bad (heartbreaking for some) it’s not unusual.
Current low rain is not unusual.
The current drought is bad (see red blobs in Queensland):
NW Queensland has missed two wet seasons in a row
The Federation Drought, circa 1900, was much much worse:
(Federation Drought graphed only 1900 – 1902)
Ken wrote to the ABC, and Genevieve Hussey replied immediately — effectively saying the ABC repeat all BOM claims, no matter how hyperbolic, extraordinary, or repetitive they sound.
The information in our report was based on an interview with climatologist Mr Jeff Sabburg from the Bureau of Meteorology. He was also interviewed by […]
The man who uncovered the 80 years of missing empirical data on ocean pH is Mike Wallace. That hidden data suggested the ocean had been getting slightly more alkaline in the 20th Century –the opposite of the man-made acidification theory — but that pH change hasn’t been a linear shift. The pH has been cycling up and down, and on his blog back in February Wallace suggested that the pH of the ocean was varying naturally as the PDO cycled*.
It’s an interesting theory. He’s used the PDO index and his global ocean pelagic zone pH time series chart that was based on 1.5 million pH readings.
It’s nice to watch a real scientist at work. His blog is worth a look.
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*PDO means Pacific Decadal Oscillation – the 15 – 30 year long cycles of warmer or cooler sea surface temperatures in the northern Pacific. In a positive phase the western side is cool and the east is warmer, it rains more in California and less in Australia. The negative phase is the opposite.
9.3 out of 10 based on 93 ratings
Skin In the Game
Guest post by Rereke Whakaaro.
It has jokingly been said, that people can be classified into two groups. Those who classify people into groups, and those who do not.
On the subject of Catastrophic Climate Change, almost everybody ends up being classified, in one way or another, and such classification seems to be unavoidable. You are either a Believer or a Denier, and that is it.
Or is it?
Are there no other classifications that could be considered? It seems that there are.
Take for example, the group of people who belong to professions that make pronouncements on Climate Change, but who in reality have no “skin in the game”. These are people who will utter dire predictions and make forecasts, but are not held to account when their prognostications do not come to pass.
I am, of course, talking about journalists, who are paid to watch the world go by; and career academics, who are paid to explain how the world goes by; and the career bureaucrats, and other Government employees, who are paid to keep an eye on the intellectuals, and to implement the policies they recommend. Do these people have […]
In 1988, way back before the data was in, the CSIRO was already push-pumping the public awareness campaign against carbon dioxide. There was never a debate about the science. Nobody checked the things that matter first, they just stepped straight into pointless action. (Why?) Twenty five years later, nothing has changed. There is still no one paid to make sure the science is right, too make sure Australians are not being taken advantage of. When will conservative governments recognise that they can’t leave this vital area to unpaid volunteers without staff, funding, access to scientific libraries and full government data?
BOM and CSIRO research that suggests billion-dollar policies must be checked and replicated independently by a group with no interest but finding holes in it. In a law court, there is a defense whose job is to poke holes in the prosecutor’s case, but in science and public policy it’s like being back in the Middle Ages with only the prosecution’s accusations getting a hearing. Only with a proper science defense will the Australian taxpayers and the environment be served.
The Australian, Graham Lloyd
“…the CSIRO and the Commission for the Future were at the forefront of international […]
Co-authored James Doogue and JoNova
Empirical data withheld by key scientists shows that since 1910 ocean pH levels have not decreased in our oceans as carbon dioxide levels increased. Overall the trend is messy but more up than down, becoming less acidic. So much for those terrifying oceans of acid that were coming our way.
What happened to those graphs?
Scientists have had pH meters and measurements of the oceans for one hundred years. But experts decided that computer simulations in 2014 were better at measuring the pH in 1910 than the pH meters were. The red line (below) is the models recreation of ocean pH. The blue stars are the data points — the empirical evidence.
James Delingpole on ‘Breitbart’:
NOAAgate: ‘ocean acidification’ could turn out to be the biggest con since Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick
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[CFACT] Marita Noon:
The alleged fraud was uncovered by Mike Wallace, a hydrologist with nearly 30 years’ experience now working towards his PhD at the University of New Mexico. While studying a chart produced by Feely and Sabine, apparently showing a strong correlation between rising atmospheric CO2 levels and falling oceanic pH […]
Guest post by Eric Worrall
The following is a slideshow of images from the NOAA National Ice website, showing snow and ice cover over the Northern Hemisphere. The images are loaded directly from the NOAA site – I just provided the slide show mechanism.
The days chosen are the 1st day of the year (top left), the 90th day of the year (top right), the 180th day of the year (bottom left), and the 270th day of the year (bottom right). In a few cases images for that exact day are unavailable, so instead I display the nearest adjacent day.
I’m not making any particular statement about the ice. You can see the fall in Summer ice cover in the bottom right panel, which excited various parties into making dubious predictions about an imminent “ice free arctic”. You can also see a moderate recovery in ice cover in recent years.
The most remarkable feature of this series IMO is that minimal visible variation in winter snow and ice cover – so it seems we may have quite a long wait, until the “end of snow”.
Note that viewing the slideshow requires a fairly up to date web browser – if […]
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7.6 out of 10 based on 28 ratings
These birds weigh only 9 grams, but they can apparently tell that the weather is going to get really nasty. Is it infrasound? And how often do thousands of birds split the scene for a false negative scare…
Songbirds fly coop long before tornadoes arrive in Tennessee By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – You might want to be careful about who you call a birdbrain. Some of our feathered friends exhibit powers of perception that put humans to shame.
Scientists said on Thursday that little songbirds known as golden-winged warblers fled their nesting grounds in Tennessee up to two days before the arrival of a fierce storm system that unleashed 84 tornadoes in southern U.S. states in April. The researchers said the birds were apparently alerted to the danger by sounds at frequencies below the range of human hearing
7.8 out of 10 based on 50 ratings […]
In 2015 the hunt for clues continues…
The central mystery in climate science is the Sun. The direct energy from the 1.4 million-kilometer-wide flaming ball stays remarkably constant. The radiation pours down on us but the relentless sameness of the watts can’t be causing of the swings in temperature on Earth. Something else is going on with the Sun. For one thing, the total light energy coming off the Sun stays almost the same but the type of light changes — the spectrum shifts — with more shorter wavelengths at one point in the cycle and longer wavelengths at the opposite part of the cycle. These have different effects. Shorter wavelengths (UV) generate ozone in the stratosphere and penetrate the ocean. Longer wavelengths don’t. But the Sun is also sending out charged particles and driving a massive fluctuating magnetic field, both of which affect Earth’s atmosphere.
But the tiny changes in total sunlight (TSI) may still be leaving us clues about other things going on with the Sun. David Evans’ notch-delay theory is that TSI is a leading indicator, and after solar TSI peaks, the temperatures on Earth follows with a peak roughly 11 years or so later (or one […]
If the Greens cared about the environment, they’d call this scheme “a ghastly waste”.
The “price” of carbon was advertised as $24 (per ton emitted) but real price of reducing emissions by one ton was $5,000. It could only happen when people are playing with other people’s money. That’s the soft left idea of good maths and good business.
That the Labor-Greens boast that this spectacular failure was a success shows the carbon tax was never about the climate, nor about CO2 or the environment. Follow the money. The purpose of the tax was to reward friends and punish competitors. Anyone dependent on Big-Government is a “friend”, and anyone who can stand on their own two feet is a “polluter” or a “denier”.
If the Greens cared about the environment, they’d call this scheme “a ghastly waste”.
The $15 billion price tag is $670 per Australian, or $2,700 per household of four. The real total is much more (when will the government add up the real bill?), because that tally doesn’t include the money wasted on solar panels, windpower, or the whole “Department of Weather Change”. It doesn’t include millions in scientific research money poured down the sinkhole of climate […]
That date line is rolling around the world. May 2015 bring you happiness and good health.
Cheers!
Jo
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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