Double-Dynamo Model Predicts 60% Fall In Solar Output In The 2030s

sycodon points out reports of a new model of solar dynamics from University of Northumbria professor Valentina Zharkova, predictions from which "suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the 'mini ice age' that began in 1645." Zharkova's model, based on observation of solar magnetism, "draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone." Zharkova’s and her colleages at three other universities believe that this two-layer model "could explain aspects of the solar cycle with much greater accuracy than before — possibly leading to enhanced predictions of future solar behaviour. “We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs; originating in two different layers in the Sun’s interior. They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different [for both] and they are offset in time.”

Comments

Excuse to keep using oil

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is true, clearly we need to be putting MORE CO2 into the atmosphere, not less. That's just science.

Re:Excuse to keep using oil

[Applehu Akbar]

The grand solar cycle (the irregular one hundreds of years long, not the 11-year ripple on top of it) is one of the many cycles that go into determining climate. It operates independently of any carbon warming effect that may be happening. If this cycle is going into a low, it would mean another Little Ice Age if nothing else were going on. It points to the need for better climate models before hysterically making major public policy decisions.

Re:Excuse to keep using oil

[The Real Dr John]

If necessary, you would put a better greenhouse gas like methane into the atmosphere, and it would not acidify the oceans. But chances are, it won't be necessary. By the way, the "little ice age" as it has been traditionally called started sometime much earlier, in the 1300s, not the 1600s. It lasted to sometime in the 1800s.If their science is as iffy as their history, I am not going to worry just yet.

Re:Excuse to keep using oil

[frovingslosh]

You have been downgraded to troll for stating the obvious. I've long believed that a new ice age was coming and that global warming was our best bet in avoiding it, but whenever I mention that I'm also marked as a troll by idiots who think that not sharing their point of view is the same as trolling.Or maybe they don't really believe that, but they still abuse moderation to make less apparent any view that disagrees with them, particularly when they are ill equipped to logically debate you.

Re:Excuse to keep using oil

[The Real Dr John]

The little ice age can't be accurately defined, and some researchers have claimed it started as late as the 1500s. Based on the data, it seems more accurate to say that the climate started to fluctuate widely in the 1300s, and crops began to fail across Europe. If you want to read about it, take a look at the book "The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300 to 1850" by Brian Fagan. Enjoyable book. Or you can just look it up on Wikipedia.

Re:Excuse to keep using oil

[TapeCutter]

Bit more complex than that, here's the Carbon 14 proxy data for solar activity since 800AD. Here's the attribution graph of known climate forcings that explains the current overall warming trend.

Solar *activity* not *output*

[rumpledoll]

Not solar output falling 60%, which would lead to completely frozen Earth, but solar activity, i.e. the 11 year sunspot cycle. Predicting levels near or at those found during the Maunder minimum. This does imply some reduced level of solar output.

Re:Solar *activity* not *output*

[Geoffrey.landis]

Not solar output falling 60%, which would lead to completely frozen Earth, but solar activity, i.e. the 11 year sunspot cycle. Predicting levels near or at those found during the Maunder minimum. This does imply some reduced level of solar output.

About plus or minus 0.1% change in total solar irradiance between solar maximum and solar minimum:

http://science.nasa.gov/scienc...

Re:Solar *activity* not *output*

[MightyDrunken]

It is a shame it isn't 60% of solar output, I was looking forward to "room temperature" superconductors.

Re:Solar *activity* not *output*

[disposable60]

Like that time the 11-, 17- and 7-year cicadas coincided and drove everyone in the US absolutely nucking futz with the noise. And larval shells. And carcasses.

Re:Solar *activity* not *output*

[catchblue22]

Not solar output falling 60%, which would lead to completely frozen Earth, but solar activity, i.e. the 11 year sunspot cycle. Predicting levels near or at those found during the Maunder minimum. This does imply some reduced level of solar output.

Thought I'd smelled a rat. The headline is deceptive (likely deliberately). The vast majority of readers wouldn't know the difference between activity and irradiance.

Re:Solar *activity* not *output*

[nyet]

Thought I'd smelled a rat. The headline is deceptive (likely deliberately).

With timothy, Hanlon's razor applies.

Re:Solar *activity* not *output*

[MillionthMonkey]

Can you imagine solar irradiance falling by 60% over 30 years?

Radiance is proportional to the fourth power of temperature. That's a huge dependence, so timothy and sycodon have got that going for them. Even so, we know the temperature of the photosphere is 5777 K. Since 5777 * (1 - sqrt(sqrt(1-0.6))) / (2030 - 2015) = 80, that implies an 80 degree drop every year across the entire sun, which would have been noticed a long time ago.

These two are skeptical that Earth's atmosphere might be several degrees warmer decades from now, and they're ready to back that up with a claim that the sun's entire atmosphere is cooling down 80 degrees every year.

And they cite a paper that didn't imply that at all. What are these guys smoking?

Re:Solar *activity* not *output*

[catchblue22]

With a 60% reduction in irradiance, I suspect that it would get so cold on Earth that CO2 would freeze solid out of the air. So no more CO2 problem. Yay. But then again, plants need CO2 to make O2. So no more breathing on our part. Doh. That would suck.

Every cycle

[Geoffrey.landis]

Well, except that every solar cycle since I can remember, I've heard somebody predicting that the next solar cycle is about the start a new Maunder minimum, and it will mean mini ice age. Every one.
This one is a prediction based on fitting a model only to the last three cycles. i'm not impressed.
For reference, here's the MSFC page on solar cycle modelling: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa....

Re:Every cycle

[mangamuscle]

... or maybe you feel like you have heard such predictions all your life, but unless you provide links to said past predictions (each one eleven years apart), then it is only that, a lingering feeling.

Epicycles upon epicycles

[amorsen]

Until we have an actual theory about what is going on, this is just adding epicycles. And bad ones at that, since we do not have sufficient observations to even create decent epicycles

Re:Epicycles upon epicycles

[nine-times]

Well we don't know what our climate is going to do, ultimately. We do know, however, that we're dumping CO2 into our atmosphere, enough to screw up our environment in various ways, including creating a greenhouse effect in our atmosphere and add to the acidification of our oceans. That's in addition to a crap ton of other stupid things we're doing, e.g. overfishing, dumping toxins into our water supply, deforestation.

So do we know if we're going to get a mini ice age soon due to natural causes? No, we really don't know. Do we know that we're damaging our own ecosystem, metaphorically poisoning our own well? Yes, we know that with a large degree of certainty.

It's not a frequency it's a period

[stevegee58]

An 11 year period would have a frequency of 1/11 or 0.091 cycles per year

Maunder minimum and climate

[Geoffrey.landis]

It sounds like there's somewhat of a correlation though, if the last time this was seen was before a "mini ice age".

Well, except nobody knowns whether the Maunder minimum even had anything to do with the little ice age, except for the coincidence of timing. The best understanding at the moment is that the little ice age was due to volcanic eruptions: http://news.agu.org/press-rele...

It sounds like there's somewhat of a correlation though, if the last time this was seen was before a "mini ice age". Do the electromagnetic bursts from the sunspots also have something to do with the regulation of earth's temperature?

People have been looking for a solar cycle-weather connection for years, but not really finding one.

University of Northumbria

[PopeRatzo]

Is Northumbria somewhere in Middle Earth?

A quick search on Wikipedia shows that it's actually in Newcastle upon Tyne, which is just a short drive North from Dog Snogging. The chancellor of the University of Northumbria (and I'm not making this up), is Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, which is a name I wish I had.

Seriously, it all sounds like something out of a Christopher Moore novel.

Re:University of Northumbria

[wonkey_monkey]

A quick search on Wikipedia shows that it's actually in Newcastle upon Tyne

Northumbria University is in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in turn, is within what was once Northumbria.

Re:University of Northumbria

[Anonymous Coward]

The chancellor of the University of Northumbria (and I'm not making this up), is Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, which is a name I wish I had.

He's actually a baron. So he's Baron Stevens of Kirkwhelpington.

Re:Let me guess.

[MillionthMonkey]

OK, I looked into it a bit longer than sycodon and timothy apparently did, and I take that back. It doesn't appear that Valentina Zharkova is being funded by the Koch brothers or anything like that. Rather, these two misinterpreted her work to suggest that a 60% fall in magnetic solar activity means the sun's brightness will fall by 60%. Which is somewhat ironic for the following reasons-

1. The sun actually gets slightly brighter when solar magnetic activity falls, because of the lack of sunspots.
2. Carbon dioxide has an atmospheric half-life of about 10,000 years, so a "60% fall in solar output" over a timescale of decades won't mean much for long.
3. The core isn't powering down (which would take approx. one million years to become evident at the surface, because the radiosphere is fully ionized and doesn't undergo convection, which means photons reach the radiopause via a random walk process). Any variation in solar output will be tempered by the stability of the heat entering the convective zone.
4. A fall in solar output by 60% would guarantee a following rise afterwards, because of the conservation of energy, and ignoring a rise in CO2 for this reason would eventually backfire.

So this is probably decent research, but unfortunately every right wing nut job out there is going to desperately sink their fingernails into this and deny that rising CO2 is a problem. From reading the comments of the submitter, it doesn't seem that we're dealing with a scientific genius here.

Re:Let me guess.

[WOOFYGOOFY]

It feel shortchanged for having correctly predicted the the abuse of this study, yet only being downgraded in my post !

http://science.slashdot.org/co...

Is there no.... justice... on Slashdot???????!!!!!

Maybe the research is right but..

[chasm22]

The research concluding it led to the LIA is wrong. This paper clearly dismisses solar activity as playing a role in the LIA. http://www.rtcc.org/2013/12/23...

Bollocks headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't a 60% drop in solar output, which would kill all life on Earth, but a 60% drop in SUNSPOTS. Why the fuck someone made that headline up without using "head up arse" as an excuse is beyond anyone's ken.

Little Ice Age [Re:Maunder minimum and climate]

[Geoffrey.landis]

And when you dismiss all data that doesn't agree with you-- which is what you're doing-- then it is completely impossible to ever overturn your conspiracy theory that all the science ever done on climate happens to be wrong.

In fact, it's not. This is currently the best hypothesis that fits the data, including the dates. There may be a better hypothesis later. This is the way science is done; you gather data, make a hypothesis that fits the data, and see if later work confirms or overturns the hypothesis.

Paleoclimate resesearch, and most specifically modelling the climate variations in the late middle ages is indeed difficult, because not only don't we have contemporary measurements of all the input parameters, we don't have good measurements of the temperature, either. (Modelling contemporary climate is much more accurate-- we have lots of data on both the input (the solar output is well measured) and the climate (not just average temperatures, but diurnal variation, seasonal variation, latitude and longitude variation, etc. all of which must fit the modelling, although the AGW debaters only ever look at the year-by-year changes.)

The paper referenced, however does use a pretty convincing proxy for temperature change in the little ice age: they looked at the dead flora preserved in the Arctic ice cap. This dates the little ice age to a start in 1375-1400, with a second cooling period around 1450 AD. That is about the time when the Vikings abandoned their settlements in Greenland (they kept Church records; the last document in Greenland (a marriage certificate) was dated 1408.)

Unfortunately, this is THREE HUNDRED YEARS before the Maunder minimum. So it's really hard to think that the Maunder minimum caused the little ice age.

So, here's the summary.
1. There is no well-understood mechanism connecting sunspot numbers to climate.
2. The only connection between the Maunder minimum and the little ice age is a rough coincidence in timing.
3. But the more detailed examination of timing shows that the little ice age started much earlier.

Re:Little Ice Age [Re:Maunder minimum and climate]

[khallow]

And when you dismiss all data that doesn't agree with you-- which is what you're doing-- then it is completely impossible to ever overturn your conspiracy theory that all the science ever done on climate happens to be wrong.

Let me also note that apparently, it is possible to observe solar activity prior to direct observation by measuring carbon 14 in tree rings as a proxy. As a result, it is claimed that there were other periods of lowered solar activity from about 1000 AD through to the Maunder minimum.

For example, there were periods of alleged reduced solar activity between 1280 and 1350 and between 1460 and 1550. Notice how those periods (especially given the declines in solar activity prior to the start of the periods) correlate with the start of the cooling periods you mention above. And note how there were also elevated periods of solar activity corresponding to both the Medieval Warm Period and modern times with the highest solar activity of the past millennium corresponding to the first fifty years of the 20th century (which was the cutoff for the chart).

Re:A quick calculation [Re:TSI is not answer]

[david_thornley]

You have not bothered to show that the "ideological and institutional biases" are based on anything other than data and good science. That the bias exists is widely touted by people who find the scientific conclusions inconvenient, without the benefit of evidence. The reasoning always seems to be that, since all these scientific organizations think AGW is happening and is serious, they must be biased and bad scientists.

Do you have any solid reasons I should conclude that the entire field is screwed up, or should I go with my gut feeling and trust the intelligent people who study the heck out of the situation to be reasonably correct about the facts?