Going From A Grand Solar Maximum To A Grand Minimum, Odd?

[sculptor]

If the prognostications of the sun going into a grand minimum are correct, and we just exited a grand maximum, is this a very odd occurrence?

Looking for previous times when this happened, the best I've found was this from Ilya Usoskin:
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/...008-3Color.pdf



Sunspot activity (over decades, smoothed with a 12221 filter) throughout the Holocene, reconstructed from 14C by Usoskin et al. (2007) using geomagnetic data by Yang et al. (2000). Blue and red areas denote grand minima and maxima, respectively.

If Ilia is correct, then changes of this magnitude seem to have happened rarely, and at the beginning of the holocene.

Darned curious?

Your thoughts?

rod

Edited May 23, 2014 by sculptor

[Buffy]

Do you know of anyone who has replicated this work?

 

I took a quick look at it, and it has some methodological problems, just one of which I'll focus on here.

 

The paper you're referencing relies heavily on the Group Sunspot Number developed by Hoyt, which does show a seeming increase in sunspot activity over the last 400 years of sunspot observations. However there has been further analysis of this data, which indicates that the increase actually nowhere near as significant as Hoyt's original computations would indicate as described in this paper by Leif Svalgaard of Stanford: 

 

 

After a heroic effort to find and tabulate many more early sunspot reports than were available to Wolf, Hoyt et al. thought to answer that question in the negative and to provide a revised measure of solar activity, the Group Sunspot Number (GSN) based solely on the number of sunspot groups, normalized by a factor of 12 to match the Wolf numbers 1874–1991. Implicit in that normalization is the assumption or stipulation that the ‘Wolf’ number is ‘correct’ over that period. In this paper we shall show that that assumption is likely false and that the Wolf number (WSN) must be corrected. With this correction, the difference between the GSN and WSN (Fig. 1) becomes disturbing: The GSN shows either a ‘plateau’ until the 1940s followed by a Modern Grand Maximum, or alternatively a steady rise over the past three hundred years, while the (corrected) WSN shows no significant secular trend. As the sunspot number is often used as the basic input to models of the future evolution of the Earth’s environment (e.g. Emmert & Beig (2011)) and of the climate (e.g. Lean & Rind (2009)), having the correct reconstruction becomes of utmost importance, and the difference illustrated in Fig. 1 becomes unacceptable.

 

(Click to embiggen)

 

Source: How well do we know the sunspot number? LeifSvalgaard, Proceedings IAU Symposium No. 286, 2011

In other words, Usoskin's (and more importantly Sami Solanki who is the lead author of papers on this topic that Usoskin has co-authored, and who has been active in the anti-climate change activism), work is all pretty much based on extrapolating data that most folks now think is flawed (as usual, for legitimate scientific reasons, not just because they don't like his face).

 

Although hardly incorrect, it is also amusing that much of the paper also relies on a supposed correlation between sunspot activity and Carbon-14 data going back 10,000 years, data that most climate change deniers say is "unreliable."

 

There's all kinds of science out there, but you need to do your own research in order to figure out what you believe. Random individual papers from people who have degrees and even prominent positions still may put them outside of the 97% consensus.

 

But it's always good to check to see why what they say isn't really true.

 

 

How much of the national news that you report to the public each night consists of information you've actually gone out and dug up on your own? :phones:

Buffy

[Eclogite]

I lack the willpower to invest the time in detailed checking that Buffy is prepared to make. I prefer a shoot-from-the-hip approach. That seems to match your approach too, sculptor, so I'm sure you will appreciate it.

 

Definitions of grand solar minima and maxima are arbitrary. Consequently, by setting different thresholds we can eiliminate this "unusual" juxtaposition, or replicate it many more times. Conclusion, your implication that this sequence of events is peculiar in some way is faulty. i.e. wrong.