Copied from John Ringo's area over on Baen's Bar.
http://bar.baen.com/Default.aspxJohn wrote,
When I wrote TLC I said it felt like dictation, but this is ridiculous.
I'm sure others have posted the various articles. But to reiterate.
The sun goes through sunspot cycles. All but the most hardcore 'it's all CO2' idiots recognize that those drive global tempertures along with current shifts. (More on that later.) Cycles vary in length from 8-16 years with the average being 11 and they overlap for about a year at the minimums. The 'cold' (low) cycles are longer and the 'hot' (high) cycles are shorter.
(High and low are based on the graph of the period. High/hot cycles have more sunspots at the high point of their graph thus go 'high' and cool ones go 'low.' I'll be using the terms interchangeably.)
Due to some new understandings and tracking ability, we know that Cycle 25 is going to be low. The driver is the lower-level 'racetrack' which is trackable now. It wasn't in time to figure out 24. Slow racetrack means low cycle. The norm is 6 meters per second. Current rate is .25mps. Low cycle for 25. (Cold)
We entered the 'low' period of Cycle 23 (which was a normal to high cycle, part of a series of normal to high that go back to the '80s and which account for most of the recent 'global warming') about when I was writing TLC. We should have seen the first sunspot for 24 around September.
There wasn't one until last January. Several months late.
As of this writing (late May) there have been only six or seven 'microspots'.
We had unusually cold weather in 2007. Guess why?
The IESE is the official group that looks in their crystal balls and tries to determine (for various reasons having to do with satellites mostly) what the 'normal curve' of sunspots will look like during a cycle.
The IESE had two predictions for Cycle 24. Exactly even among the predictors. One was a normal to hot cycle. The other was a flat cycle ala what they're predicting for 25. (In which case, we're going to be going into a minimum at least as bad as the Dalton. The Dalton was what caused the famine that's the background for Les Miserables.)
The current conditions are well into their 'normal curve.' Yeah, it's the sun. It could change. But the current normal curve is 50% under the low prediction. The sun is acting more or less exactly as I wrote about (I won't say predicted) in TLC.
It should kick up. It better kick up. Despite liking cooler weather (what I wrote in TLC was more wish-fulfillment than prediction, I hate heat) I fully recognize the nightmare that a truly reduced insolation would cause.
But wait! There's more!
Meteorologists, by and large, ignore sunspots. Their systemology is based on the sun being steady-state. I won't say that's changing alot, but it's starting to change a bit. But what they mostly look at is oceanic currents.
(On a side note: I personally think that's because it gives meteorologists a reason to take cruises. If they didn't have currents and only looked at sunspots they'd be stuck in observatories looking at the sun all the time. Which would you prefer? End digression.)
Thing is, they've identified four major currents that, from their perspective, are the major drivers of weather. Basically they're north and south Atlantic and north and south Pacific. The two biggies are north pacific and south Atlantic. (POD and AOC)
(Oh, by the way, according to them there's a 'notable oscillation frequency' between AOC and POD that is the driver for all long-term climate change including iceages. Uh-huh.)
Both, nearly simultaneously with the solar recession, have gone into recessive conditions.
Now the meteorologists are saying 'It's going to get colder.' (Of course, as soon as this 'masking' (their term) goes away, we're going to heat up and the world will end. Better hope we do.)
What I find fascinating is that there should be no connector between currents and solar output. At least, not without one hell of a lag.
But simultaneous with the last solar maximum we had an El Nino (which is what is credited with driving temps up in 1998. Not the fact that we were near a solar maximum. Oh, the El Nino and 'man-induced global warming' of course.)
And now we have a La Nina and cold conditions with AOC and POD.
There's something funky going on that defies theory. Even sunspot accepting theory.
Currents do have an effect. Don't get me wrong. They do. So does insolation. More than most climatologists are willing to admit.
(The latter I can back up with some original research. I'm still trying to figure out how to make money from it, though.)
Bottom line is that with the currents going into recessive condition and reduced insolation...
I said that damned thing felt like dictation!
Seriously, my completely un-accredited WAG is that we're looking at a 50-75 year minimum. Temperatures will drop rapidly after 2016 and may not go up alot during this cycle. (The currents are going to fight agin it.) If the sun doesn't warm up fast, temps may drop fast. But there's no way to tell when it's going to kick in or if as of now.
(If I could figure that out, I could make one hell of alot of money.)
Okay, digression.
Space is really big and really cold. We're on a ball stuck in space. What keeps that ball warm is the sun. When the sun is putting out extra energy, it gets absorbed by the seas. When it puts out less, the seas should be releasing heat.
If the seas aren't releasing heat and we're losing heat due to lack of insolation...
Think of a house in the winter and the heater goes out. It was warm. It doesn't suddenly get cold but you can feel it creeping in. By morning it's really freaking cold.
Extend this over a period of time. Right now, if you've been paying any attention to the weather, you can feel it creeping in.
Extending the metaphor. The heater went out in the afternoon. The house is well warmed. (It's summer in northern latitudes.)
This winter is probably going to be interesting. If we don't start having more sunspots (and neutron output)... It's going to really, really suck.
There was another thread having to do with gas prices and such. A bit on that.
You don't have to have an iceage for reduced insolation to affect commodity prices. The obvious one is heating oil but it's more complicated than that. A 'Bandit Six' discussion of farming.
This 'creeping minimum' hasn't really affected planting seasons and probably won't for a while. Maybe by a few days but farmers are used to a few days here or there.
What it does effect is production.
Plants need both light and warmth to maximize production. They are not hot-blooded thus they fall under Q10 rules. Their metabolism is reduced if temperatures are reduced. All things being equal (equal sunlight, equal rain, equal fertilizer) if you have cooler weather, you have less production.
Corn kernels are a bit smaller and less plump. Ditto wheat. Your soybeans are just a tad smaller. Ripe and harvestable, but...
It doesn't sound like much, but when you weigh your harvest, your field has produced a couple less hundred pounds/tons (depends on field size) than it would in warmer weather.
5%? 10%? Doesn't matter. It's the difference between 'bumper crops' (price goes down for the commodity) and 'reduced yield' (Price goes up.)
For us non-farmers, even without the biofuels craze, things get more expensive.
The commodity markets have been going insane, lately. Everyone factored for the biofuels. They're scratching their heads, mostly, as to why there's not more grains on the market.
Reduced. Insolation.
And we're doing the biofuel dance at the same time.
People, we don't get our head around reality sometime in the next decade, I'm afraid we are totally and completely screwed. We're heading for 'the perfect storm.'
And the possibility exists that this isn't a minimum.
It's possible, no way to tell for sure, that it's the first notes of a grand fugue called: Ice Age.
In which case, we'd better get our heads around nuclear. Fast.
If Mark Turuk ever reads the Bar:
This is not a time to be a wheat farmer in Saskatchewan.
John
