Wh Bahr: I do not understand the question. To what are you referring?

Please reply personally to my email

Tad Cook: Gee, your theory sounds so good, except that I do not receive any money from the Koch Brothers, and my research into the science of the climate field clearly shows that no one, especially you, has any real idea yet what the true influence is of either CO2 or the Sun on the climate

That research however does suggest that the Sun is far more influential, and that the influence of CO2, a trace gas in the atmosphere, has been greatly overblown by politicians and environmentalists, mostly for political reasons to increase their power.

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anthony_Watts

K7RA

donald penman: Interesting thought. I have no idea, as the Sun will do what the Sun wants to do. We shall find out.

The correlation between the sunspot cycle and temperature is not directly related to the number of sunspots at any given instant (not related to where we are in the cycle) but seems to be related to factors associated with the cycles, such as the cycle period and the cycle strength. I have seen a chart (but cannot find, right now) that shows that the length of the cycle correlates well with whether the we are in a period of rising or declining temperature. The reaction to sunspots, if there is a cause/effect relationship, does not seem to be instantaneous.

Even the observed historical relationship between rise in temperature and increasing CO2 levels has an observed lagtime of many decades, where long after temperatures rise then CO2 rises.

Garry: As for the science of the followup post at Wattsupwiththat, the scientist is quite correct. The cycles always overlap, and the sign that the next cycle is beginning is when we spot the first reverse polarity sunspot. I’ve been waiting for news of this, and tt appears he has done so, though the sunspot hardly lived long enough to be ranked one.

Garry: Thanks for the heads up. Though I appreciate greatly Anthony Watts plugging my post, I think it a bit inappropriate for him to repost it entirely, on his site, without even asking me. I think I’ll shoot him an email about this.

In the follow up post, a solar physicist, Dr, Leif Svalgaard, asserts that the new sunspot just observed belongs to the next solar cycle, as evidenced by its polarity and its position (about 30 degrees latitude). It had never occurred to me that solar cycles overlap (no surprise, my knowledge of sunspots is not very deep).

I’m inclined to believe the good doctor on that point, but I think he’s getting ahead of himself by asserting that the new sunspot proves that there will be no protracted solar minimum, and solar cycle 25 (the next one) will be stronger than the present cycle.

There has also been a protracted discussion on that site asserting that sunspots have no affect on temperature, mainly because there is no evidence of an 11-year cycle in temperature. I would argue that perhaps the sunspot cycle is dampened by the retention of heat in the oceans, delaying the cause and effect, and a protracted minimum would lead to cooling, perhaps with a delay of a few years or decades.

I do not like this reCAPTCHA you have on here BZ.

It is pretty clear that some factor, probably natural, has a greater effect on Earth’s temperature than CO2, because for the past couple of decades the temperature has stabilized (we are saved(!), probably due to the Kyoto agreement), yet CO2 in the atmosphere has continued to climb. CO2 and temperature are not as well correlated as many claim.

We also know that when temperatures go up, CO2 in the ground is released into the air, so the cause and effect between CO2 and temperature are not as clear as claimed, either.

“Note that La Niña cooling in the tropics has finally penetrated the troposphere, with a -0.12 deg. C departure from average,” wrote atmospheric scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer, who compile satellite data at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
Satellite data, which measures Earth’s bulk atmosphere, show temperature anomalies dropped from 0.41 degrees Celsius in December to 0.26 degrees in January. The temperature drop was brought about by a La Niña cooling event in the tropics.
La Niña is in full swing in 2018, plunging temperatures in the tropics to -0.12 degrees Celsius in January, down from 0.26 degrees the previous month. It’s the third-largest tropical temperature drop on record.”
https://www.thegwpf.com/global-temperatures-drop-back-to-pre-el-nino-levels-2/
The correlation of sun spots and temperature is well documented as is the reality that solar radiation not Co2 is the driving force of climate change. Beware, we are losing the great benefits of a warming climate!

A current problem we have is that we are now able to observe the far side of the sun with satellites placed in solar orbit. This is why Robert points out, in his fourth paragraph, that these are observations from the visible (Earth) side of the sun. We have a lot of sunspot data from Earth and from Earth orbit that predates these solar orbit satellites, and it is difficult to figure out how to correlate the data from these solar satellites with the traditional visible side data. Some day this new far side data will be part of the primary data that we use.

Observational techniques (and now seriously data processing techniques) are continuously changing. Astronomy is changing because WE are changing, not because the universe is changing. Those big mirrors to a large part only reflect ourselves.

Oh yes, here’s a paper reviewing the history of sunspot spotting (like train spotting?) Well, not “many”, but before the telescope for sure.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0702/0702068.pdf

Problem is that only modern Westerners have kept a reliable track record of it. Other societies were never organized in a way to make that possible for people to do. Astronomers estimate that there is at least one nova per century that would be visible by the naked eye on earth. But none has been documented since over 500 years, Kepler’s nova. However, it has been discovered that a supernova was indeed visible by the naked eye in the early 1800s. But on the southern hemisphere. And no civilized people able to document it lived there then. Just indigenous, Boers, English prisoners and some sailors. No one cared about a new dot on the sky. It’s not so much about what is visible, as it is about who cares.

joe lorino: Sunspots were definitely seen by many observers all across the globe centuries before the invention of the telescope. What was not perceived was the 11 year cycle of activity. Without the right equipment it was too difficult to measure that cycle with any precision

When the telescope arrived in the early 1600s, that cycle happened to vanish at that time, going into a grand minimum that lasted almost a century.

Great job!