Philalethes

What really catches my eye here is that gorgeous nexus of loops above 4246!

I live in a houseboat right in the cold blob; it's way colder than usual here.

As far as I could tell the fact of increased extreme event probability during transition from odd to even is empirical rather than from principle, so presumably flipping the polarities wouldn't change that; but I'm guessing it might be important for actually deriving it from principle at some point!

The description says:

«[…] Positive (outward) polarities are blue, negative (inward) polarities are red. […] According to Hale’s law, throughout odd cycles (left) leading sunspots have negative polarity in the northern hemisphere and positive in the southern hemisphere. […]»

But it's opposite, no?

Wanted to ask you something separate pertaining to a different one of your papers, and thought I'd just do it here, heh. In the discussion section of one of your papers there's this illustration, with the description confirming that blue is positive and red negative; isn't that opposite of reality?

Greetings, fellow Green Man enjoyer.

I understand the principle, but I do have some objections. First of all, while LLMs are also impressive, they have not proven capable of predicting the future yet.

Secondly, you don't need to wait for the future predictions to keep improving, but it's good to publish them in order to check later.

Fossil fuels are not dinosaur bones.

I agree that it's very impressive, and in principle people should be better convinced by that than they really are; but ultimately correctly predicting the future is the heart of science, and I suspect a lot more people would be convinced by your work with some solid future predictions of e.g. ENSO.

Florida Current transport observations reveal four decades of steady state - Nature Communications The study shows that the Florida Current, an important contributor to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, has not declined as previously suggested, but remained steady over the past 40-ye...

I've seen this paper be posted by various "skeptics" lately with the claim that the correction made there makes it impossible to claim AMOC has weakened with any confidence; do you address this in your work anywhere? I'm trying to delve into some of the details here.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

That does look like a pretty good match. I know you emphasize cross-validation due to how we can't always sit around and wait for new data to come in in real time, but would be great to see some future projections over the next 10 years or so and see how well they end up matching after the fact.

This particular hurricane (Erin) is still unlikely to pose much problem for humans, as it's still projected to curve up and out to sea; but the extremely rapid intensification and the destructive potential we'll be seeing of it as it widens do not bode well for potential future ones that do impact.

As per the relative Niño index that accounts for the warming trend in the Pacific, we've been in a Niña since July of last year (2024), only just recently having come out of it with a value of -0.49 for AMJ (April-May-June). That just makes this all the worse.

In any case, thanks again for the input; I will restate that I'm not even remotely the expert you are on the subject, so I will certainly put more weight on your expert knowledge here than my own doubts, which may ultimately be unfounded. Just some healthy skepticism on my part. Hope you understand.

Still I must reiterate that I find it strange that over over 200 years of reliable observations (since 1790, as mentioned in the paper), a G4 from just very recently would be ranked so high. To me it suggests possibly some bias that's unaccounted for and/or that there was something unusual about it.

Your point about storm strength and latitudinal extent not necessarily being the same is duly noted; and I am indeed aware that for events like 1859 (CE) and 1921 all we have are estimates of the Dst anyway. Your point about time of day is also clear; probably few reports from the Marshall Islands!

I guess for future investigations it could be an idea to involve people who are more active on the photography and aurora side, or even optics. From some papers I've come across with your name on it I know you're not new to multidisciplinary studies! Could leave it to someone else too, of course.

In the discussion I had, where your paper was mentioned, there were some people who actively do aurora photography and have more experience on that side of things, and I can relate that they also expressed some doubt about the claim that the dark-adjusted eye is just as sensitive as today's cameras.

Thank you very much for all your input. Really appreciate that you've put thought into trying to account for differences in how observations are made. Even so I suppose I maintain some reservations about it, and as you say it's up for debate; maybe a future paper could investigate that more closely.

Would certainly like to hear some of your thoughts on this, and perhaps some of the potential issues regarding improved observational capabilities in recent times that haven't been fully resolved. Would also like some input on how exactly you account for that April storm being ranked so high there.

For more context it's because there are people recently who are taking some of these observations out of context and e.g. pinning the low-latitude visibility of the April storm (the 2023 one) on the geomagnetic field weakening, which of course doesn't add up with most other evidence that exists.

It seems even stranger when considering that the 1921 storm, which you go through the observations for quite thoroughly by the looks of it, somehow ends up ranked lower, despite having a fairly well established Dst that's roughly the same as or possibly even higher than that of the Carrington Event.

For example, to take the event that triggered the discussion, namely the geomagnetic storm of April, 2023; while this was a significant storm that reached severe geomagnetic conditions (G4), it seems very strange to me that it could rank up there so high with the others without any such bias.

I realize that I'm not really in a position to say you're wrong, since you are a professional, have orders of magnitude more experience, and have explicitly tried as much as possible to account for it, but it's hard to fully convince myself that modern capabilities haven't noticeably impacted it.

I just had a discussion about something related to this, and very respectfully I must express some doubt about the degree to which observational capabilities have lowered the lowest geomagnetic (QD) latitude of observation for extreme events in the last ~20 year or so, as you discuss there.

Very sad. Has been bred for countless generations to lay extreme amounts of eggs. Takes a huge toll on its body no matter what, a life full of suffering.

Recently I saw some wild junglefowl. Quite a different animal, not bred for generations into the kind of monstrosity seen in that image.

Could of course be confounding factors there, like e.g. a decrease in aerosols driving part of the increase in absorbed SW, but assuming that's not a big fraction (assuming it is would have implications of its own) it could point to e.g. feedbacks that are faster than previously expected by models.

At least I think it's worth being open to other potential explanations for an increase in the rate. I'm sure you're familiar with the large increase in the EEI over the last couple of decades and maybe with Myhre's recent work showing increased SW per degree of warming is higher than all the models.

I see this increase in the rate is also visible in the chart you posted. I'm not so convinced that such consistent developments in such longer-term rates can easily be explained by ENSO; the 10-year rates, for sure, but the 20-year one is already fairly stable, and the 30-year one seems very stable.