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Paul Penrose says:

November 20, 2017 at 10:40 am

The article did not claim the Japanese results were “new” or “surprising”. Neither did I. So that part of your argument is a straw man. All I said is that this data is useful and worth reporting, even if it only adds to all the other data we have. Stop projecting your own biases onto me.

lsvalgaard says:

November 20, 2017 at 10:54 am

The title of this post does claim that:
Solar minimum surprisingly constant
More than half a century of observation yields new discovery
Paul Penrose says:

November 20, 2017 at 10:43 am

OK, I just noticed the article subheading which claimed the results are new. I didn’t read that before (I usually ignore the subheadings). From what I know, this is not really new, but I didn’t read the entire paper to see if there really was anything new in it.
Mike Jonas says:

November 20, 2017 at 1:54 pm

Loomis observed a number of solar minima and saw that solar acitivity was the same at every minimum. I would be interested to know whether he also observed any swans and noted their colour. It can be an interesting journey from observation to knowledge.
lsvalgaard says:

November 20, 2017 at 2:01 pm

As Yogi Berra said: “you can observe a lot by just looking”. Loomis did exactly that: looking at the daily variation of the geomagnetic field which had been observed at his time for more than a century [discovered in 1722] and that was known at the time to depend on the sunspot number.

The question is:

How does this relate to other data showing that the Sun's magnetic field is in decline:

OK...cancel that question...seems the Suns magnetic field has perked up:

The current solar cycle 24 reached its probable peak in 2014, with a yearly averaged sunspot number of 79, compared with maximum numbers ranging from 106 to 190 for the previous five cycles of the space age.1 The low amplitude of the current cycle, and the unusually quiet nature of the sunspot minimum of 2008–2009, have led to speculation that the Sun may be entering a prolonged period of extremely low activity resembling the Maunder Minimum of 1645–1715, when sunspots almost disappeared (Eddy 1976; Barnard et al. 2011; Lockwood et al. 2011). Thus, it was surprising when the Sun's large-scale magnetic field underwent a sudden rejuvenation toward the end of 2014.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/809/2/113

THE RECENT REJUVENATION OF THE SUN'S LARGE-SCALE MAGNETIC FIELD: A CLUE FOR UNDERSTANDING PAST AND FUTURE SUNSPOT CYCLES

N. R. Sheeley Jr. and Y.-M. Wang