Posted on 11/25/2013 7:27:34 AM PST by Star Traveler
Washington (AFP) - The surface of the sun has been surprisingly calm of late -- with fewer sunspots than anytime in in the last century -- prompting curious scientists to wonder just what it might mean here on Earth.
Sunspots have been observed for millennia -- first by Chinese astronomers and then, for the first time with a telescope, by Galileo in 1610.
The sunspots appear in roughly 11-year cycles -- increasing to a daily flurry and then subsiding drastically, before amping up again.
But this cycle -- dubbed cycle 24 -- has surprised scientists with its sluggishness.
The number of spots counted since it kicked off in December 2008 is well below the average observed over the last 250 years. In fact, it's less than half.
"It is the weakest cycle the sun has been in for all the space age, for 50 years," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association physicist Doug Biesecker told AFP.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Bush’s fault.................
Real risk of a Little Ice Age, says leading scientist
Professor who once blamed man-made CO2 for global warming does a U-turn.
The severe cold of the ‘Little Ice Age’, a period of harsh winters across the UK and Europe in the 1600s, went hand in hand with an exceptionally inactive sun,says this article on BBC.
That period of harsh winters and low solar activity is known as the Maunder solar minimum.
Now a leading scientist from Reading University, Professor Mike Lockwood, warns that the current rate of decline in solar activity poses a real risk of a return of Maunder minimum conditions.
According to Lockwood, professor of space environment physics, the sun was unusually active during the late 1900s, and that a so-called ‘grand maximum’ occurred around 1985.
Since then the sun has been getting quieter.
So much quieter that Professor Lockwood – who only 6 years ago blamed man-made CO2 for global warming - now thinks solar activity is falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years.
He found 24 different occasions in the last 10,000 years when the sun was in exactly the same state as it is now – and the present decline is faster than any of those 24.
Based on his findings, Lockwood has raised the risk of a new Maunder minimum to 25-30%.
And he thinks a repeat of the Dalton solar minimum, which occurred in the early 1800s, is ‘more likely than not’ to happen.
http://iceagenow.info/2013/10/real-risk-ice-age-leading-scientist/
Yet another symptom of man-made global warming.
/s
Australian astronaut Phil Chapman predicted a mini ice age.
“Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh,” shouts the headline.
Here are excerpts from that article, published in 2008:
“Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously,” wrote Chapman.
The reason? Because “there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like (today) was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.
“Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.”
“It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.
“There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada.
Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare
“Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it. Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.
“The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.
“The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.
http://iceagenow.info/2013/05/australian-astronaut-phil-chapman-predicted-mini-ice-age/
We should back 0bama’s plan to invest in more sunspots. More revenue and expenditures are necessary.
Many meteorological and astrological scientists are readying themselves for the A-bomb of a Dalton minimum to be dropped on the “global warming” alarmists. Sadly, many of them, while being well-educated and well-informed on the ins-and-outs of solar weather science, refuse to get into a detailed public discussion on the matter out of fear of being cast as a “doubter.”
My college roommate and close friend is working on his Ph.D. in Meteorology, and he said that while the field is generally tight-lipped on the matter, behind closed doors most of them agree that the sun is causing more of the climatological abnormalities we see now than man ever has. Even during the industrial revolution, weather was normal if not below-average with regards to temperatures, and there was more carbon being pumped into the atmosphere then than there is now.
Obama just wants to use this as an opportunity to pass regulations on industry to later claim that he did something for the planet and that’s why temperatures are cooler than before.
These people are geniuses in their own minds.
The more likely scenario
Sunspots could soon disappear for decades: study
(PhysOrg.com) — Sunspot formation is triggered by a magnetic field, which scientists say is steadily declining. They predict that by 2016 there may be no remaining sunspots, and the sun may stay spotless for several decades. The last time the sunspots disappeared altogether was in the 17th and 18th century, and coincided with a lengthy cool period on the planet known as the Little Ice Age.
Sunspots are regions of electrically charged, superheated gas (plasma) on the surface of the sun, formed when upwellings of the magnetic field trap the ionized plasma. The magnetic field prevents the gas from releasing the heat and sinking back below the sun’s surface. These areas are somewhat cooler than the surrounding sun surface and so appear to us as dark spots.
Sunspots have been observed at least since the early 17th century, and they are known to follow an 11 year cycle from solar maximum to solar minimum. The solar minimum usually lasts around 16 months, but the current minimum has already lasted 26 months, which is the longest minimum in a hundred years.
Since 1990, Matthew Penn and William Livingston, solar astronomers with the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, have been using a measurement known as Zeeman splitting to study the magnetic strength of sunspots. The Zeeman splitting is the distance between a pair of infrared spectral lines in a spectrograph taken of the light emitted by iron atoms in the atmosphere of the sun. The wider the distance, the greater is the intensity of the magnetic field.
Penn and Livingston examined 1500 sunspots and found that the average strength of the magnetic field of the sunspots has dropped from around 2700 gauss to 2000 gauss. (In comparison, the Earth’s magnetic field is below one gauss.) The reasons for the decline are unknown, but Livingston said that if the strength continues to decrease at the same rate it will drop to 1500 gauss by 2016, and below this strength the formation of sunspots appears to be impossible.
http://phys.org/news203746768.html
“It’s obviously the SUV’s driving around on the Sun!”
~Algore
(He hasn’t actually said it yet. He’s still working on a way to exaggerate this future statement in such a way that he can make even more profit on promoting his scam)
Bush’s fault.................
Naaah, solar SUVs and republican obstruction
of Obama’s magnetic flux.
little ice age???????
"Doubter" i.e. "denier" i.e. "heretic." Maybe they really DO expect the Spanish Inquisition.
No, it's no doubt CO2 causing this and the only solution is a tax on all carbon production (you know, like breathing).
I love it when nature doesn’t behave the way scientists expect it to.
His opinion, professional and otherwise is only useful to the extent that it should how ignorant many so-called scientists are about the matter of ‘Global Warming’.
Beyond that, his predictions are as useful as the results of last years coin flip.
I’ve wondered if all the global warming alarmism isn’t just God showing his sense of humor in setting up a situation where He can cut the legs out from under the worst of human hubris.
Like thinking that, on a planet robust enough for life (let alone intelligent life) to be created and exist, a change of a few hundred parts per million of anything humans can create can have a real impact on a global scale.
I’ve always appreciated George Carlin’s take on global warming: this planet we happen to be on can shake us of like fleas the moment it decides it wants to.
The notion that we’re in control, one way or another, is downright silly. But it will also be amusing, when we do go into a Maunder/Dalton Minimum, asking very cold Liberals why our carbon emissions didn’t save us.
There’s one pretty good prediction in all this — and that’s that one which has tracked the magnetic field for the sun and it’s sunspots — and it shows a really dramatic (and steady) decrease in the magnetic field strength. And there is a point at which the magnetic strength is no longer sufficient to form sunspots. Now that “line” is about to be crossed, in just a few years away.
We’ve had a prior time in recorded history in which the sunspot activity dramatically decreased. That was the Maunder Minimum and was when we had the “Little Ice Age.” There was one other time (not as severe) and that was the Dalton Minimum. It got cold then, too.
I would say that’s a pretty good track record to go on - in recorded history.
We'll have a much clearer picture in 3-5 years. If the sunspot cycle is shutting down, count on shorter growing seasons and more world hunger. The kind of things that can make peoples invade other countries real quick ...
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