[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[Rocky]

Obama needs to get in front of this and take credit for it.

[jjotto]

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/06/the-sunspot-mys.html

June 11, 2008

...Tsuneta said solar physicists aren’t weather forecasters and they can’t predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Coincidence? Some scientists say it was, but many worry that it wasn’t.

Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory also show that there are currently no spots on the sun. He also noted that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.

“This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,” Dr Chapman noted in The Australian recently.

If the world does face another mini Ice Age, it could come without warning. Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder. Could something like this happen again? There’s no way to tell, and because the changes can happen all within one decade—we might not even see it coming.

The Younger Dryas occurred at a time when orbital forcing should have continued to drive climate to the present warm state. The unexplained phenomenon has been the topic of much intense scientific debate, as well as other millennial scale events.

Now this 11-year low in Sunspot activity has raised fears among a small but growing number of scientists that rather than getting warmer, the Earth could possibly be about to return to another cooling period. The idea is especially intriguing considering that most of the world is in preparation for global warming...

[wjcsux]

My guess it that the lack of Sunspot activity is due to Global Warming brought on by those evil SUV’s.

[Prospero]

I've been studying the solar cycle, and the interplanetary magnetic field with its inverse relationship with the infall of cosmic rays at Earth (and the rest of the inner solar system) for decades. One thing that set me on that course was a Junior High textbook showing the sunspot cycles since 1900, which fortunately didn't show the inferred cycle numbers now available back to about 1820. From the beginning of the 20th century the cycle maxima showed increased amplitude to the present day, and I remember thinking then that seemed a misleading statistic.

There is an inverse relationship between the peak in a cycle and the more than 50 percent fall off in cosmic ray bombardment. Thus, a falling off in solar activity means more than a doubling of cosmic rays arriving in our vicinity from outside the solar system, and increased cloud base aerosols together with the small drop in narrow-band IR radiation means colder, perhaps wetter winters.

Since cosmic ray incidence began to be measured continuously, around 1958, the last peak was in 1966, a record unbroken until this last solar minima, if I remember correctly, counted as November 2011.

[factoryrat]

Solar radiation drives the weather on this planet, regardless of what the global warming types tell you, and we are at the mercy of the sun’s moods. Virtually all of the energy we consume on this planet is directly or indirectly derived from the sun. Coal, oil, gas, and hydroelectric power are all basically stored sunshine the we extract energy from.

[darth]

Buy Southern farmland.

[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

I like global warming. Seriously. Longer summer growing season, and milder winters mean shorter, milder flu season.

That said, I would be dandy to live through a cold decade or two to completely bury the AGW theory and make 99% of people realize it is just a lie. I would gladly pay the price of cold winters and getting sick for a few years for that.

So bring it on! Good to see we should get some short term cooling and here is hoping for a very speedy death to the support of AGW among the duped Sheeple. May they soon be awakened from their slumber.

I may have to move south though. Hee, hee, hee.

[mnehring]

Obama has even made sunspots unemployed.

[Prospero]

Note above, from the long-standing Moscow Neutron monitor, what has been a "typical" pattern in rapid fall off in cosmic ray incidence coinciding with the "usual" relatively rapid increase in solar activity. The valleys above coincide with solar max, the interplanetary magnetic field being our first line of defense in refracting the most energetic and massive radiation nucleons, like iron and gold, spinning in from interstellar space.

The interesting thing here, really, I suppose, is (1.) the huge last peak, during the protracted solar minima just experienced, and what appears also to be a slack valley followed by a steady increase in cosmic rays, meaning the fall off in sun spots and a decrease in solar activity is being mirrored also in the cosmic ray numbers.

This, again, appears to be a genuine trend.

[RegulatorCountry]

My knowledge of the science involved is, well, spotty, but I've been under the impression that sustained low sunspot activity continuing on into periodic cycles historically known to indicate a solar maximum means the likelihood of a very noteworthy coronal mass ejection greatly increases.

Actually, what knowledge I do have of sunspots was gained from obscure studies and related literature directed at revolutionaries, directing them to time their agitation to periods of high sunspot activity. It appears that social unrest correlates well with them. I found that odd and fascinating enough to pursue. Not much online that I'm aware, just scattered oblique references.

[Graewoulf]

Great Data! Thanks!

[wiggen]

Sending to some weather buffs who can help me understand the science better. Very informative article but a bit over my head!

[Techster]

Thanks for the post. Sunspot numbers in the teens last month was a good clue.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Not to worry.

Global warming is not caused by the sun.

</sarcasm>