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Posted on 12/17/2009 5:00:34 PM PST by KevinDavis
SAN FRANCISCO — When the sun is relatively inactive — as it has been in recent years — the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere cools dramatically, new observations find.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
“When the sun is relatively inactive — as it has been in recent years — the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere cools dramatically,”
SHAAZAAMMMM!!!
Bad link
Must be caused by those dang SUV's!
Now can we Sue AL Gore for Cooling the Planet too much??
Oh great! Now the Sun is living a sedentary lifestyle which will lead to obesity and a likely shorter lifespan.
obviously because there are too many SUVs and red meat eaters.
But but I thought the Earth was warming up????
It was warming up, but then, it turned around and started cooling down...
I'm a firm believer in Global Warming and Global Cooling, because it happens all the time... LOL...
It's only "Anthropogenic Global Warming" that I don't believe in... :-)
THEREFORE..., it’s also absolutely necessary for people to know the information in the following documentary. If there were simply one video that you could see and/or show people you know... this would be the one...
The following is an excellent video documentary on the so-called “Global Warming” I would recommend it to all FReepers. It’s a very well-made documentary.
“The Great Global Warming Swindle”
If you want to download it, via a BitTorrent site (using a BitTorrent client), you can get it at the following link. Information about BitTorrent protocol and BitTorrent clients and their comparison at these three links (in this sentence). Some additional BitTorrent information here and here.
Download it here...
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3635222/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle
[This is a high-quality copy, of about a gigabyte in size. This link is the information about it, and you have to click the download link to get it on your BitTorrent client software. You'll also find users' comments here, too.]
It’s worth seeing and having for relatives, friends, neighbors and coworkers to see.
Also, see it online here...
http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/great_global_warming_swindle.php
[this one is considerably lower quality, is a flash video and viewable online, of course..., and also, you can download flash video on a website either yourself or some software doing it.]
Buy it on DVD here...
[this would be the very highest quality version, on a DVD disk, of several gigabytes in size...] At Amazon, it seems to be high-priced now and have only a few copies right now.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000WLUXZE
At WAGtv (a UK shop), but don't know about shipping. The price is reasonable, though.
https://www.wagtv.com/product/The-Great-Global-Warming-Swindle-322.html
[And..., some information from WAGtv about this item.]
Also, in split parts on YouTube...
The Great Global Warming Swindle (Part 1 of 9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TqqWJugXzs
The Great Global Warming Swindle (Part 2 of 9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5rGpDMN8lw
The Great Global Warming Swindle (Part 3 of 9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzFL6Ixe_bo
The Great Global Warming Swindle (Part 4 of 9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNQy2rT_dvU
The Great Global Warming Swindle (Part 5 of 9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dzIMXGI6k8
The Great Global Warming Swindle (Part 6 of 9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GjOgQN1Jco
The Great Global Warming Swindle (Part 7 of 9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHI2GfbfrYw
The Great Global Warming Swindle (Part 8 of 9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N9benJh3Lw
The Great Global Warming Swindle - Credits (Part 9 of 9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_1ifP-ri58
Need to replace that picture of him breathing fire on the earth with one of him shooting out ice.
All those GW changes are working too well.
21 Apr 09 - Paul Stanko of NOAA writes meteorologist Anthony Watts to tell him of an interesting development in his tracking of the International Sunspot Number (ISN).
Paul writes:
My running mean of the International Sunspot Number for 2009 just dipped below 1.00. For anything comparable you now need to go back before 1913 (which scored a 1.43) which could mean we're now competing directly with the Dalton Minimum. Just in case you'd like another tidbit, here is something that puts our 20 to 30 day spotless runs in perspective… the mother of all spotless runs (in the heart of the Maunder Minimum, of course!) was from October 15, 1661 to August 2, 1671. It totaled 3579 consecutive spotless days, all of which had obs. To say that that we in interesting times is a huge understatement. We are about to enter a Grand Minimum, which in the past have produced a cooler planet, while our government is preparing for run-away global warming. Who could have predicted this stupidity?
Is a new Dalton Minimum approaching?
Russ Steele
Well 2008 arrived last night and Sunspot Cycle 24 was absent. While we had a flurry of excitement a few week ago when a patch of reverse polarity showed on the Suns surface it soon faded. The Sun reverses polarity with each cycle change. As we have discussed in the past the length of the roughly 11-year sunspot cycle is correlated with temperature and a late arriving cycle can have some long term climate implications for us folks here on Earth. The Cycle 23 solar minimum was at 1996.5, so with an average 11 year cycle we should have seen the new minimum in mid-2007. Here we are in 2008 and the next cycle is already six months late, and the defining minimum generally occurs 12-20 months after the first spot of the new cycle. This would indicate the ending minimum of Cycle 23 and the start of Cycle 24 will come in mid 2009, resulting in a 13 year cycle, the longest since 1784-1797. Interesting to note that this cycle started a long series - 13.6, 12.3, 12.7 years, which coincided with the cold period known as the Dalton Minimum. Stay tuned, these are going to be interesting times. Sun cycles indicate cooling and the politicians are trying stop global warming. We may need a little extra warming over the next thirty years.
Thanks to David Archibald for this graphic showing the relationship of cycle length to temperature in New Hampshire.
The Dalton minimum in the 400 year history of sunspot numbers The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity, named for the English meteorologist John Dalton, lasting from about 1790 to 1830. Like the Maunder Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Dalton Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. The Oberlach Station in Germany, for example, experienced a 2.0° C decline over 20 years. The Year Without a Summer, in 1816, also occurred during the Dalton Minimum.
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 27 October 2004
12:58 pm ET
Sunspots have been more common in the past seven decades than at any time in the last 8,000 years, according to a new historic reconstruction of solar activity.
Many researchers have tried to link sunspot activity to climate change, but the new results cannot be used to explain global warming, according to the scientists who did the study.
Sunspots are areas of intense magnetic energy. They act like temporary caps on upwelling matter, and they are the sites of occasional ferocious eruptions of light and electrified gas. More sunspots generally means increased solar activity.
Sunspots have been studied directly for about four centuries, and these direct observations provide the most reliable historic record of solar activity. Previous studies have suggested cooler periods on Earth were related to long stretches with low sunspot counts. From the 1400s to the 1700s, for example, Europe and North America experienced a "Little Ice Age." For a period of about 50 years during that time, there were almost no sunspots.
But a firm connection between sunspot numbers and climate remains elusive, many scientists say.
Better record
The new study, led by Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, employed a novel approach to pinning down sunspot activity going back 11,400 years:
Cosmic rays constantly bombard Earth's atmosphere. Chemical interactions create a fairly constant source of stuff called carbon-14, which falls to Earth and is absorbed and retained by trees. But charged particles hurled at Earth by active sunspots deflect cosmic rays. So when the Sun gets wild, trees record less carbon-14.
While trees don't typically live more than a few hundred years or perhaps a couple thousand, dead and buried trees, if preserved, carry a longer record, "as long as tree rings can be identified," said Manfred Schuessler, another Max Planck Institute researcher who worked on the study.
The study's finding: Sunspot activity has been more intense and lasted longer during the past 60 to 70 years than at anytime in more than eight millennia.
Sunspot activity is known to ebb and flow in two cycles lasting 11 and 88 years (activity is currently headed toward a short-term minimum). Astronomers think that longer cycles -- or at least long-term variations -- also occur. Scientists in other fields have shown that during the past 11,000 years, Earth's climate has had many dramatic shifts.
"Whether solar activity is a dominant influence in these [climate] changes is a subject of intense debate," says Paula Reimer, a researcher at Queen's University Belfast who wrote an analysis of the new study for Nature. Why? Because "the exact relationship of solar irradiance to sunspot number is still uncertain."
In general, studies indicate changes in solar output affect climate during periods lasting decades or centuries, "but this interpretation is controversial because it is not based on any understanding of the relevant physical processes," study member Schuessler told SPACE.com. Translation: Scientists have a lot to learn about the Sun-Earth connection.
Better understanding
The study's methods appear solid: "The models reproduce the observed record of sunspots extremely well, from almost no sunspots during the seventeenth century to the current high levels," Reimer said.
The research could eventually help scientists understand why the climate has changed in the past and allow for better predictions of future change.
"The reconstructed sunspot number will nonetheless provide a much-needed record of solar activity," Reimer said. "This can then be compared with palaeoclimate data sets to test theories of possible solar-climate connections, as well as enabling physicists to model long-term solar variability."
Whatever the result, change is likely to continue.
Solanki's team calculates that, based on history, the chances of sunspot activity remaining at the currently high levels for another 50 years is 8 percent. Odds are just 1 percent the solar exuberance will last through the end of this century.
September 3, 2009: The sun is in the pits of the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century. Weeks and sometimes whole months go by without even a single tiny sunspot. The quiet has dragged out for more than two years, prompting some observers to wonder, are sunspots disappearing?
"Personally, I'm betting that sunspots are coming back," says researcher Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona. But, he allows, "there is some evidence that they won't."
Penn's colleague Bill Livingston of the NSO has been measuring the magnetic fields of sunspots for the past 17 years, and he has found a remarkable trend. Sunspot magnetism is on the decline:
"Sunspot magnetic fields are dropping by about 50 gauss per year," says Penn. "If we extrapolate this trend into the future, sunspots could completely vanish around the year 2015."
This disappearing act is possible because sunspots are made of magnetism. The "firmament" of a sunspot is not matter but rather a strong magnetic field that appears dark because it blocks the upflow of heat from the sun's interior. If Earth lost its magnetic field, the solid planet would remain intact, but if a sunspot loses its magnetism, it ceases to exist.
"According to our measurements, sunspots seem to form only if the magnetic field is stronger than about 1500 gauss," says Livingston. "If the current trend continues, we'll hit that threshold in the near future, and solar magnetic fields would become too weak to form sunspots."
"This work has caused a sensation in the field of solar physics," comments NASA sunspot expert David Hathaway, who is not directly involved in the research. "It's controversial stuff."
The controversy is not about the data. "We know Livingston and Penn are excellent observers," says Hathaway. "The trend that they have discovered appears to be real." The part colleagues have trouble believing is the extrapolation. Hathaway notes that most of their data were taken after the maximum of Solar Cycle 23 (2000-2002) when sunspot activity naturally began to decline. "The drop in magnetic fields could be a normal aspect of the solar cycle and not a sign that sunspots are permanently vanishing."
Penn himself wonders about these points. "Our technique is relatively new and the data stretches back in time only 17 years. We could be observing a temporary downturn that will reverse itself."
The technique they're using was pioneered by Livingston at the McMath-Pierce solar telescope near Tucson. He looks at a spectral line emitted by iron atoms in the sun's atmosphere. Sunspot magnetic fields cause the line to split in two—an effect called "Zeeman splitting" after Dutch physicist Pieter Zeeman who discovered the phenomenon in the 19th century. The size of the split reveals the intensity of the magnetism.
Astronomers have been measuring sunspot magnetic fields in this general way for nearly a century, but Livingston added a twist. While most researchers measure the splitting of spectral lines in the visible part of the sun's spectrum, Livingston decided to try an infra-red spectral line. Infrared lines are much more sensitive to the Zeeman effect and provide more accurate answers. Also, he dedicated himself to measuring a large number of sunspots—more than 900 between 1998 and 2005 alone. The combination of accuracy and numbers revealed the downturn.
If sunspots do go away, it wouldn't be the first time. In the 17th century, the sun plunged into a 70-year period of spotlessness known as the Maunder Minimum that still baffles scientists. The sunspot drought began in 1645 and lasted until 1715; during that time, some of the best astronomers in history (e.g., Cassini) monitored the sun and failed to count more than a few dozen sunspots per year, compared to the usual thousands.
"Whether [the current downturn] is an omen of long-term sunspot decline, analogous to the Maunder Minimum, remains to be seen," Livingston and Penn caution in a recent issue of EOS. "Other indications of solar activity suggest that sunspots must return in earnest within the next year."
Whatever happens, notes Hathaway, "the sun is behaving in an interesting way and I believe we're about to learn something new."
I was really looking forward to a green Greenland too. darn. heh.
How sunspots were observed “back then”?
From NASA...
The Sunspot Cycle
(Updated 2009/12/08)
Sunspot Numbers
In 1610, shortly after viewing the sun with his new telescope, Galileo Galilei (or was it Thomas Harriot?) made the first European observations of Sunspots. Continuous daily observations were started at the Zurich Observatory in 1849 and earlier observations have been used to extend the records back to 1610. The sunspot number is calculated by first counting the number of sunspot groups and then the number of individual sunspots.
Even Lord Monckton, whom many FReepers quote here, says that he believes that "Global Warming" is a fact and it is happening. He says he does not dispute those who say that Global Warming is happening.
What he disputes is the assertion of "Anthropogenic Global Warming"... :-)
And note that the famed "Northwest Passage" may finally be opening up once again, if the Arctic Ice does finally get out of the way. We'll have the famed "Northwest Passage" to use once again...
Article from: Albany Times Union (Albany, NY) Article date:September 16, 2007 Copyright
Byline: JAMEY KEATEN - Associated Press
PARIS - Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane.
The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978.
The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles from Europe to Asia by bypassing the Panama Canal. The seasonal ebb and flow of ...
The Canadian government claims that some of the waters of the Northwest Passage, particularly those in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, are internal to Canada, giving Canada the right to bar transit through these waters. Most maritime nations, including the United States and the nations of the European Union, consider them to be an international strait, where foreign vessels have the right of "transit passage". In such a régime, Canada would have the right to enact fishing and environmental regulation, and fiscal and smuggling laws, as well as laws intended for the safety of shipping, but not the right to close the passage. In 1985, the U.S. icebreaker Polar Sea passed through from Greenland to Alaska, the ship submitted to inspection by the Canadian Coast Guard before passing through. The United States government, when asked by a Canadian reporter, indicated that they did not legally ask permission as they were not required to. The Canadian government issued a declaration in 1986 reaffirming Canadian rights to the waters. However, the United States refused to recognize the Canadian claim. In 1988 the governments of Canada and the U.S. signed an agreement, "Arctic Cooperation", that resolved the practical issue without solving the sovereignty questions. Under the law of the sea, ships engaged in transit passage are not permitted to engage in research. The agreement states that all US Coast Guard vessels are engaged in research, and so would require permission from the Government of Canada to pass through.
In late 2005, it was alleged that U.S. nuclear submarines had travelled unannounced through Canadian Arctic waters, sparking outrage in Canada. In his first news conference after the 2006 federal election, Prime Minister-designate Stephen Harper contested an earlier statement made by the U.S. ambassador that Arctic waters were international, stating the Canadian government's intention to enforce its sovereignty there. The allegations arose after the U.S. Navy released photographs of the USS Charlotte surfaced at the North Pole.
On April 9, 2006, Canada's Joint Task Force North declared that the Canadian military will no longer refer to the region as the Northwest Passage, but as the Canadian Internal Waters.[46] The declaration came after the successful completion of Operation Nunalivut (Inuktitut for "the land is ours"), which was an expedition into the region by five military patrols.
In 2006 a report prepared by the staff of the Parliamentary Information and Research Service of Canada suggested that because of the September 11 attacks the United States might be less interested in pursuing the international waterways claim in the interests of having a more secure North American perimeter. This report was based on an earlier paper, The Northwest Passage Shipping Channel: Is Canada’s Sovereignty Really Floating Away? by Andrea Charron, given to the 2004 Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute Symposium. Later in 2006 former United States Ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci agreed with this position; however, the succeeding ambassador, David Wilkins, stated that the Northwest Passage was in international waters.
On July 9, 2007, Prime Minister Harper announced the establishment of a deep-water port in the far North. In the government press release the Prime Minister is quoted as saying, “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic. We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this Government intends to use it. Because Canada’s Arctic is central to our national identity as a northern nation. It is part of our history. And it represents the tremendous potential of our future."
On July 10, 2007, Rear Admiral Timothy McGee of the United States Navy, and Rear Admiral Brian Salerno of the United States Coast Guard announced that the United States would also be increasing its ability to patrol the Arctic.
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