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Sun's Activity Levels Reconstructed
neutron_p writes "An international team of scientists has reconstructed the Sun's activity over the last 11 millennia and forecasts decreased activity within a few decades. The activity of the Sun over the last 11,400 years, i.e., back to the end of the last ice age on Earth, has now for the first time been reconstructed quantitatively. The scientists have analyzed the radioactive isotopes in trees that lived thousands of years ago. As scientists report in the current issue of the science journal Nature, one needs to go back over 8,000 years in order to find a time when the Sun was, on average, as active as in the last 60 years."
In order to investigate the issue, NASA has announced that they are sending an unmanned space probe to the sun. In order to avoid the intense heat, they are planning on launching the probe at night.
Unknown host pong.
I'm not sure I trust their error bars (they appear on the second plot). Since they're using 10-year averages, they should be removing the effects of the solar cycle. But their sunspot number curves drop below 0 sunspots in several places. A negative number of sunspots is, obviously, unphysical. Also, their data is pretty wildly varying over short timescales (again, solar cycle should be removed) and doesn't match the actual sunspot records from 1610 on very well, either.
So... we'll schedule the Global Cooling panic for what, 2030-ish? That good for everyone?
Save your Global Cooling books from the 70s, they'll be invaluable in showing how long it has been a problem even as the Global Warming hysteria is quietly, but thoroughly, whitewashed out of existance (just as the Global Cooling panic has been, as of today).
See you then!
(This is about 1/3 humorous, 1/3 a troll, and 1/3 an attempt to get people to be a little less dogmatic and a little more thoughful about climate issues in general. Moderate accordingly, I guess.)
(PS: I would expect the Earth's temp, if it is affected significantly by the Sun, to lag behind it by several years, because it has one hell of a lot of "thermal inertia".)
The Sun is approximately 4.5 billion years old. An increase in the average brightness of 30% over that time is equal to 6.7% per billion years, or .00000067% per century. If you think that this will become a measurable change in the next century, you obviously never learned anything worthwhile from a lab course (and nobody should trust you with numerical methods, either).
Sustainability and energy independence essay