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Sunspots Reach 1000-Year Peak
rlp writes "Researchers at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich are reporting that solar sunspot activity is at a 1000-year peak. Records of sunspots have been kept since 1610. The period between 1645 and 1715 (known as the Maunder Minimum) was a period of very few sunspots. Researchers extended the record by measuring isotopes of beryllium (created by cosmic rays) in Greenland ice cores. Based on both observations and ice core records, we are now at a sunspot peak exceeding solar activity for any time in the past thousand years."
Just read the article and try to forget what the /. editors have posted as the description. That usually works for me.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Folks this says SUN SPOTS. Again, SUN SPOTS. Not solar radiation, not heat coming from the sun, but sun spots.
Sun spots are COOLER than the surrounding sun material.
From wikipedia: Although they are blindingly bright at temperatures of roughly 4000-4500 K, the contrast with the surrounding material at about 5800 K leaves them clearly visible as dark spots.
So no, this does not account for Global warming, or more accurately, global climate change.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The Sun has a DIRECT influence on global climate, yet the author says "indirect influence", and this is not disputed by ANY scientist.
The relationships between where Beryllium comes from, the solar wind strength, number of sunspots and cosmic rays is not explained in a coherent manner with simple statements that could be made.
The number of sunspots has been near constant (on average) over the past 20 years, yet they are at the highest level in over 1000 years for the last 60 years "yet the average temperature of the earth has continued to increase". This shows the author doesn't understand lag times between applying extra energy input to the atmospheric system versus the time required for the large mass of the Earth's ecosystem to respond by warming land, sea and air to the point where average temperature changes can be measured.
These sort of incomplete descriptions give the average reader a bad view of what is really going on. It gives journalism a bad name.
Sun spots are *cool* parts of the sun. If the sun is at a 1,000 year peak of sunspot activity, that means that it is at a 1,000 year *low* for temperature, as far as sunspots are concerned.
So if there is global warming, then this argues *against* the sun as an explanation.
That is a common misconception. Direct satellite measurements of irradiance have shown that solar irradiance increases as the number of sunspots increase.
According to current theory, sunspots occur in pairs as magnetic disturbances in the convective plasma come close to the surface of the Sun. Magnetic field lines emerge from one sunspot and re enter at the other spot. Also, there are more sunspots during periods of increased magnetic activity. At that time more highly charged particles are emitted from the solar surface, and the Sun emits more UV and visible radiation.
It is most likely that the sunspots do not cause more radiation, but they instead are caused by the same events that cause the Sun to emit more radiation.
Regardless of what happens, it is clear that increased sun spot activity increases the radiation and therefore the heat that is transferred to the Earth from the Sun.
--
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Beryllium in ice cores: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1997/97JC01265.sh tml
"The most dramatic is a 10Be peak ?40,000 years ago, similar to that found in the Vostok ice core, thus permitting a very precise correlation between climate records from Arctic and Antarctic ice cores."
There is a lot of scientific data and the summary article (as poor as it was) did not even start to touch on the breadth of what is currently known from the analyses.
To answer your question:
More sunspots -> Indication of greater solar activity
More solar activity -> More solar flares
As a bonus:
More solar activity -> Slightly brighter Sun (but not nearly enough to account for the warming)
No, for a couple of reasons. GPS operates in the GHz region. When you hear of "radio blackouts" due to solar activity, it is reference to HF radio in the less than 30MHz region that uses skywave propagation. Currently we are at solar minimum and it is very unlikely we would have a solar event that would cause radio interference in the GHz region. The satellites may be affected by such an event, but I suspect the military has hardened them in such a way to be immune.
--fatboy
The article says:
> Over the past 20 years, however, the number of sunspots has remained roughly constant
This is a weird statement. In last 20 years we've had two solar cycles and the number of sunspots has varied dramatically over the period as it usually does. You could interpret this statement as saying that relative to the cyclic average the number has remained constant - but that's certainly not how it reads, and 20 years is a bit of a short time over which to make such a judgement.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
This was at about the middle of the Early Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings had a colony on the west coast of Greenland, supporting itself as dairy farmers. I specify the west coast because, although the Gulf Stream reaches Greenland, it goes up the east coast, and wasn't a factor. I might add, that with all the foofrah about how hot it's getting, we still don't have dairy farms there.
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There's a great video called The Great Global Warming Swindle; in it they mention a close correlation for sunspots to global temperatures. (And an even closer correlation for cosmic radiation.)
I think maybe you forgot a quote. One that really tells us what this is about.
French President Jacques Chirac and saluting Kyoto as a "genuine instrument of global governance,"
I orginialy saw it here
Why would I place a scientific rebuttal to a political document? I mean, the friggin title of the damn thing is "Summary for Policy Makers". It is "Cliff note for the Corrupt". OK, here is a scientific rebuttal (from a scientist, not me)
Yes, I know more cutting and pasting, this time, though, real science from a real scientists, not the anti-science drivel I posted before from honest to goodness environmentalists
By the way, rather than insulting me, have you been able to come up with a single environmental doomsday prediction that has come true? The way I see it, alarmist climatologists are batting at exactly 0%. Why should I believe them now?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Anyway, rebuttals: Carl Wunsch, one of the people on the show has since come out with a public letter where he explains that he was systematically misquoted and misrepresented, and has come out with a public letter:
When a couple of noted British scientists tried to engage him in debate about some issues in the show, he answered "You are a big daft cock." and "Go and fuck yourself" (respectively). Channel 4 themselves now say the show is basically polemic. Of course, as a modern TV channel they don't care for a second about science or truth, they care about generating controversy so they get more viewers.
And then we have some people who go into the claims of the show a little bit more in depth here, and here, and here and finally here.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Both are correct.
Were are at the low point of the 11-year sunspot cycle.
The 1000-year peak is measured over the average of the last 11 years, so the fast cycle is evened out.
The paper you link to is from 2003, a lot more data has come since then. A little careful Googling turns up that 13 of the authors of the papers Baliunas and Soon cited refuted her interpretation of their work, and that furthermore
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
This is an excellent comment. I received my B.S. degree in physics and have seen a great deal of legitimate data against humans as the predominant cause for global climate change. Much of the data is refuted by department chairs or the most zealous members of the physics department. Why? You ask. Because those people are the best at delivering funding. Physics, like many other scientific (read: non-engineering) fields, requires a great deal of government funding for research. Those that often receive funding are good at politics, both within the department and outside. Very much like CEOs are often the best at delivering sales or profits, without being the most expert on a subject.
To dispense with my ad-hominem argument, I would suggest any interested party to look into Milankovitch cycles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles.
These cycles show how small oscillations in some of the Earth's angular parameters impact radiation and hence temperature.
The chain of events is very clear: 1) astronomical variations -> 2) temperature change. Furthermore, the data from the insolation parameter correlates very well with the ice core data used as a CO2 proxy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vostok_420ky_4
The scientific community generally regards Milankovitch cycles as being in large part responsible for non-industrial era warming. Yet, when it comes to industrial era warming, proponents of human-caused global climate change say that CO2 emissions are driving temperature. This is a logical departure from the previous theory because it readjusts causality.
If from that above graph you believe that in ancient eras radiation drove temperature which drives CO2, then why the switch? Am I to believe that somehow in the modern era CO2 drives temperature which drives solar radiation levels incident at the Earth?
The sun is a massive fusion reactor 330,000 times the mass of earth. Even small fluctuations matter.
I can't take any text seriously that uses this old chestnut - totally ignoring that meterology and climatology are _not_ the same thing.
An analogy: take a pan of water, and put it on a gas stove. The meterologist's job is to predict where convections will occur at some time (a few seconds) in the future. In this chaotic system, it becomes harder and harder to predict the exact position and strength of individual convections on a period greater than a few seconds. The climatologists job, on the other hand, is to say if you turn up the heat by 50%, the water will boil in X minutes, and if you also cover the pan with a lid, the water will boil in Y minutes (were Y X). The climatologist can predict this with a fairly good degree of accuracy, given that he knows how much extra energy turning up the heat puts into the water (analagous to the sun warming up), and how much energy the lid traps (analagous to greenhouse gases).
It does not follow that climatologists are wrong, just because a meterologist can not tell you with much confidence whether it will be raining at 11:30 two weeks on Tuesday. Climatology and meterology are two different disciplines, and anyone who's argument includes the old saw about "climatologists can hardly be right if they can't tell me the weather at 11:30am two weeks on Tuesday" is almost certainly making an extremely dubious argument to begin with.
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Here's one of Linzden's recent peer review papers
Lindzen, R.S. (2003) The Interaction of Waves and Convection in the Tropics. J. Atmos. Sci., 60, 3009-3020
There are quite a few others in the past twenty years. I'm no great fan of Linzden myself but there's no denying that he has contributed quite a lot to the literature on climate science.
Even the worst case scenarios aren't exactly that catastrophic, at least not for us in the 1st world, and will be, if anything, just a minor inconvience.
Are you fucking stupid? Have you heard of the Stern report? 20% shrinkage of the world economy a 'minor inconvenience?
That's not even a worst case scenario.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
How so? The models presented by some AGW groups wildly overstate both the rise in sea level and the rise in temperature due to increased CO2. For example, the IPCC model for temperature predicted that from 1979 to 1998, temps would go up by 0.8 degree C; in fact, they FELL by 0.2 degrees. Here's a link:
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm#Message53
Please note that this link is to a group that SUPPORTS the AGW hypothesis, even though they present evidence showing that the models fail to predict temperature DIRECTION, let alone the magnitude of change. Sorry, if your model predicts a rise of 8, when the actual experience is a fall of 2, I'd say your model is pretty much worthless. But then, I'm only an engineer; we're more concerned with what we see than what we want to prove.
What was once true, is no longer so
Lindsen has published peer-reviewed papers the last 20 years. Even if he did not, just the fact that he is an enviromental science
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professor at MIT is enough to give his positions scientific credibility.
And he is not alone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6IPHmJWmDk...rela
"2) This is a UN body. Can you name for me three UN successes in the past 25 years? Just three. I can name three failures in about two seconds... Rwanda, Darfur, Oil for Food program, 17 Iraqi resolutions, Lebanon, Iran, North Korea... Oh, I was only supposed to stop at three?"
It has already been pointed out that this is a fallacious argument, but I'll bite.
Things the UN does well:
Food aid (World Food Programme)
Aid to Refugees (UNHCR)
Protecting Children (UNICEF)
Peacekeeping (Congo, Eritrea, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Haiti, etc, etc — 61 operations in total since 1948)
Intervenor of Last Resort (Congo, Liberia)
Running Elections (Iraq)
Reproductive Health and Population Management (UN Population Fund, UNFPA)
War Crimes Prosecution (Yugoslavia, Rwanda)
Fighting AIDS (WHO, UNAIDS)
Bringing up invisible issues (landmine victims, diseases, child soldiers, slavery, etc)
Wait, was I supposed to stop at three things? Sorry, my bad. Also, the Oil For Food Programme was actually successful in bringing food to the Iraqi people, despite the failure of the US and UK to police smuggling. As for the other failures, well, the UN does what the Security Council tells them to. You can't hold that against the UN itself. Go complain to Russia, China or why not the US?
"Also irrelevant. If someone has a political agenda, we might suspect that they slant or distort the data, then we check the data through a peer-review process."
But there's the rub. The peer-review process is inherently political---any process involving more than one person is political. The hope is enough dispassionate people will put politics aside and look at the facts. However, global warming has become a hotly political issue which serves to reduce the population of dispassionate people; therefore peer review is another form of politics.
I have heard (I'm a rank layman) that hard-core environmentalists have achieved majority status on the boards of several peer-reviewed journals. The fact that it is even possible reduces the credibility of peer review. I conclude "peer review" is just another way of making another argumentum ad verecundiam argument. You don't need peer review to assert gravity, heliocentricity, or tooth decay.
Please remember that peer review would have discounted Galileo. You can put a dress on a pig, lipstick on its lips and call it Hillary; but in the end, its still a peer review---er, pig.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
None of these environmental doomsday events were predicted for obvious reasons but at least they go to show that environmental doomsday events are survivable if you are fit enough. As for future prospects for prediction, so far we haven't done well have we? We were already in the several thousand years into the ongoing Holocene extinction event before we even figured out it was happening but at least we have managed to figure out since then that this time around we are a major contributing factor to the extinctions.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Well, according to a study from the University of BC:
* A 40% drop in violent conflict.
* An 80% drop in the most deadly conflicts.
* An 80% drop in genocide and politicide.
The problem with your line of reasoning is that it's based on faulty assumption: that bad things didn't happen before the UN existed.
If you want to be cynical about the UN, the cynical position is not that it is a form of world government; the cynical position is that it is a mechanism for powerful nations to impose their will on less powerful nations by somewhat less expensive and barbarous means. Why else would a world government need a "security council", which is just a nice way of saying "the countries that are too powerful to be restrained."
In any case, what you are doing here is called "poisoning the well": arguing points that are irrelevant to the question at hand to convince people to use emotion to reject an argument because it is believed by somebody they don't like.
With respect to the "doomsday" scenarios, the problem with many of these scenarios is that they ignore the power of wealth to evade negative consequences. The human capacity to adapt is also important, but it's easier to dismiss warnings about overpopulation living in a first world country, than living in a third world country which many of the people are food insecure.
Another serious negative scenario that is repeated over and over is the disruptive effects of exotic organisms. A special case of this also touches on the population issue: the problem of emergent diseases. There are several root causes to this problem, including people driven by overpopulation to move to areas previously considered uninhabitable, and people engaging in ecologically unhygienic practices. The problem is amplified by dense human populations, which provide a rich growth medium for the infectious agent and evolutionarily favors virulent agents like the 1918 flu. Recent examples include Ebola, West Nil Virus, SARS, and bird flu.
Lyme disease is an interesting example. It is prevalent in the northeast US because the decline of agriculture has resulted in a gradual reforesting of the region. In general, this is a good thing. However when animals like small rodents and deer returned, there was no wolf to predate upon them, and their populations exploded. Instead they are predated upon by ticks, in turn ticks are predated upon by Lyme disease. A friend of mine married into a family that owns an island which is large enough to support a population of deer as well as small rodents. They've all had Lyme disease. Now the western coyote has moved into New England, and has reached the island, destroying the deer population and cutting down the rodent population. You can visit now for week and never see a single tick. As coyotes move in, and fisher cats return to their old ranges, predation is returning the system to a healthy balance. I'll bet if this is allowed to continue, Lyme disease may become much more rare.
The focus on doomsday issues is misplaced. Humans are adaptable to practically any conditions from the African veldt to arctic tundra. The real issue is that if human populations are allowed to grow to the point where it is in equilibrium with the environment's ability to support them, then the people who are near the margins where that equilibrium deducts from the population are going to live miserable lives. This is not speculative, it's already happening, only in places far from us. We, who live far from the hard edge of ecological reality, won't ever experience these problems as doomsday problems, but as disorders, either of the body (emergent diseases), or of society (war and terror).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Here is a list of his publications: http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/Publicatio nsRSL.html
High latitude, ozone depletion was a near catastrophe. Predicted on thermodynamic grounds by Rowland and Molina in 1974, first measured by the British Antarctic Survey in 1978-79. Left unchecked it would have had disastrous effects on the productivity of the Antarctic Ocean and human activities at high latitudes.
We use data models for all sorts of shit, for example, 'proving' that the design of the aircraft you're flying in won't crash
Interesting that you would say this. Models are indeed used when designing aircraft. But any prediction made by the model is not trusted if the model predicts deviation from normal behaviour - for that, we have to use wind tunnels and models.
That is the problem here. You cannot create a model which predicts a deviation in behaviour and then use that as proof. You use the model to make a prediction, and then you compare the prediction to reality. Then you have proof.
Many aspects of Global Warming have followed this procedure. The "doomsday" projections have not. That is why most people don't argue the existence of Global Warming, they argue the necessity of doing anything about a 1 degree change over a decade...
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