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."

Comments

Re:Before the smarmy comments start

[baseinfinity]

And if you read your own link, you'd also see: "Since sunspots are dark it might be expected that more sunspots lead to less solar radiation. However, the surrounding areas are brighter and the overall effect is that more sunspots means a brighter sun. The variation is very small (of the order of 0.1%)."

Re:Sssshh!

[ranton]

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.

--

Re:Keep in mind Indep Search:

[BoRegardless]

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.

Right now is a minimum

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I regularly observe sunspots. I've hardly seen a sunspot for months. We're actually at solar minimum right now. Of course tha article is about a long term average, but the timing of the article is a bit peculiar!

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.

Re:What happened 1000 years ago?

[techno-vampire]

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.

Re:What do you know

[sumdumass]

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

Re:What do you know

[ArcherB]

I belive the GP was looking for a scientific rebuttal, a poltical rant is not a substitute for science. Sticking your fingers in your ears whilst cutting and pasting anti-science drivel will only result in your fingertips meeting in the middle.

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)

Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators--and many scientists--seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature--a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.
--snip--
Moreover, actions taken thus far to reduce emissions have already had negative consequences without improving our ability to adapt to climate change. An emphasis on ethanol, for instance, has led to angry protests against corn-price increases in Mexico, and forest clearing and habitat destruction in Southeast Asia. Carbon caps are likely to lead to increased prices, as well as corruption associated with permit trading. (Enron was a leading lobbyist for Kyoto because it had hoped to capitalize on emissions trading.) The alleged solutions have more potential for catastrophe than the putative problem. The conclusion of the late climate scientist Roger Revelle--Al Gore's supposed mentor--is worth pondering: the evidence for global warming thus far doesn't warrant any action unless it is justifiable on grounds that have nothing to do with climate.

Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.

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?

Re:What do you know

[LarsWestergren]

Ok, this show has been promoted like wildfire on the net by conservatives and global warming deniers. Like with Michael Crichton, no matter how many times it is debunked, I see we will see this show quoted as truth for years to come and links to it get modded up....

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:

"As I made clear, both in the
preliminary discussions, and in the interview itself, I believe that
global warming is a very serious threat that needs equally serious
discussion and no one seeing this film could possibly deduce that.

What we now have is an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which
there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why
many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely
accepted by the scientific community. There are so many examples,
it's hard to know where to begin, so I will cite only one:
a speaker asserts, as is true, that carbon dioxide is only
a small fraction of the atmospheric mass. The viewer is left to
infer that means it couldn't really matter. But even a beginning
meteorology student could tell you that the relative masses of gases
are irrelevant to their effects on radiative balance. A director
not intending to produce pure propaganda would have tried to eliminate that
piece of disinformation.

An example where my own discussion was grossly distorted by context:
I am shown explaining that a warming ocean could expel more
carbon dioxide than it absorbs -- thus exacerbating the greenhouse
gas buildup in the atmosphere and hence worrisome. It
was used in the film, through its context, to imply
that CO2 is all natural, coming from the ocean, and that
therefore the human element is irrelevant. This use of my remarks, which
are literally what I said, comes close to fraud."

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.

Re:What do you know

[andersa]

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.

Re:Climate

[CaffeineJedi]

From her brief look into the topic (by her own admission), sunspot activity appeared to correlate better than CO2. She submitted a NSF proposal to study it further and was rejected on the grounds "the cause of global warming is well understood and further research is not warranted.'

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_4c urves_insolation.jpg.

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.

Re:What do you know

[Alioth]

but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.

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.

Re:What do you know

[FatMullet]

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.