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

What do you know

[TodMinuit]

So are temperatures. *ducks from thrown chair*

Re:What do you know

[biocute]

*ducks from thrown chair*

No need, this is Sun, not Microsoft.

Re:What do you know

[apostrophesemicolon]

Here's an explanation from NASA. In shorter version, how fast the sunspots cycle in and out of the Sun's surface determines how big they get.

So the article says that the sunspots have reached 1000-year peak, but the NASA article says that sunspots are at the minimum right now (Solar Minimum). Which one is correct?

Re:What do you know

[LarsWestergren]

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?

That is classic ad-hominem, you are attacking the messanger rather than discussing the issue. This is especially irrelevant since we are discussing a scientific issue, you are talking about war and conflict areas.

Can anyone list a single doomsday environmental prediction that has come true? Just one. That's all I ask.

If by doomsday, you mean end of the earth, then.... *looks around* nope. Seems not. On the other hand, if you mean heavy human impact on the environment, then yes, there are plenty of examples. The Newfoundland cod stock collapse for instance. Plenty of environmentalists were warning for years that a collapse was happening. Warnings were ignored, then it happened.

Or take the deforestation of Easter Island, or this list of disasters. It happened on a local scale, yes, but with the population and technology we have today, we MIGHT affect ecology on a larger, perhaps even global scale.

And now for some environmentalist quotes

More ad-hominmens. Random quotes by fringe nutters does not a coherent argument make.

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]

Attacking the messenger is valid when no one can think of three successes in 25 years.

I could quote areas where UN has suceeded (as I said, the UN works with more than peacekeeping issues), but it would just divert the issue and attract anti-UN trolls. Let me come up with a counter example: the UN is not the only player who has failed in the countries you mentioned. So has NATO, the US, the African Union, the EU... Should we discredit everything these agencies say? No, because they work with many other things too. The people working on the peacekeeping missions are NOT the same people working with The Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change. So again, what you are doing is ad-hominem.

Still, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that if I keep chopping down trees that deforestation would occur.

Or that if we burn things that emit greenhouse gasses, the planet gets warmer...

Still, good examples, but nothing compared to the Global Warming scare tactics of today or the Ozone depletion

Oh, the Ozone "hole" is still there, it is just not mentioned often in the media these days. Ozone depletion didn't turn out quite as bad as some people warmed, BECAUSE WE DID SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Even some politicans, like Margaret Thatcher (who has a Chemistry degree from Oxford University), realised the dangers and helped drive through the Montrol agreement which caused a gradual reduction of manmade ozone destroying gases. The thinning is still there, but it is finally stabilizing and may slowly heal over decades. If you think the ozone whole was a myth, ask people in Australia about increased rates of skin cancer the last decades.

, global cooling

Myth, it was the popular press talking about it for a while, you did not have anything near the scientific conscencus we have on global warming today.

Fact is that the climate changes all the time. We have global cooling and enter ice ages and then we have global warming to get us out. Sometimes we cool form within an ice age and warm we are not in one. It's 100% natural.

No, it is not.

Besides, RTFA is about the possibility that the main source of heat in our solar system may be responsible for all this heat. Why is that such a far fetched idea?

Why is it such a far fetched idea that gases that trap heat locally (a process known to science since the 19th centruy), if released in sufficient quantities globally might have the same effect globally?

Those are examples from former leading environmentalists to show how wrong they've been in the past

Irrelevant. Totally irrelevant. They are not the people presenting the data, it is scientists.

and to show their true agenda (the end of capitalism)

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.

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:What do you know

[Jump]

Both articles talk about different time scales. The sun spot rate is going from minimum to maximum in only 11 years (not sure about the correct time scale but should be approximately right). Just last year, the Sun hit the minimum and for the first time a gigantic explosion with a shockwave running all around the Sun was observed. While the Sun Spot number goes through this cycle, the solar magnetic field is reversed. This is critical for the solar wind which helps to protect earth from the cosmic radiation. Same is true for the magnetic field of the earth. And Earth's magnetic field is also reversing now! Why? The interplay between the solar magnetic field and the Earth's magnetic field is not known.

The NASA article talks about this minimum, and the science article talks about the average Sun spot number increasing over the last 1000 years. This is surely interesting, as it explains quite a lot of the global warming. The astronomical influence on the weather system should be studied in more detail. For example, it is believed by some scientists, that the Sun's orbit around the Galaxy is causing Ice Ages as well. At the moment, this is all far fetched, but if we do not understand it better, we will never know for sure what is causing how much of the observed global warming.

Re:What do you know

[bheer]

> we MIGHT affect ecology on a larger, perhaps even global scale.

Actually, we affect ecology simply by existing. Fishing changes fish population patterns, man's spread to every corner of the Earth has caused a decline in certain species and a (relative) increase in others (check out the pigeon population of NYC, for instance). In that sense, environmentalists who say the only way to 'reverse the damage' is to 'remove man' are right, and in fact intellectually honest -- although their PR skills are questionable.

However, most environmentalists grandly over-estimate our ability to cause global-scale disasters. Re your local disasters, disaster size does not scale linearly with technological growth, and ecosystems have a way of correcting themselves -- deforestation in England was a 'hot topic' in 16th and 17th centuries, with people complaining as England's forests were denuded for wood for stoves and ships. In time, the ecosystem bounced back (helped by the shift to steel for ships and gas for stoves) -- there are fewer trees in England now than c.10th century, but more than the 16th and 17th!

One of the best known debunked examples was Sagan's rapid-cooling scenarios ("nuclear winter"). The other problem is environmentalists refusal to see Earth's ecosystem as a evolving system, instead harking back to the past as a ideal that the future should aspire to. Ecosystems don't work that way! Millenia ago, most of Europe was an icy wasteland and the Sahara was an oasis. An observer then might decry the loss of the Sahara, but would they have predicted the advantages a temperate Europe would have brought?

Bottom line: there's nothing more arrogant than the assumption that a given region has the right to enjoy a static, unchanging climate for all of time.

I should probably add that this does not mean that polluters are let off the hook. On health grounds alone, we already regulate most pollutants. As for CO2 emissions (which is what most global warming campaigners campaign for), I would suggest that the "the end is nigh" scenarios many campaigners paint is both scientifically inaccurate as well as damaging to their cause. Rather, they should encourage (through various methods like research grants and tax breaks) use of a basket of energy sources, including solar, wind and nuclear. Nuclear is crucial -- solar and wind are nice but large markets need reliable electricity sources.

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

[LordPhantom]

The news, however, isn't about "viewpoint", or shouldn't be.

If you're a political commentary show, that's one thing. I wouldn't watch "The O'Reily Factor" or "Countdown with Keith Oberman" to get an unbiased reporting of the news, but really, your 9pm news broadcast shouldn't pander to a political agenda, even if the producers have mores based in that agenda.

It seems that nearly every news organization on the planet does so. Even the BBC is only telling you want they want you to hear.

So, is intelligent satire that lampoons BOTH sides, yet somehow manages to cover the news more clearly than most news outlets Kool-Aid? If it is, I'd rather be drinking that than the ditch-water folks like you seem to hold so highly. Face it, the news media has sold out to government and industry across the planet - and subscriptions are starting to feel it. Look at the viewer numbers for most national "news" programs! It's insanity, but with respect to news, the world culture has turned into the Jerry Springer show circa 1994.

Re:That doesn't debunk global warming

[DoofusOfDeath]

before the trolls come in - know that this doesn't debunk global warming. What most of the 'global warming' controversy is centers on "are humans contributing?"

the answer is absolutely undeniably: Yes

Oh please... you expect us to believe that humans cause sunspots???

Re:That doesn't debunk global warming

[LordKazan]

You need to learn two things
1) Reading Comprehension
2) Manners

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:Climate

[TuballoyThunder]

I'm sorry, the cause of global warming has been decided and further research is not needed. Please turn off the lights when leaving the hall of scientific inquiry.

In all seriousness, when I was working on my M.S. in Astronomy (circa 1993), we had a seminar given by solar physicist on sunspots. She showed two slides that were quite interesting: The first slide showed a plot of "global average" CO2 concentration and "global average" temperature and the second slide showed sunspot activity and "global average" temperature. 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.'

Re:1000 years ago

[orangepeel]

Europe was warmer, you could grow wine in regions you can't now. The middle East was a trading empire, Vikings were on the march, some Christians were planning the crusades. All things considered, you would probably be a poor peasant, half starving, and about to drop dead from plague or some other ailment at the ripe age of 30.

Wait ... so ... what exactly is the difference between 1000 years ago and today? Oh right ... we've got Slashdot! Go us! ;-)

Re:To all you people

[CustomDesigned]

I ride my bicycle 6.85 miles to work every day (or telecommute for snow and ice). I keep the thermostat at 65 in the winter. I make my kids walk to school, even in the rain. We eat vegetarian with occasional chicken/turkey. I use fluorescent lights when they are on much of the day (and incandescent when on for a few minutes at a time).

Nevertheless, IMO the global warming alarmism being used to push a neo-communist agenda stinks. I've looked at the evidence, and humans as *the major* contributor just doesn't add up. I'm not convinced by "all the real scientists say so" either. There is too much censoring of dissenters for that to be convincing.

In many cases, the cures exacerbate real problems. For instance, demand for ethanol is causing more rain forest clear cutting to grow sugar cane. Paving large areas causes local warming (urban heat island effect) far in excess of the worst case estimates of global warming, and loses even more ability to recycle CO2 in the air. Eating beef/pork for breakfast, lunch, and dinner has causes a 10 fold increase in methane, much more that the increase in CO2. All the driving causes stress, and the fatty, sugary fast food combined with the lack of exercise has made most of us fat, driving up health care costs.

My point is that I would like to see a positive agenda. Keep and expand greenspaces and forests. I'm not a stickler for "everything wild" like Gore - parks are fine. Walk, ride bikes, use mass transit. Rent a car for vacations. Use a ZipCar for trips to the store to pick up heavy items. Eat meat only on feast days (e.g. Sunday - modify for your religion), like we used to, and observe a Sabbath (on a day appropriate for your religion). Getting rid of my car saves $300 to $800 dollars a month (depending on how nice a used car I would have gotten to replace it). I have a ready excuse why I can't jump up and drive all over the county on a moments notice. Stop the rushing around. Relax, enjoy your food instead of wolfing it down in a hurry. Eat slowly. Eat less. Fast on a regular basis - if only so you know what it feels like to be hungry. Eat only when you are hungry, not when you are bored, or pressured by friends.

Use our own oil (offshore drilling, Alaska, and/or plant it instead of corn for the cows you aren't eating as much of) instead of buying it from our enemies and carting it over the ocean. Save the oil for the truckers so your fresh veggies won't cost an arm and a leg. The trees will slowly take care of the CO2 if we don't cut them down and pave them over. Whatever you do, don't give control to the government to "fix" things. They will only make it worse. Sufficiently large corporations are indistinguishable from government in their capacity to foul things up.

Take these suggestions slowly so the affected industries have time to adjust.

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.