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Of Late, Fewer Sunspots Than Usual
esocid writes "The sun has been laying low for the past couple of years, producing no sunspots and giving a break to satellites. Periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, but this period has gone on longer than usual. The sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, with the next cycle just beginning and expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. Today's sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago, and scientists aren't sure why. In the past, solar physicists observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots, coinciding with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700." (More below.)
esocid continues: "The Hinode, a Japanese satellite mission with the US and UK as partners, has three telescopes that together show how changes on the sun's surface spread through the solar atmosphere. It orbits 431 miles (694 km) above the Earth, crossing both poles and making one lap every 95 minutes, giving Hinode an uninterrupted view of the sun for several months out of the year. Scientists are not extremely worried, but have added extra ground stations in case of interference from extra solar activity, and are ready for the Sun to resume its activity." (The Little Ice Age is fascinating, full stop.)
it's obvious why -- climate change and solar warming! we need legislation to fix this problem.
[move
a little spotty?
I can confirm that after looking at the sun I too have come to conclusion that the spots must all be hiding on the other side. (I did not see any spots or anything after)
...Larry Niven's Fallen Angels. Basic back story was that global warming was corrected, but it was the only thing holding back the next ice age. Not a bad supposition for a 17-year old novel. Pretty fun read with some decent science, as well.
Mess not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
Apparently, no spotting at all. Word is the sun is tremendously worried and was seen at CVS in the pregnancy test section.
If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.
Now it is just hiding.
While you probably don't agree with most of his stances on the myriad issues, his position on global warming is spot on. Even if all the hullaballoo surrounding whether humans are the primary cause of global climate change or not, if we take actions now to stem wholesale dumping of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, whether it turns out that we have a huge impact on the global ecosystem or not, at least the world we leave behind will be cleaner and more hospitable for our children and future generations.
With new data pointing to a possible solar cause to global climate change, it does not change the fact that sucking up all the available fuels and dumping CO2 into the atomsphere is making the world a worse place to live.
Hopefully we can make the right changes whether or not the science backs us up.
I blame the Mayans and their stupid calender!!
What happens when an asteroid hits the sun? Does it splash? Or does it vaporize before it hits the sun?
I've read that sunspots are caused by the sun's internal magnetic field, how do we measure it?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
No discernible warming since 2000? Then this article from NASA must be all wrong then. Thanks for letting us know! *rolleyes*
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Even if that were true, which it isn't, one would expect *cooling* during this half of the cycle.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
...and expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012 Causing the apocalypse predicted by the Mayan calendar, no doubt.Your brain is not a computer.
Surprised that nobody has yet linked this to the Mayan 2012 prophecy, in which The world will end on Dec 21, 2012... I'm not a big believer in apocalypse prophecies, I think it's just one of Man's primal fears and along with death, probably one of the reasons religions were created.
Procrastinators, Unite Tomorrow!!
So what you're saying is that with the sun at a low point, the fact that we have not lost overall tempature here is evidence *against* global warming?
I am stunned
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
isn't that when the mayan calendar is supposed to end?
http://skepdic.com/maya.html
so the sun is just preparing to shut down, for the coming end of the world, of course
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Stunned by the brilliant post or the brilliant slashdot community that promoted the post to Score:4 ?
A few hundred years ago William Herschel was able to notice the inverse relationship between sunspots and the price of wheat.
http://www.hao.ucar.edu/Public/education/bios/herschel.html
I find it amazing that this relationship (sun spots vs agricultural output) is dismissed so easily by the current anti-CO2 crowd. I am all for eliminating pollution but I am very worried that the focus on CO2 is completely wrong and is doing a great disservice to humanity.
CO2 is the breath of life.
_GP_
Jerks.
No discernable warming since 2000? And this gets labeled informative? Sorry, but you can't just make up arguments. 2005 is the warmest year on record since records started being kept. In fact every one of the 7 years since 2000 is in the top 8 warmest years on record (NOAA data), and there is an obvious pattern of warming over that period as well. So sorry, you don't even have correlation, let alone causation.
I came here for a good argument
You mean like these graphs from the IPCC which show an increase in global temperatures from 2000 to 2007?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Sorry, Jupiter is experiencing warming near the EQUATOR, not the poles like I erroneously posted in the above post.
please people, please, do not go into the CVS unless the change is major enough to warrant the attention. every little class tweak is not Changelog-worthy. There are a lot of eyes reading this CVS, and we don't want to be too verbose. And as for pregnancy...
wait, what?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I hate to tell you this, but seeing as the temperature in 1998 is still the warmest year on record, that doesn't indicate warming. Worst case it indicates no change for the past decade. Furthermore, this goes counter to what the majority of the climate models have predicted: that the world would continue to warm almost exponentially. Personally, I find it amusing that 'global warming' has officially been replaced with 'climate change' for this very reason, yet people still try to defend global warming.
1. Group A declares GLOBAL WARMING (and soylent green) comes from PEOPLE
2. Group B declares Nuh-uh! Not it doesn't!
3. World expends great effort in reducing human contribution, reducing warming by (a little bit)
4. Natural warming/cooling cycles shift, reducing warming by (a lot)
5. Earth cools due to natural cycle before effects of #3 really kick in.
6. Group A declares GLOBAL COOLING also came from human behavior. See! Told You So! Our efforts worked! We should do more of #3!
7. Group B says zOMG! The earth is cooling! Build more SUVs! Save the planet! Save the tropical fish from extinction!
8. The current arguments continue
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
So, let me see if I understand. The UNUSUAL lack of sunspots coinsides with a LACK OF WARMING, and your conclusion is that the prior warming is caused not by CO2, but by the USUAL prior sunspot activity? I guess people really do see what they want to see, and not what is there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
NASA disagrees with Wikipedia then. They changed their mind on this and now think that 1934 was the warmest year on record. Something about that NOAA data not necessarily being very accurate... http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html
And those few who actually are climatologists, like Mr. Hanson, know that they are lying. The facts are plain. There has been no warming (except where they move thermometers to hang over asphalt parking lots), and now there is cooling, in sync with the sunspot minimum in progress, and the Pacific Decadal Occilation. 31,000 climatologists, climate scientists and other scientists just signed a petition against the 1900 IPCC sociologists and a handful of scientists getting their grant money from promoting warming alarmism. The ice sheets are getting thicker, too. You are sooo easily deceived. Would you happen to be interested in buying a bridge? Or male enhancement pills?
You mean like these graphs from the IPCC
I was thinking more like the snow in China, and the hurricane season that hasn't happened in 4 years. But oh, we're going to get more hurricanes, any day now.
I mean by satellites operated without AGW funding on the line. NASA keeps changing its historical data, as do other people.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/
But really, the prediction is pretty simple. For the last six months, the earth's temperature has fallen, according to satellite measurements.
ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_1.txt
The reason given for this in AGW circles is the recently ended LaNina. If temperatures continue to fall, then, AGW theories won't stack up.
But the main point is this: I've not seen a single climate (as in non-weather event), that justifies the amount of money proposed be spent on AGW. Just give me one predicted event... and I'll see you a snow in Iraq.
This is my sig.
Well, here you go, then.
Certainly determining warming/cooling on a short scale is surprisingly much argued.
The great Flying Spaghetti Monster feels the "sauce" on the planet is getting a little too hot, and reached out with his noodly appendage has lowered the heat for us all. All hail his Al Dente-ness!.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I bet Jupiter is just laughing at all of this right about now. ...that would be Uranus.
Heh. No, dearie. That was my satire at people who treat it as some kind of fucked-up religion. The moment you go some variant of "OMG, you're not worthy to question The Great Scientists", you're not about science any more.
Get this: you don't need anyone's seal of approval to use your own head. Einstein was a nobody working as a patent office clerk, when he thought he could do better than the great Lorentz. Galileo was a nobody to question the great scientists of the Aristotelian establishment. Etc.
There is _nothing_ that's sacrosanct and beyond questioning, no matter what Great Man said it. Even if he's a scirentist. In fact, _especially_ if he's a scientist.
Now I'm not saying that you or I are as smart as Einstein but the principle remains the same. Capisci? Attitudes like, basically, "OMG, don't even try to question The Scientists, you're not worth it," have _nothing_ to do with _science_. That's how religion works, not science.
Science works more like, "Ok, let's see your data."
And in a nutshell _that_ is what ticks me off about the carbon cultists. That fucked up attitude that there's only one Truth, some High Priests... err... "Scientists" hand it down as some sacrosanct beyond-questioning Holy Truth, and you're not worthy to question Them. And everyone is the Enemy if they even try to think about it on their own. That's _not_ science. That's religion in pseudo-science garb.
Regardless of whether the scientists studying that are right or right, and they probably are are real scientists... the gang of rabid eco-zealots waging holy crusade in their name, are not. They just perverted that science into some weird kind of religion.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Blow 45 trillion dollars and knock the temp down 1/10th of a degree by living in the stone ages? Can you say straw man?
Ah, if it only were a straw man....
International Energy Agency Report
Now, if we blow through this money, and knock our emissions down, we still wind up with a CO2 level STILL HIGHER THAN TODAY.
http://ucsaction.org/campaign/3_6_07_sanders_waxman_climate_bills/explanation
Meaning that, we will spend 45 trillion dollars to basically get today's weather.
Now, let's consider what this means. It means we have to use 1/5th of the energy we presently use now. By any conceivable measure, modern society places the wealth of a society based on how much energy it can consume. All things being equal, spending money to get the same or less of an effect will make people poorer. I mean, in a perfect world, where oil just poured out of a big new 100 billion barrel find in Montana and we didn't have to do anything about AGW, we could take that 45 trillion and feed the world, cure AIDs, build a base on Mars, and still have enough money to invade Iraq 20 times over. It's a lot of money to basically make us poorer.
We might have to do it, after all. But, let's call this for what it is. Because of climate change, humanity is about to become a whole lot poorer.
This is my sig.
I was an active ham back in college - about 1998. 20 meters was great back then. But I moved into a series of apartments where I couldn't put up an antenna, and the Internet came along, so I let it slide. Recently, my wife sort of convinced me to take the hobby back up again (probably to take some of my time away from Poker), and now that I'm back on the air.... the Sun isn't cooperating. :(
But that's ok. At least we're on the upswing rather than the downswing.
Although these cycles average at 11 years (actually 11.1), they vary markedly between approximately 9 and 14 years. So while this one is running longer than average it's going to be another 18 months or so before it's really unusual.
On a related note the period of 'no sunspots' is referred to as the Maunder Minimum, though it should be noted that there were still sunspots, and the cycles did continue, just at a greatly reduced intensity.
Note: I do not look at the sun directly, nor do I play someone who does so on TV.
Huricane frequency isn't all that connected with global warming, hurricane intensity is what should increase.
That hasn't happened either. I work in hurricane insurance software, and it just hasn't happened.
This is my sig.
Don't really care if the rocks are uncomfortable. Presumably there is a narrow band that 'life as we know it' exists within. 0K..270K really doesn't matter, we'd all be dead. Suppose the narrow band is in the range 290K .. 310K. Then 1K is ~5%. Thats a bit more troubling. What is the actual range?
Second, I think part of the issue is about distribution - head in the oven, feet in the fire - and all that. Although, the feet in the SUV, head up the ass seems more popular...
Even NASA's data seems to disagree with you. We had twice your number since 1970 alone. Go figure. A 0.05% increase per decade, over a century, is 0.5%. (And over 150 years, it's 0.75%.) Now it doesn't go the full 1.2% we'd need to explain the Global Warming (unless it went up as a different rate before), but it almost halves the effect we can blame ourselves for.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In the past, solar physicists observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots, coinciding with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700."
This is really really *really* hard to say. Our data on sunspots in prior to about 1750 is pretty dismal. Most of the mentions of sunspots are casual or even accidental observation. You can find a lot of data on this at the NOAA ftp site:
Reports of sunspots from 164BC to 1918AD
Monthly average of sunsports from 1749 to present
Note two things: One, that there were reports of sunspots between 1650 and 1700; two, that the data prior to 1749 is inaccurate and (pardon the pun) spotty.
Note that the monthly averages file (the second one) is fairly accurate, as the older data in that file was made by the Royal Observatory and the later data in that file was made by the NOAA. I find it really hard to jump to the conclusion that the little ice age was a result of sunspots. Without a time machine, I don't think we could say that with any degree of certainty.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
I was about to refute your statement and link to several places that show the massive increase in hurricane damage over the past few years, but then I stumbled across data that was normalized to population/infrastructure and you're right. There's more damage from hurricanes these days, but it looks to be driven by the value of the areas rather than the intensity of the storm.
A much better metric is the Lower Troposphere temperature as measured by satellite. It in fact shows no trend from 1998, and also shows a big drop globally in temperature since January 2007. See this analysis of the satellite data.
Break down by specialty:
http://www.petitionproject.org/gwdatabase/GWPP/Qualifications_Of_Signers.html
Only 40 "climatologists", but 3000+ in highly relevant fields.
You must not have researched this very hard, or even looked carefully at that site, because this is a very well known case of outright fraud that was debunked years ago. People can add their names over the Internet without any fact checking. So how is anyone going to find the person who lied on a website form?
http://mediamatters.org/items/200706060009
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine#Case_Study:_The_Oregon_Petition
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
that's basically true, at night the algae metabolize stored food and consume O2 and give off CO2; but the plants generally store much more than they need for the night during the day, and the day tends to be longer than the night when the plants are most active. All of this tends to allow a surplus of stored food in the algae plants. In most of the ocean the algae that dies sinks to the bottom and if it's deep enough it doesn't rot much. It's very probably the the oil we are burning today was once oils make by algae that died and sunk in the ocean and slowly de-oxidized from triglycerides into petroleum.
The AGW thing is more of a estimate from a computer model that is still being worked on than a controlled experiment so there will be surprises along the way; if we don't get some sunspots we might be lucky we mucked up the atmosphere to hold more heat!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds