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.)

Comments

solar warming, that's why.

[Svet-Am]

it's obvious why -- climate change and solar warming! we need legislation to fix this problem.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[Anonymous Coward]

I blame the loss of pirates.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[peragrin]

Nope it's actuall the global warming laws that the sun is following. The summary stated without sunspots for 50 years the planet went through a mini ice age. The sun is just trying to help us cool the planet down a bit.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[FredFredrickson]

That would be weird if not only the earth tried to accomodate for the inbalance- but some sort of cosmic balance that we don't understand kicked in.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[beoba]

Unfortunately, the Sun doesn't care about the Earth.

Sorry

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[ArcherB]

Yeah, everybody knows that it's sunspots that cause climate change. Or maybe its absence of sunspots. Yeah, must be that, cause that's what we've got. It certainly isn't my SUV! Not unless you've been driving your SUV on Jupiter, which is also experiencing warming...

Couldn't be the sun causing GW. Why would anyone even think that the primary source of heat in the solar system would be responsible for warming?

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[clam666]

The sun isn't changing. Man causes climate change, the climate change causes solar activity to change.

Now that I've proved it the solution is to create a economic cap-and-trade system that creates a secondary market for the redistribution of wealth from people that earned it(good, bad, ugly, fairly, or unfairly) to people that didn't.

Surely you know that the movements of pieces of green paper around the earth will cause a perfect eden to exist like northern California worldwide don't you?

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the Sun doesn't care about the Earth.

Sorry Fine. The Earth couldn't give a crap about the Sun either. And no, we're NOT sorry!

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[Lord_Frederick]

Stupid selfish Sun.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[spun]

First, lack of sunspots corresponds to lowered solar output. Second, while the warming of Jupiter can be explained by increases in solar output, the warming of Earth can not. Do you honestly think climate scientists don't take this into account? That's either bordering on a tinfoil hat level of crazy conspiracy theory, or it represents an equally crazy level of disdain for other people's intellect.

I can't understand why anyone falls for this argument, it represents a complete lack of respect for science.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[JustOK]

thinking its so fucking brilliant!

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[Moraelin]

Ok, let's do some science. Physics, to be precise. We'll start from the StefanBoltzmann law.

Radiated energy is proportional to the _fourth_ power of the temperature. For a black body j = sigma * T^4, for a body that's not quite black, you just plug an emissivity factor in too.

A body heated by an external source (e.g., Earth) reaches equilibrium when the radiated energy equals the incoming energy. So the equation works just the same with j being the _incoming_ energy from the Sun.

What I'm getting at is that the average temperature of Earth is in the ballpark of 300K. We had an increase of 1K in a whole bloody century. That's the whole Global Warming. That's an increase of 0.3% or so. Plugging it back into the StefanBoltzmann law, we need an increase of only 1.003^4=1.01205 times in solar output to _fully_ explain it. That's 1.2% btw.

But even that's a bit over-calculated. Being that the same law applies to the Sun's power output, basically we just need the same 0.3% increase in the Sun's temperature to get that effect, all else being equal. You don't need anything spectacular to happen, really.

Yes, sunspots are a cause of short term variations, but we really don't know what the Sun has been gradually doing over that century. If both Jupiter _and_ Mars have been warming up, maybe the Sun is warming up after all.

And finally, well, if you're that concerned about insults to people's intelligence... maybe you should STFU with the "shut up and don't dare question the High Priests" attitude. Just a thought.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[mh1997]

"...while the warming of Jupiter can be explained by increases in solar output, the warming of Earth can not.

At least 25% of it can be:

From http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080512120523.htm

Over the past century, Earth's average temperature has increased by approximately 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit). Solar heating accounts for about 0.15 C, or 25 percent, of this change, according to computer modeling results published by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies researcher David Rind in 2004.

"Right now, we are in between major ice ages, in a period that has been called the Holocene," said Cahalan. "Over recent decades, however, we have moved into a human-dominated climate that some have termed the Anthropocene. The major change in Earth's climate is now really dominated by human activity, which has never happened before."

My question is what is the optimum temperature to sustain life on our planet? I've searched and can't find that answer and would appreciate any help. I'm not denying warming or trying to flame, I am serious about the question.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[mpeskett]

Depends what kind of life you prefer. There are species able to fill most niches, from polar bears and penguins at the cold end to extremophiles in the boiling hot ocean vents. The perceived problem with warming is that it removes some of the diversity of available niches (i.e. if all the ice melts the ice-living stuff has a problem). If it got significantly colder then things in the tropics might have a problem.

For the life that has been around for the relatively recent past, the temperatures of the relatively recent past are preferred... that's how evolution works, things adapt to the conditions that are available, or they die out. There is no real optimum, any sudden change from the prevailing norm means some species or other is fucked.

Although, if you just want to maximise the total mass of alive stuff on the face of the Earth, tropical temperatures seem to work well (lot of biomass in the rainforests), so a planet that's mostly fairly warm, with some deserts at the equator where it gets hotter and some temperate regions further north is probably your best bet. Shame about the polar bears though.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[peragrin]

that's my favorite part of global warming. They are all worried about a 3,000 year old ice shelf collapsing.

yet they can't seem to figure out if it is 3,000 years old then the ice shelf one generation before it must have collapsed due to the slave labor building the pyramids. It's not some natural collapse when it gets to heavy every 3-5 thousand years, noooo it must be humans fault.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[oni]

As if the whole world revolves around it.

(the pun didn't quite sound right when I used the word orbit)

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[WhiplashII]

Second, the cap and trade system, while not perfect , does not redistribute wealth

Very true - that is why the older, embedded politicians and companies like it so much. Who is hurt under cap and trade? STARTUPS!

As a startup, (building rockets, for example), I am not allowed to pollute, or at least have to pay some arbitrary amount for it. And who do I pay? My competition, who were established before the caps and now can just sit back and accept the checks.

Why are you against progress? You want anyone trying to create something new to be beholden to the status quo? Really, how does your system help anyone that is not a large corporation?

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[stankulp]

You have just proved that belief in AGW is a religious belief.

The idea that global climate is never supposed to change is as primitive as any creationist idea.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[Quadraginta]

I imagine one could fit a black-body curve to the solar spectrum, for example. That would probably give a pretty precise answer.

However, the OP has a point, even if it wasn't put all that sophisticatedly. The question of the influence of solar output on the Earth's energy budget is not as settled as you imply. In the first place, he's right, only very subtle changes in the huge amounts of energy flowing in and out of the Earth's ecosystem are required, and these are inherently difficult to measure accurately. Generally speaking, you're subtracting large and nearly equal numbers from each other, which is always tricky.

Secondly, the Sun does more than simply heat the Earth through radiation. It emits ionizing radiation that ionizes the atmosphere (which is what allows over-the-horizon radio communication). It injects charged particles into Earth's magnetic field. It has a magnetic field itself that interacts with that of the Earth, and changes the way charged particles from the Sun and the cosmos hit the Earth. These things may have subtle effects on, for example, cloud formation -- and therefore on the Earth's albedo.

One might well say who cares about all this weird third- and fourth-order stuff if we were talking about big changes in Earth's climate. But we're not. We're not trying to explain an Ice Age, still less a "snowball Earth" event, or the runaway hothouse climate of Venus. We're trying to explain a temperature trend that is so slight that it is not only much smaller than annual and diurnal variations, it is smaller than the unexplained "background noise" variations in the measurement. It's only by averaging over a long time that you can even see any temperature change.

Does that mean the leading explanation of the day for the observed temperature change (anthropogenic CO2 emission) is wrong? Nope. But it very well does suggest a bit of humility about the possibility of other explanations. Mother Nature has a long, long history of confounding "obvious" explanations.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[Coriolis]

Are you perhaps referring to this article from 2001 which suggests that cosmic rays (which are different from emissions from the Sun, btw) intensify the effect of CFCs?

I suggest that you first read through the resources on realclimate.org on solar forcing, where it has been extensively discussed, and if you wish to dispute their findings, then please attack the science, not the scientist.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[packeteer]

Before you go claiming "tinfoil hat science" I would look at the universities where those climatologist teach. With Berkley, Stanford, and any other liberal biased university behind their name, you can bet on their position.

I find it interesting that anytime the facts don't line up with someone's values they say there is a "liberal bias" going on. That is a classic ad hominem attack. It's literally a textbook example of one, but I'm sure that textbook must be biased.

Maybe rational people and the apparent facts of the world have a liberal bias. Or perhaps the forces of unreason in the world have seen a polarized society and chose to exploit one side to support their arguments. Most of the time if someone is greedy and they need public support for themselves all the need to do is claim this is a political issue and generally poor conservatives will support them.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[Quadraginta]

Hmm, well...I dunno if the existence of photosynthesizers that do something with the incoming radiation other than simply absorb it, like a rock, matters. Maybe. I suppose one could argue that some small fraction of the incoming radiation is being turned into stored chemical energy instead of re-radiated as heat. Does that matter? Got me. We're talking about incredibly subtle effects.

increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is known to have a warming effect

Wrong. It's known to increase the warming effect in the laboratory. That's easy physics. But in real life? That's harder. We don't know enough about the atmosphere to calculate the effect with enough certainty, and we can't measure the effect because we can't do the control experiment (go back in time 200 years, not start burning fossil fuels, and see what happens).

Even if the effect of the CO2 is smaller than an as yet unproven warming by the sun: We can't change the sun, can we?

You speak as if reducing CO2 emissions is entirely a cost-free enterprise. But it's not. It would have enormous dislocating economic effects. That means it will greatly reduce the size and health of the future world economy, slow down scientific and technological progress (which both depend on a healthy economy to pay for them), and greatly strain social and political agreements that keep world peace.

That's all fine if it's necessary to prevent an Ice Age or runaway warming that will leave Earth like Venus.

But what if it's not? The problem is, we can only make such a staggeringly huge change in our habits perhaps once in a thousand years. By making that change now, in the direction of reducing CO2 emissions, we give up the ability to make any similarly massive change for a long time. Is that a wise bet? Or might there be some other climate effect, driven by the Sun, say, to which we will in the future really wish we had preserved our ability to respond?

If reducing global CO2 emissions is something like buying insurance, we do need to consider the fact that that insurance is very expensive, and, once we buy it, we'll have virtually nothing left in the bank with which to buy anything else we might need in the future. That doesn't say we shouldn't do it. That does say we should as a species approach this giant purchase with extreme caution, the way one might hesitate before committing to buy a very large house in an uncertain real estate market.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[lawaetf1]

Try 12,000 years.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the incredibly rapid 2.5C temp increase in the last 50 years.

... that just happens to coincide with us digging up sequestered carbon and burning it by the megaton, pushing CO2 levels to ever increasing highs.

Nay, my good man, all is well. Continue whistling and dance that little jig you do so well.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[JebusIsLord]

That's a straw person argument, and you know it. What climate scientist out there would ever suggest that the global climate stays constant? It doesn't, and they all know that. They study the degree and rate of change, and identify causation. The broad scientific (not dogmatic) consensus is that the change is too rapid, too large, and the corelation with increasing levels of CO2 is impossible to ignore.

Don't make dishonest attacks.

Re:solar warming, that's why.

[ihuntrocks]

Yes, you are correct, it is a rapid (geologically speaking) and large process. However, it isn't the fastest we've ever experienced a warming event in our history. I also think that it's interesting to note that nearly all of our previous warming events either predate our species or at least predate our technology. Thankfully this isn't a topic of who is to blame for climate change, so forgive me for straying slightly off topic to mention that.

What I would like to mention is that I am really loving the increasing levels of CO2. It's a perfect compliment for all of the free oxygen we're getting out of the deal. Think about it: oceans warm, ice melts, algae grows in the now exposed and warmer waters and is further fed by the growing levels of CO2. We can see evidence of this happening many times (rock flowering is one such source). Geologists have known that this seems to happen to our planet, largely of its own volition, from time to time, and to tell you the truth: we haven't been worried. I honestly don't see what all the fuss is about. Oh, no, the average global temperature is going up by a degree Celsius over the course of half a century due to the millions of tons of carbon output we have as a species. Yeah, well, when Mount Pinatubo erupted, it released enough ash to lower (bear in mind, this is with global warming working against it) the average planetary temperature by one degree Celsius for two years. We also won't go into the random releasing of tons and tons of methane that was compressed as ice under the oceans quite a long time ago which fried the crap out of the planet. Now THAT was global warming. The planet itself spontaneously released more greenhouse gases than we as a species have since our inception. Oh, the things nature does when no one is paying attention. Honestly, someone should lobby against random acts of nature which are harmful to....nature.

I'm just going to kick back and enjoy the benefits of this naturally occurring process. I'm really okay with more oxygen, and better beach locations popping up around the world that haven't been exploited as such, what with the past temperate spell we've been having (glad to see we're not stuck in that anymore).

On another note, I believe this may encourage a healthier life style for people in general. We've all known for a long time that fat people don't do well in the heat. This is just a little incentive from nature (in small part helped by humans) and I welcome it.

You mean the Sun's spot production has been ....

[Palmyst]

a little spotty?

This reminds me of...

[Kemanorel]

...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.

Re:This reminds me of...

[fumblebruschi]

Meh. Fallen Angels is what a friend of mine calls "fan porn" -- a book cynically designed to flatter the vanity of its target audience. The book features a group of (what else?) science-fiction-fan nerds who are persecuted for being smart, creative, and open-minded -- exactly the fantasy that many SF fans construct about their own lives. (Hey, it's not that people avoid you because you're an obnoxious ass -- it's that they're all jealous because you're special.) There is no plot that sits so well with the SF market as a story about a small group of superior people who are oppressed by the inferior masses.

Re:You mean the Sun's spot production has been ...

[MarcoG42]

Apparently, no spotting at all. Word is the sun is tremendously worried and was seen at CVS in the pregnancy test section.

McCain is right on Global Warming

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:I blame

[Anonymous Coward]

I blame the Mayans and their stupid calender!!

Re:Global warming my blue butt

[bunratty]

No discernible warming since 2000? Then this article from NASA must be all wrong then. Thanks for letting us know! *rolleyes*

Re:Global warming my blue butt

[pushing-robot]

Incidentally this lull in solar activity coincides with there having been no discernable warming since 2000.

Even if that were true, which it isn't, one would expect *cooling* during this half of the cycle.

2012

[FiloEleven]

...and expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012 Causing the apocalypse predicted by the Mayan calendar, no doubt.

It's the Mayan Prophecy!

[steeljaw]

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.

Re:Global warming my blue butt

[CyprusBlue113]

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

Re:Global warming my blue butt

[bunratty]

You mean like these graphs from the IPCC which show an increase in global temperatures from 2000 to 2007?

Re:You mean the Sun's spot production has been ...

[circletimessquare]

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?

Yes, the alarmists are lying

[Iowan41]

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?

Except ...

[Ambitwistor]

Plugging it back into the StefanBoltzmann law, we need an increase of only 1.003^4=1.01205 times in solar output to _fully_ explain it. That's 1.2% btw. However, over the last 150 years or so, solar irradiance has only increased by about 0.1% (from ~1364.5 to 1366 W/m^2, IIRC).

Dearie, that was satire

[Moraelin]

Your characterization of climate scientists as a high priesthood says all I need to know about your respect for real science. You are one of those people who jumps to conclusions and then reasons backwards to find a comfortable theory that fits what you'd like to believe is true.

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.

Where are the numbers from?

[giminy]

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.