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The Sun Has First Spotless Month Since 1913
radioweather writes "August 2008 has made solar history. As of 00 UTC September 1st 2008 (5PM PST)
we just witnessed the
first spotless calendar month since June 1913.This was determined according
to sunspot
data from NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center, which goes back to 1749.
In the 95 years since 1913, we've had quite an active sun, but activity has been
declining in the last few years. The sun today is a nearly featureless sphere and has been spotless for 42
days total, but this is the first full calendar month since 1913 for a spotless
sun. And there are other indicators of the sun being in a funk. Australia's
space weather agency recently revised their solar cycle 24 forecast, pushing the
expected date for a ramping up of
cycle 24 sunspots into the future by six months."
As one of the links above indicate, there was a "sunspeck" reported August 21/22, though. Reader MikeyTheK adds a link to a story at Daily Tech on the spotless record.
to 'prove' that global warming isn't manmade.
There we go, asking people to prove negatives again. Why don't you start by proving that it IS man-made?
Or conversely, prove that it ISN'T caused by the belly button lint of invisible space goats.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"There we go, asking people to prove negatives again. Why don't you start by proving that it IS man-made?"
The argument being made is that it HAS been proven, as far as one can prove anything in such indeterministic systems.
Of course, we had proof for years that ulcers were caused by stress. Nope - bacteria.
Proof that the continents were immobile in their positions. Well, not so much proof as that it was just so totally OBVIOUS that continents couldn't move, and that "continental drift" was a crackpot theory. Until it wasn't.
AIDS was a breakdown of the immune system because of IV drug use, exposure to multiple venereal diseases, and the generally unhealth lifestyle of the gay community. Until they isolated a virus.
The reality is that scientific "proof" consists of general agreement among communities of people about the interpretation of observed phenomena, and that agreement can be driven by MANY factors, not just how well the data fits. One CANNOT get to the level of mathematical proof. So there will always be a role for skeptics, and those that just won't accept that, if you have a square peg and a round hole, you just pretend the peg's squareness doesn't exist, because it MUST fit into the round hole.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
As to how the Earth is heating up due to there being too few sun spots or birds are falling out of the sky and little children are being eaten by monsters at the worlds edge.
I'm really interested in stories about science but every one like this seems to be taken as an excuse for the uninformed to come up with todays hair brained theory to scare the masses. I wonder if we can link this to terrorism in some way.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Considering that recorded history is but a tiny fraction of human existence, which is in turn but a tiny fraction of earth's existence, I have a hard time believing anything anyone says about long-term trends. We just don't know.
Of course atmospheric/climate scientists have considered the impact of the sun. Please, don't assume they're complete idiots.
The problem with global warming alarmism is not not the climate science is poor, but that it is used to rationalize unnecessarily intrusive interventions in people's lives that have little to do with preventing catastrophe, and very questionable impact on net emissions.
The obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem is to simply internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off, either by tradeable caps or a tax, and then apply the funds to mitigating the damage. Then, you don't have to do impossible calculations about which activities are "truly wasteful", and people can decide how they cut back. And even if they don't, such a solution is still robust, as such a decision would just generate more funds with which to handle the problem.
But the most vocal alarms don't want this. Instead, they propose a laundry list of intrusive interventions, and then want to pick and choose which technologies are the "right" ones. If they were honest about wanting to avert catastrophe, the debate today would be about the size of the tax or cap, not about whether we should ban this particular product on the grounds that it gets an emotional reaction out of some people. Alarmism has been more about whether you're "on the team" or not. If the most efficient solution for you is to get better insulation rather than a hybrid, well, the latter would signal that you're "one of them" and the former wouldn't, so ...
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
After all, the Earth is about be destroyed in the Rapture anyways, so why do we care?
Would be funny if it wasn't true - my mother-in-law just told me that global warming doesn't matter because when the world ends it will be an act of God and there will be nothing we can do about it anyway. The implications of this worldview are frightening.
They use phrases like "it suggests", and "gives support to" rather than phrases like "statistically significant".
Actually, the Fourth Assessment Report produced in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report with several hundred scientific contributors and co-authors, uses phrases like "very high confidence" and "very likely".
"There is very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming" (p. 37)
"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations" (p. 39)
I wish they would drink some Kool-aid and leave now. They really annoy the rest of us already fending for ourselves trying to make the Real world a better place.
Science is the Real TRUTH!