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Sunspots May Be Different During This Solar Minimum
PhreakOfTime writes "According to Bill Livingston and Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, sunspot magnetic fields are waning. The two respected solar astronomers have been measuring solar magnetism since 1992. Their technique is based on Zeeman splitting of infrared spectral lines in radiation emitted by iron atoms in the vicinity of sunspots. Extrapolating their data (PDF) into the future suggests that sunspots could completely disappear within decades." To motivate their interest the researchers mention the Maunder Minimum, which occurred beginning in 1645 and coincided with the coldest part of the so-called "Little Ice Age." Sunspot counts during this period were as low as 1/1,000 of the numbers seen in modern times.
It seems we may be heading towards another ice age. Time to start buying up some of that precious offshore land! Global climate change, whether caused by humans or natural processes is not something to be feared but something to be profited from.
Speaking of global change. The Slashdot front page still hasn't changed the appearance of that +- bar yet. Does anyone think it looks good? Has anyone found it to be functional?
When sunspots stop occurring, we're in for some global cooling. Perhaps this could reverse the damage we humans have done to the environment. What with our cars and factories and stuff.
sorry, this joke kinda wrote itself.
Extrapolating? Sounds like a job for Randall Munroe! http://xkcd.com/605/
I presume...he knows what he's talking about!
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
Some look at ice core samples. Others count sunspots. This suggests that we will have "lower than average global temperatures". Call me a heretic, but I think that we get better data from counting sun spots.
So, in the 1600s we had a very low number of sun spots and a little ice age.
In the last decade we've had a low number of sun spots and a temperature spike.
But the people who says that global warming isn't caused by human factors, primarily claim that it's due to this low number of sun spots.
So ... normal sun spot count, normal temperatures. Low number of sun spots, high temperatures. Very low number of sun spots, very low temperatures.
I wonder what happens if we get a high and very high number of sun spots - one will probably push the average global temperature to 300 Kelvin while the other will send it to 350. Wonder which will do what.
Oh no! Global cooling is coming! Kill some pirates to raise the temperature back to normal! Invade Somalia and give the RIAA a license to kill!
But something is unusual about the current sunspot cycle. The current solar minimum has been unusually long, and with more than 670 days without sunspots through June 2009, the number of spotless days has not been equaled since 1933
As to the "low number of sun spots and a temperature spike", more from TFA:
...posted on the Internet and led to some misunderstanding when a few authors from other fields cited that post and erroneously concluded that a lack of sunspots could explain global warming
This is something worth following closely:
Four years after the first draft paper, the predicted cycle-independent dearth in sunspot numbers has proven accurate. The vigor of sunspots, in terms of magnetic strength and area, has greatly diminished...Whether this is an omen of long-term sunspot decline, analogous to the Maunder Minimum, remains to be seen.
Note in this chart on Wikipedia that temps have been trending downward for thousands of years, as if we are plunging into the next glacial period.
Chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
See here in general about the time since the most recent glacial period: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene
According to data from the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., the global high temperature in 1998 was 0.76 degrees Celsius (1.37 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average for the previous 20 years. So far this year, the high has been 0.42 degrees Celsius (0.76 degrees Fahrenheit), above the 20-year average, clearly cooler than before.
Al Gore seems to have been barking up the wrong tree. This chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Temp-sunspot-co2.svg) shows a much better correlation between sunspots and temperature, than between CO2 and termperature.
However global temperatures are still rising while sunspot activity is decreasing that only gives us breathing space. When sun spot activity increases again and global temperatures increase driven upwards by both solar and man made factors.
1998 was the year of the strongest El Nino of the century. No one is saying (or no expert is saying--no telling what random activists will claim) that every year with be successively hotter than the last, any more than each successive day in December is colder than the last. Global warming is a global trend, and needs to be considered as a trend. Here's a good debunking of this particularly bad GW-skeptic argument.
(I realized that with the Winter analogy I just cued the 'it's a natural cycle and therefore humans have no effect' people. But scientists didn't just somehow overlook that possibility. Maybe they're not a bunch of absent-minded bumblers after all?)
Actually, in the last decade, we have NOT had a temperature spike. Over the last 10 or so years of little solar activity, the global mean temperature has actually declined slightly. During the previous period of very high solar activity, temperatures rose. Seems too soon for a clear cause and effect, but certainly enough to investigate further.
I knew global warming zealots were poor students of science, math, and history, but I did think they were better at paying attention to CURRENT data than this...
*Doctor* Livingston, I presume!
The Politically driven, AGW-religionist UK Met Office, the same office will not publish that data for critical review? The smae Met office that uses sensors positioned next to air conditioning outlets (hot air)? The one that fails to account for the area around the sensor going from open field to an airport tarmac?
Most other sources indicate a cooling trend over the past decade and will point to the data, but those idiots claim warming will not release the data.
In the last decade we've had a low number of sun spots and a temperature spike.
Wrong! The temperature has been going down for the last decade. In fact, in 2007 alone, the global temperature dropped about 0.6 degrees C. This wiped out about a century of "global warming." Any graphs that show the temperature rising for the past decade have had their data manipulated in a manner similar to the infamous hockey stick graph.
Or it's just the calm before the storm, and we are going to get hit with a lot of sunspot activity, or nice solar flares or maybe even something cooler.
ps thats not cooler as in cold, but cooler is in something pretty fucking awesome that we didn't expect, and oh, look, as a side product, we are dead. or not.
Be seeing you...