Solar Dynamo Still Anemic, Magnetism and UV Lax

radioweather writes "While we are well along into solar cycle 24, there remains a significant gap between the predictions of where we should be, and where we actually are in the progression of the cycle. Recently, the sun went spotless again, and the solar Ap geomagnetic index, an indicator of the solar magneto, hit zero. It is something you really don't expect to see this far along into the cycle. In other solar news, scientists monitoring the SORCE solar satellite have found that solar ultraviolet emissions have dropped significantly in the past few years. The Solar Irradiance Monitor on the satellite 'suggests that ultraviolet irradiance fell far more than expected between 2004 and 2007 — by ten times as much as the total irradiance did — while irradiance in certain visible and infrared wavelengths surprisingly increased, even as solar activity wound down overall.'"

Comments

Re:Signs of Grand Minimum

[SoftwareArtist]

Whoa. That is so completely, totally wrong, I hardly know where to start.

The greenhouse effect is very well understood. It's the sort of thing you derive as an exercise in an undergrad electromagnetism class. You can find a discussion of it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect, but the basic idea is very simple. When light hits any material (solid, liquid, or gas), some energy is transmitted, some is reflected, and some is absorbed. The details depend strongly on both the material and the frequency of the incoming light. That's why different objects are different colors: because they vary in how much light of each color they reflect.

The energy from the sun is primarily in the ultraviolet and visible frequencies. When it hits the earth, much of the energy is absorbed, then re-emitted as lower frequency infrared light. Many materials (including glass, which is how greenhouses work, and carbon dioxide, which is how the earth's greenhouse effect works) are more reflective of infrared light than of ultraviolet or visible light. That's how they hold in energy: a larger fraction of the energy coming in gets through than of the energy trying to get out.

All of the above is easily testable, and every time you get into a car that's gotten hot by sitting in the sun, you are witnessing the greenhouse effect in action.

If I may offer a suggestion (and I mean this sincerely, not as an attempt to be insulting), one of the most important things you can know is what you don't know. You clearly know almost nothing about the science of climate change and the evidence supporting it, yet you seem to believe that you know a lot about it. You don't. Making false claims and throwing out insults about "wooly-minded AGW believers" who actually know far more than you does nothing useful: not for you, not for them, not for society. You owe it to yourself to be better than that.