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Big Drop In Solar Activity Could Cool Earth
coondoggie writes "Scientists say the Sun, which roils with flares and electromagnetic energy every 11 years or so, could go into virtual hibernation after the current cycle of high activity, reducing temperatures on Earth. As the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, begins to ramp up toward maximum, scientists from the National Solar Observatory and the Air Force Research Laboratory independently found that the Sun's interior, visible surface, and corona indicate the next 11-year solar sunspot cycle, Cycle 25, will be greatly reduced or may not happen at all."
Take that Al Gore!
... the global warming naysayers are going to have a field day with this one...
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Does this mean that we should be polluting more to compensate?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
The Europeans are going to save us by switching from nukes back to coal.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This is what they said about the last solar cycle, especially since we went into a deep solar minimum, and now the sun is waking up and we have had some nice Geomagnetic storms and solar flares already.
The networkworld (why are we posting a solar/space article from there?) article links to a much better Cosmic Log article: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/14/6857473-solar-forecast-hints-at-a-big-chill
..for all of this intense activity. It needs more time to rest between cycles these days.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
I love this. You think the existing models don't take solar variation into account? You have reduced a complex, multi-factor system of equations to one independent variable. Congratulations on letting anything that sounds like it agrees with you at all prove all other ideas wrong even if there's nothing contradictory at all. Sun cycles are 10 year data cycles that don't explain 100 year trends in the slightest. If you look at the climate data since the invention of the thermometer, the waves produced are already quite visible. This was the same argument they made in the 70s, when global warming was first introduced as a theory(but it was far less understood then).
Instead of offering useless conjecture about what people are going to say, how about you give us a nice solid hypothesis about how much cooler it will be when, and how that relates to existing global warming projections. I dare you to actually make a meaningful falsible claim instead of putting words in the mouth of people you disagree with.
winter is coming?
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
Decreased solar output will have an impact on global temperatures, but it will take time.
Greenhouse gasses (Water, CO2, CH4, etc) do not directly interact with incoming shortwave radiation from the sun. Rather, they interact with the longwave radiation coming from the surface of the Earth. With no greenhouse gasses, the Earth would radiate (based on its temperature) and this radiation would be lost to space. What greenhouse gasses do is absorb the emitted longwave which adds energy to the molecule absorbing it. The excited state either results in a temperature increase of the molecule, or the emission of radiation. Some of this re-emitted radiation is directed downward, toward the Earth. The net result is that some energy that would be lost to space is absorbed by molecules in the atmosphere, warming it, and some is redirected back to the Earth, increasing the net incoming radiation.
The effect can be directly observed. If you look at the measured longwave radiation emitted at the top of our atmosphere, the global average temperature you would calculate would not support life as we know it (much too cold). The difference from that and our directly observed average surface temperatures are due to the greenhouse effect (the energy based on those temperatures is not making it to the top of the atmosphere).
Decreasing solar input would change part of the energy budget, but the greenhouse effect will act as a buffer (from absorbing and re-emitting longwave radiation) that would cause a delayed response.
Note that I am not a climate scientist, just a regular meteorologist who has taken a few classes in radiative transfer.
Solar activity had nothing to do with "The Year Without a Summer". It was the eruption of Tambora that caused that.
It's freakin' 107.1F (41.7C) in North Texas... Come on sun, cool us off!
...hmmm why does that not sound right..
Local solar astronomer here - Current global warming trend is definitely not Sun driven. We went through a prolonged period of solar inactivity over the last 5 years and what do you know, temperatures kept going up. We also monitor the Sun in every conceivable wavelength and from multiple angles, so it would be pretty hard to have some significant amount of energy hitting us that we don't know about.
-Bill
I'd like to see data collected from several fixed weather stations across time (eg. a century) using the same equipment and the same method. As far as I know (and please prove me wrong if I am), the current data doesn't take into account the inaccuracy of older equipments, upgrades in methodologies (the distance from the ground and condensation factor of the surface of the equipment does influence the data collected) and/or bigger warming cycles of our planet. It is commonly accepted that the earh has gone trough several ice ages, but the idea that the warming we are experience is somehow natural and part of a cycle is dismissed as heresy, because we are totally killing the polar bears and the forests and whatnot. I'm not (totally) AGW, but the data available isn't reliable enough and most of the models and theories I've seen resumed are weak, considering they're the argument for a worldwide effort. I do agree that we should move away from oil and from coal, but I think it is funny how some companies are making billions from this "green frenzy" - from recycling companies to carbon credit traders.
Wow...
Just because it's been cooler at your house for the last two years, does not mean the earth, as a whole, is not getting warmer in general.
It's perfectly plausible that the average temperature on the planet could rise significantly while a region, like Europe, gets colder. For instance, general warming could result in polar warming diminishing the northern ice caps (as we're seeing). Should those ice caps melt enough, the iceberg melting in the north atlantic would dramatically lesson since no glaciers would spawn them. The atlantic currents would be disrupted, lessening the gulf stream. Winds flowing over those warm waters would no longer carry that extra heat to Europe and slowly the weather in Paris starts to resemble Winnepeg (about the same latitude). The good news for Winnepeg is that it's likely to warm up a little.
That's climate change in a nutshell. General warming. Local cooling. Some areas get dryer. Others wetter. Very, very complicated interplay between systems makes predicting winners and losers extremely difficult.
And I swear, the next time there's a snowstorm and people use that as evidence that there isn't global warming, I'm going to punch someone in the face.
An examination of sunspots over the last 10+ years by looking at Fe lines shows that the magnetic fields and temperatures in the sunspots are decreasing. There is apparently a "minimum" value for the magnetic field for a sunspot to form. The average value has been decreasing rather rapidly of late (10 years or so). This leads to smaller and less intense sunspots. If the magnetic values generated are no longer strong enough to generate sunspots, how is the magnetic field of the sun affected? Will it still go through a 22-year cycle (I suspect yes, the lack of sunspots should not affect that cycle)? So simply the 11-year SUNSPOT cycle will be affected.
Further to this, I (as an actual real life scientist) have been looking at the activity of the solar magnetic field. Specifically the transition from a dipolar field (at solar minimum) to a non-dipolar field (near solar maximum) and back again. Given the long relationship the Sun and Earth have had (some 4 billion years) I thought I'd throw in some macroscale effects seen on the Earth for comparison. Very surprisingly, the sunspot cycle and the El Nino/La Nina cycle is actually reasonably correlated (remember, correlation does not equal causation). There is a bit looser relationship better the solar cycle and Typhoons (though this may be more related El Nino) and monsoon rains (very likely correlated to the El Nino cycle).
However, solar variation in radiation is not the cause (this is what is taken into account in climate models) but the magnetic fields and the solar wind appear to play a much larger role (See multiple articles by Scafetta and West for example). The solar wind interacts with polar atmosphere and there is a suggestion (questionable) that is may link the Quasi-biennial ocsillation to solar activity. There seems to be relationship, however, it is not clear what it is or how a lack of solar activity would affect the Earth (or what the "lag time" might be).
Will it get cooler if there is an extended period of low to no solar activity? Yes, there is strong evidence of that based on previous examples (Maunder and Sporer minimums for example). Will the cooling completely counteract the greenhouse gas warming? Good question.
Yep, maybe now the government will give oil companies subsidies. Imagine that!
Solar activity had nothing to do with "The Year Without a Summer". It was the eruption of Tambora that caused that.
Indeed. Tekrat (the GP) is quite confused.
More about Mount Tambora, which blew its top in April 1815 with enough ejecta to darken skies worldwide and reduce agricultural yields.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Because 'coondoggie' posts summaries of all of blog articles on here, it seems, with only links back to his blog.
At least Roland Piquepaille learned, and started linking to places other than his blog ... especially as coondoggie's blog spam tends to just be regurgitated press releases with mostly self-referrential links or broken links when he does link externally (eg, whenever he tries linking to the SDO website).
Check Google News -- there have been well over a hundred groups responding to the press -- NatGeo, Space.com ... all are better informed than coondoggie's recycled crap with his own conjecture inserted. (maybe that's why Slashdot likes posting his stuff so much ... because they get more people responding to how mis-informed he is)
http://news.google.com/news/more?hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&q=frank+hill&biw=1169&bih=793&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=d-UvhPYxunMkI0MlB6BfoT_DWec-M&ei=1OL3TZfwLoKisAPG2LzxDA&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CC4QqgIwAA
Discover Magazine had a good article -- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/14/the-sun-may-be-headed-for-a-little-quiet-time/
And let me quote them:
(disclaimer ... I'm actually at the SPD meeting, and I've co-authoried with Frank Hill, but I didn't go to his talk today)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Everyone knows the biggest greenhouse gas (something that absorbs/emits radiation in the thermal-IR band) is water vapor. Water vapor is responsible for about 50-60% of the greenhouse effect, but there's not much we humans can do about it since you have the ocean constantly able to refresh the water vapor in the air.
The 2nd and 3rd biggest greenhouse gasses are CO2 and CH4. Although CH4 is a more effective greenhouse gas (about 20x), there's much more CO2 and that currenty has a bigger impact (~15-20% vs 5-10%).
Apparently people think we can do something about that 15-20%, but as most folks are also aware, it's much easier to agree to try to do something than acutally to be able to do something (just google "miss greenhouse gas target"). It's kinda like going on a diet, we know it's good for us, but it's really hard to do.
FWIW, I personally don't think the CO2-reduction thing is really something we can accomplish. We should just spend the resources to try to figure out how to live in a world where the frozen methane escapes from the ocean floor and causes real global warming (not the kind of stuff that we are seeing now). I doubt that even if we sucked all the CO2 from the atmosphere we could prevent this problem as it is a ocean thermal oscillation, not something that we humans have control over as it has happened in the past long before we walked this earth.
Earth isn't warm because of CO2, it's because of H2O vapor.
Increases in CO2 increase temperature which drives increases in H2O vapor which also increases temperature. Increases in temperature also cause solubility of CO2 in water to decrease, so the oceans also release CO2. It's called a positive feedback mechanism, and climate scientists have known about it for a long time.
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I don't know if they considered this effect and that effect and this possibility, so I'll assume they didn't and all the science is crap and that what I want to be true is true, rather than checking it out and possibly finding out that what I want to be true isn't.
Trust me. Climate scientists are smarter than you give them credit for, and have considered all of those effects, and those possibilities, and have corrected for them, or have convinced themselves and the rest of the scientific community that they weren't causing current temperature changes. You aren't thinking of anything they haven't already considered.
I know that with all the denialist propoganda out there it's hard to find reliable information. http://skepticalscience.com/ is a good place to start. The wikipedia page on global warming is more reliable than most pages on global warming. And on either, feel free to follow back to the original source.
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It will get warmer.
It will get colder.
Repeat.
It is irrefutable.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Yes, the Dalton Minimum had its part to play in the Year Without a Summer as did several other large eruptions (~VEI-4) in 1812, 1813 and 1814 but the April 1815 Tambora eruption, a VEI-7 event, was the straw that broke the camels back and led to snow in Upper New York to Maine in June of 1816 among other things. You could say the pump was primed by those other things but it wouldn't have been half as bad without Tambora.
To respond to your straw men:
a) Solar activity is of course completely relevant to global temperatures and you can see the effect of variations in insolation in the temperature record. But it hasn't been changing enough to account for all warming and from the 1960's until this recent minimum it was relatively constant from one cycle to the next. That's why climatologists discount the effects of the Sun for the warming since then.
b) No one who knows his stuff is saying that CO2 is responsible for all of the warming since the Dalton Minimum. Before the 1960's warming was more due to the Sun coming out of the Dalton Minimum and the lack of large volcanic eruptions in the first half of the 20th century. Since then increased GHG's have taken over to as the larger cause of increasing temperatures.
this might help connect the dots...
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/14/nasa-jpl-on-new-insights-on-how-solar-minimums-affect-earth/