Puzzled Scientists Say Strange Things Are Happening On the Sun

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Robert Lee Hotz reports in the WSJ that current solar activity is stranger than it has been in a century or more. The sun is producing barely half the number of sunspots as expected, and its magnetic poles are oddly out of sync. Based on historical records, astronomers say the sun this fall ought to be nearing the explosive climax of its approximate 11-year cycle of activity—the so-called solar maximum. But this peak is 'a total punk,' says Jonathan Cirtain. 'I would say it is the weakest in 200 years,' adds David Hathaway, head of the solar physics group at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Researchers are puzzled. They can't tell if the lull is temporary or the onset of a decades-long decline, which might ease global warming a bit by altering the sun's brightness or the wavelengths of its light. To complicate the riddle, the sun also is undergoing one of its oddest magnetic reversals on record, with the sun's magnetic poles out of sync for the past year so the sun technically has two South Poles. Several solar scientists speculate that the sun may be returning to a more relaxed state after an era of unusually high activity that started in the 1940s (PDF). 'More than half of solar physicists would say we are returning to a norm,' says Mark Miesch. 'We might be in for a longer state of suppressed activity.' If so, the decline in magnetic activity could ease global warming, the scientists say. But such a subtle change in the sun—lowering its luminosity by about 0.1%—wouldn't be enough to outweigh the build-up of greenhouse gases and soot that most researchers consider the main cause of rising world temperatures over the past century or so. 'Given our current understanding of how the sun varies and how climate responds, were the sun to enter a new Maunder Minimum, it would not mean a new Little Ice Age,' says Judith Lean. 'It would simply slow down the current warming by a modest amount.'"

Comments

Re:Global warming..

[Anonymous Coward]

I was alive then, and I can remember the CIA put forward proposals to do things like scatter soot on the Antarctic, dam the Gulf Stream and create a huge lake in the middle of Africa. The environmentalists on Earth Day 1970 were all warning about a new Ice age.

Here are a couple of papers from the scientists of those times...

http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0493/106/3/pdf/i1520-0493-106-3-413.pdf

http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F1520-0450(1971)010%3C0703:TEOAAO%3E2.0.CO%3B2

Re:Global warming..

[firewrought]

consensus is not the same as reality

And authority is never the source of truth. It's a good reminder, and one that needs to happen frequently.

At the same time, authority is frequently a necessary shortcut. Most casual participants in the Global Warming "debate" don't have the time to deep-dive the dozens of interrelated specialties needed to understand climate science. Instead we choose the narrative we find most convincing, whether it's ((greedy grant-seeking scientist supporting Al Gore's vision for controlling us all)) or ((greedy carbon-heavy corporations fueling disinformation campaigns against truth-seeking academics)). Arguing-to-consensus supports the latter by reminding us that there's strong agreement among people doing real-world investigation, and that's the closest to the truth we can get in time to make a decision.

Truth is not democratic in nature.

Another good reminder, but I'll nitpick a little: the scientific community isn't a democracy but a worldwide collection of highly-specialized researchers. Fallible? Yes. Corruptible? Some of them. But it's not the same thing as inviting all members of the populous to pick their favorite option after 8 months of intense media campaigns.