Saturday, December 19, 2009

Disappearing sunspots may signal end to global warming

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Sunspot numbers are now at a 100-year low, a possible sign of a cooler climate ahead. Sorry, Al Gore, you have to return your Nobel medal and money.




Sunspot numbers are now at a 100-year low, a possible sign of a cooler climate ahead.


Oh, where, oh where have all the sunspots gone?

The fiery orange ball overhead has quieted during the past three years. Quiet in the sense that there have been very few sunspots – those black blotches on the sun’s surface caused by intense magnetic activity.

But just how quiet is quiet? Well, so far during the recent solar minimum (a period of low activity during the sun’s typical 11-year solar cycle), we’ve seen 183 sun-spotless days in 2007, 266 in 2008 and 259 in 2009 (as of Dec. 16 2009). Earth hasn’t witnessed a similar three-year stretch (1911, 192, 1913) of sun-spotless days since the early 1900s.

The blank sun has not gone unnoticed by the experts. "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.

"This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.





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2 comments:

Francis T. Manns, Ph.D. said...

The true believers do not want you to know, "It is not the heat; it is the humidity”
What the ego geocentric believers always miss is a subtle study from Denmark. Two geophysicists (Friis-Christensen and Lassen, 1991) found a 95% correlation with sunspot peak frequency, cooling, and heating. When the peaks are farther apart, all the planets cool and when the peaks are closer, all the planets warm. It is such a strong correlation that the editor of Science magazine said, “now the ball on anthropogenic global warming is in the other court”. published in Science in 1991, it is such a strong correlation that AGW was held at bay for four or five years and came back with “Correlation is not causation.” George Monbiot of the Guardian debunked the study by reversing the effect, and citing the conclusion as false. He could be just in error or worse, intellectually fraudulent. That column has been deleted from the Guardian archives. Variation in heat output, however, is a red herring, only varying in the fourth significant figure and probably has nothing to do with it.
The sunspots are simply a proxy for the sun’s magnetic shield that shields earth too. In a sunspot minimum, the shields are down and cosmic radiation (iron nuclei mostly) bombard the earth and seed the clouds. Experiment supports solar causation. Successful cloud formation has since been subject to experimentation by the successor scientists at the Danish National Space Centre.
The Danes now have international support and an experiment scheduled for the Hadron Collider soon. I cannot wait to see if there is more support for the sun in global warming. It is a variable star. It is not the heat, it is the humidity… precipitation in the form of ice and snow and changes in reflectivity are huge as is the cooling effect of evaporation. I have just exceeded my safe zone of knowledge on the subject. Speculation for me is that the centre of gravity of the solar system (Sun-Jupiter centre of mass) has a pronounced wobble and controls the magnetic behaviour of the sun.
Toronto, where I live, is particularly sensitive to the magnetic (sunspot) cycle because the Great Lakes Basin is a huge cloud chamber. The rainiest summers on record were in 2008-9. The previous rainfall record was during the sunspot minimum of 1986, a 22-year cycle low. 22-year cycles are more pronounced than the 11-year cycle for some unknown reason. Every 22 years the magnetic poles of the sun shift. Right now is mysterious because they are horizontal instead of parallel to the rotational pole. Maybe we are stuck mid-flip.
The Medieval church squashed the Galilean proposal for the earth following the sun; now it is the church of the environmental lobby groups. I am choosing my words carefully because we are all environmentalists.

Chimp said...

I am of the belief that the earth will constantly change in the short term from hot to cold to hot and the control is the sun, not puny humans.

Some humans have taken up the global warming hoax almost as a fanatical religion and all those not believing will be dammed to hell.

Then you have the politicians who have great profit to make if they get everyone to believe that major coastal cities will be under 20 feet of water soon.

The only ones we should believe are scientists, however, current hacked e-mails show that they have been “bought” by the Church of Global Warming and/or by The Coal Billionaire Al Gore and their data is questionable.