Articles Tagged "Solar News"

From New Scientist (subscription) - UK

New sunspots may signal end of solar dry spell
by Rachel Courtland

New spots are beginning to break out on the face of the Sun and may signal the end of a dry spell in solar activity. Watching for more spots in the coming months could help determine how severe – and potentially damaging to Earth's satellites and power grids – the next solar cycle will be.

Every single doom and gloom environmental prediction for 2008 (melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, numerous catastrophic hurricanes and typhoons) utterly failed to materialize. In fact 2008 may prove to be the coolest year of the past decade. On the other hand, the sun has virtually ceased its normally robust sunspot activity. This has caused a number of scientists to postulate that fluctuations in the earth's climate and sunspot activity may be closely linked.

2008 was also the year that man-made climate change skeptics began to form strong organizations and issue strong statements, such as the Global Warming Petition Project, which has been signed by 31,000 individuals with university degrees in science including 9,000 PhD's. And The Heartland Institute is now forcefully fighting back against climate change hysteria. It features an impressive roster of contributors including Fred Singer, Steven Milloy, and Roy Spencer.

Above: A histogram showing the blankest years of the last half-century. The vertical axis is a count of spotless days in each year. The bar for 2008, which was updated on Sept. 27th, is still growing. Larger images: 50 years, 100 years

From Science.NASA.Gov

Spotless Sun: Blankest Year of the Space Age
Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

Sept. 30, 2008: Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the "blankest year" of the Space Age. As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times.

by Ben Sandilands

NASA has issued yet another statement on the deep solar minimum specifically noting that "the changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming.”

The wording is significant. NASA appears to be taking a lead in explaining the "unusually" spotless sun before it gets accused of covering up an "inconvenient truth" that might undermine the case for anthropogenic global warming or AGW.

It is a smart move although it might upset those who fear any degree of public engagement with the issues at any level more complex than a bumper sticker on a petroleum burning car.

There is no cover up, and what is happening on the sun is not the reason why the greenhouse gas atmospheric heat trap effect has been seriously elevated by the release of fossil fuels kicking the concentration of the main offender, carbon dioxide, to more than 385 part per million or ppm and rising.

Anatoly Zak of RussianSpaceWeb.com alerts our readers to the fact that Russia is preparing to launch the country's first science satellite in years.

The satellite is the Koronas-Foton, which was designed to conduct uninterrupted monitoring and analysis of solar activity and will analyze heating of the Sun's corona, mechanics of solar bursts, and the nature of Sun cycles. According to officials involved in the project, the satellite would help to plan manned space missions, including future expeditions to Mars, by providing accurate and up-to-date forecasts of solar activity. The Sun’s influence on weather and climate on Earth would also be investigated...

Although its peak is still four years away, a new active period of Earth-threatening solar storms will be the weakest since 1928, predicts an international panel of experts led by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and funded by NASA. Despite the prediction, Earth is still vulnerable to a severe solar storm.

Please click link from NOAA for FULL article

From RedOrbit.Com

Norway's Space Adventures
by Brekke, Pal

Space exploration is more than daring astronauts and thrilling astronomy. It has practical applications that are becoming increasingly apparent. Norway is a small but important space nation that envisions playing a larger role in this exploration than do most countries. NORWAY HAS A LONG TRADITION AS A SPACE NATION, IN no small measure due to its northern position on the globe. Kristian Birkeland's famous Terrella experiment in 1896 in which he created synthetic northern lights can be seen as the start of modern space activities. He understood that it was the sun that caused the aurora borealis (as well as its southern-hemisphere counterpart, the aurora australis) and that particles from the sun interact with earth's magnetic field and atmosphere.

From EngineeringNews.Co.Za

Evidence of sunspot involvement in climate change compelling
by Dr Kelvin Kemm

Over the last few years, the evidence that sunspots on our sun are directly related to climate change on earth has been steadily increasing. I explained the exact proposed mechanism in some detail previously. Great work in this field is being carried out by Dr Henrik Svensmark and coworkers in Denmark and elsewhere.

What it means..

Once again, we are led to say: Not much global warming here! And this being the case in a place that is clearly demonstrated to be responsive to changes in solar and volcanic activity, we are led to wonder why there has been no response to the past century's historic increase in the air's CO2 content.

Well, to be totally truthful, we actually don't wonder, as we believe that a number of negative feedback phenomena of both a biological and physical nature tend to largely counter the modest greenhouse effect of the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration, rendering its impetus for warming too small to even detect.

by Carolyn Barry

The sun's fluctuations can help predict extreme climatic events on Earth decades ahead of time, new research suggests.

Solar cycles are 11-year phases during which the sun's activity ebbs and flows, accompanied by an increase in sunspots on the sun's surface. (Watch a video of how solar storms cause "sun quakes.")