Articles Tagged "Solar Cycle 25"

Something strange is happening to the sun, and we can't do a darned thing about it.

Normally, the sun pulsates like a warm heart, burning slightly more or less brightly with an average rhythm of 11 years. The solar surface also develops numerous small dark patches, or sunspots, when it becomes most active at solar maximum. It skipped a beat last year when the energy peak of Solar Cycle 24 was seemingly due, leading some experts to speculate that the sun may be heading into a prolonged rest period that could last for years, even decades.

That alone is exciting news to physicists, but it's not the only reason it's making headlines. Solar variability is a favourite talking point among climate deniers who claim that today's global warming is not caused by fossil fuel emissions but by "natural cycles." The back story here amounts to "It's the sun, stupid," and hints at yet another scandalous Climategate moment that might embarrass the scientific community.

It's nothing of the sort, though. In fact, as a paleoclimatologist who openly studies those natural cycles that deniers treat like WikiLeaks secrets, I rather hope that the sun skips the next several cycles. Here's why.

Scientists think Britain and Europe could be in for a chilly few years predicting a 'Little Ice Age' could be on its way in just a few decades time.

Average temperatures in Britain could fall by two degrees centigrade, according to the study led by Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at Reading University, because of a drop in the amount of sunspot activity.

Sunspots are darker patches seen in the sun's surface which are caused by small areas of magnetic activity which disrupts the normal flow of intensely heated gases.

Almost every major American daily newspaper picked up an article published earlier this month by New York Times scribe Justin Gillis entitled “A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself.”

How many times have we read, in the last 50 years, that this or that environmental apocalypse is going to starve the world? I got my doctorate on the wings of one; at that time it was called “global cooling,” after a 1974 CIA report leaked to the Times said that rapidly cooling planetary temperatures could usher in an era of heightened global instability caused by food shortages.

In my lifetime there have been a large number of predicted nutritional apocalypses, caused by overpopulation, lack of biological diversity in our food supply, genetic engineering run amok, acid rain, too little ozone, too much ozone and, finally, global warming. If there were futures on the end of the world, I’d go short. The wrong bet won’t matter anyway.

Facts: Global surface temperature rose about three-fourths of a degree Celsius in the 20th century. U.S. corn yields quintupled. Life expectancy doubled. People got fat. Global warming didn’t cause all of this, but increased atmospheric carbon dioxide directly stimulated plant growth. Further, greenhouse warming takes place more in the winter, which lengthens growing seasons. With adequate water, plants then fix and yield more carbohydrate.

Much fanfare was associated with the reappearance of sunspots earlier this year, marking the beginning of a new period of high solar activity. Now come a number of reports saying the Sun is most likely headed for a prolonged period of low activity, possibly rivaling the Maunder minimum. Three independent studies of the Sun's dynamics all predict that the next solar cycle will be significantly delayed and might even be skipped. The Maunder minimum is associated with a prolonged period of climate cooling known as the Little Ice Age. Whether Earth's climate is headed for a significant cooling trend has become a matter of heated debate, while at the same time NASA is warning that a quite Sun can also be a deadly Sun. In the 1850s, following a period of low sunspot activity, the largest coronal ejection event ever witnessed caused havoc with telegraphs and ship's compasses around the world. Such an ejection today could cause widespread power outages and failure of electronic equipment. Will our star turn both quiet and deadly?

Sunspots are relatively cool, dark blemishes on the Sun's surface that indicate regions of intense magnetic activity. Some sunspots are gigantic, often wider than Earth with magnetic fields reaching far into space. For centuries scientists have been using sunspots to gauge solar activity, discovering that visible activity waxes and wains in a regular 11 year cycle. After an unusually quiet period we are now in Solar Cycle 24, which should peak sometime in 2013. But it is what solar scientists are predicting to come after SC 24 that is causing concern among climate scientists.

Newly reported solar observations, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that the Sun could be less active in the coming years. Three independent studies by solar experts all predict that the next solar cycle may not happen, or at least be significantly delayed. Astrogeophysicist Frank Hill and colleagues at the National Solar Observatory, have been monitoring solar cycles using a technique called helioseismology. Hill was the lead author on the first of three papers on these results presented at the American Astronomical Society conference in New Mexico. Using data from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) of six observing stations around the world, the team translates surface pulsations caused by sound reverberating through the Sun into models of its internal structure.

Reference

Lockwood, M., Harrison, R.G., Woolings, T. and Solanki, S.K. 2010. Are cold winters in Europe associated with low solar activity? Environmental Research Letters 5: 10.1088/1748-9326/5/2/024001.

What was done

Noting that "solar activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to levels unknown since the start of the 20th century," and that "the Maunder minimum (about 1650-1700) was a prolonged episode of low solar activity which coincided with more severe winters in the United Kingdom and continental Europe," the authors write that "motivated by recent relatively cold winters in the UK," they investigated the possible connection between these severe winters and low solar activity, identifying "regionally anomalous cold winters by detrending the Central England temperature record using reconstructions of the northern hemisphere mean temperature."

What was learned

Lockwood et al. discovered that "cold winter excursions from the hemispheric trend" do indeed "occur more commonly in the UK during low solar activity, consistent with the solar influence on the occurrence of persistent blocking events in the eastern Atlantic," and they state that "colder UK winters (relative to the longer-term trend) can therefore be associated with lower open solar flux (and hence with lower solar irradiance and higher cosmic ray flux)." They are quick to note, however, that "this is a regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a global effect."

Sun’s coming quietude burns global warmists.

Reports of imminent climatic catastrophes are turning out to be rather anticlimactic. That’s because rather than heating up to life-threatening levels, new scientific findings indicate it’s more likely the Earth will cool in coming years. That’s bad news for a global-warming industry heavily invested in a sultry forecast.

Cornelis de Jager, a solar physicist from the Netherlands and former secretary-general of the International Astronomical Union, announced that the sun is about to enter a period of extremely low sunspot activity, which historically is associated with cooling trends. Backed by other scientists, he predicted the “grand solar minimum” is expected to begin around 2020 and last until 2100.

The ebb of solar activity is shaping up to resemble what occurred during the Little Ice Age, the period from 1620 to 1720 when sunspot activity diminished and temperatures dropped an estimated 3 degrees Celsius. The era was noted for colder-than-usual winters in North America and Europe, when rivers and canals froze over, allowing for ice-skating and winter festivals. It also resulted in crop failure and population displacement in northern regions such as Iceland. To characterize the impending grand solar minimum as an “ice age” - with glaciers forming at temperate latitudes - would be an exaggeration. The correlation between decreased sunspot activity and falling temperatures means it’s likely to get colder when the sunspots begin to disappear.

Our sun may be on the verge of a relatively long snooze, as researchers have found solar energy output could decrease in the coming decades. Though the dip in solar activity isn't expected to reverse climate change and plunge Earth into a cold snap, similar phenomenon have happened in our planet's history, scientists say.

Some researchers say that changes in sun activity caused the "Little Ice Age" from 1500 to 1800 — during the chilliest part of this cooling trend beginning in 1645, the sun reached its 75-year Maunder Minimum, when astronomers found almost no sunspots. But the connection between solar activity and Earth's climate remains largely mysterious — scientists are not sure how much of a role the Maunder Minimum played in fueling the little ice age.

And despite media claims in recent days that global cooling is imminent, experts don't expect a repeat of the little ice age anytime soon.

It turns out this would be a very minor impact on the climate, even if we were to return to Maunder Minimum conditions," climate scientist Michael Mann, of Pennsylvania State University, told LiveScience. "That would only lead to a decrease in about 0.2 watts of power per square meter of the Earth's surface — that compared to greenhouse forcing, which is more than 2 watts per meter squared. That's a factor of 10 larger."

It was announced June 15 that scientists are now fairly sure that around 2020, sunspot activity is going to lessen significantly. All the conditions for it are lining up so far. In layman’s language, an active sun, devoid of sunspots, can produce cooling because solar flares are diminished. Technically, this condition is a “solar minimum.” The last time it happened, experts say, we had a “Little Ice Age.”

Some 20 independent news sources published the findings emanating from at least three independent scientific studies and some dozen scientists. All seemed to concur that episodic sunspot activity lasting anywhere from 70 to 150 years is responsible for wild swings in weather on Earth as well as on other planets within our solar system. This 70- to 150-year cycle has embedded within it several shorter-term, 11-year solar cycles (“mini-cycles,” for lack of a better term), “that we all should have learned about in high school,” advises Dr. Michael Coffman, president of Environmental Perspectives, Inc.

Coffman explains that “everyone expected a normal cycle this time around. It hasn’t happened. The sun has massive ‘conveyor belts’ of plasma that circulate every 11 years. Our current solar cycle, Cycle 24, is very weak and scientists are now realizing the internal ‘conveyor belt’ is breaking down just as it did 150 years ago.” [See graph.]

“The number of sunspots (or, solar eruptions),” explains Coffman, “is already the lowest they have been in over a 100 years [See the stunning graphic by clicking “here” at the bottom of the embedded link above.] There are indications that Cycle 25 may not have any at all! This hasn’t happened since the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, when Earth experienced what is termed ‘the Little Ice Age.’” The “Little Ice Age” had no sunspots, and global temperatures dropped by 3 degrees Celsius. But in contrast to what people are led to believe by "global-warming" ideologists, the cooling did not turn out well. Coffman points to historical details showing that the dip in global temperatures caused, instead, massive crop failures, famine, and disease.

The recent story about the possibility that the sun might enter a prolonged period of inactivity like the Maunder Minimum (MM) of the 17th century was at first sight not news. It has been suggested before, many times, as a result of the prolonged sunspot cycle minimum after cycle 23, and the diminished showing of cycle 24. But this time a press release from the American Astronomical Society describing three papers about changes on the sun presented at its solar physics meeting added some new and interesting data to the debate.

That something unusual is happening to our sun is unarguable, and studying how the sun behaves in the near future is going to be fascinating. Recent research offers differing views about the relationship between the Maunder Minimum and the solar minimum. Some, like Schrijver et al (2011) (see also the Observatory) believe that the MM is like a lengthy solar minimum and that the recent longer and deeper than normal solar minimum provides a snapshot or baseline from which to extrapolate the state of the sun in the MM. The researchers conclude that the IPCC “consensus” solar climate forcing factor of 0.24 Watts per sq m is too big, (the IPCC says the greenhouse gas forcing is 2.5 W per sq m.)

The other view, expressed by Shapiro et al is that the 2008 solar minimum is not like the MM which could be lower in activity. They say that a solar climate forcing factor of 1 W per sq m is more likely.

Dear All

Here is a new article based on revelations given to me this morning by an anonymous whistleblower showing NASA is rigging the data in sunspots.

Thanks,

John O'Sullivan

As Earth enters deepest solar minimum in centuries NASA caught hiding sunspot data to prop up dying global warming cult. Inconvenient new ice age imminent.

A solar scientist insider who wishes to remain anonymous gives us the scoop that government officials are falsifying solar data to suit a political agenda. Below is his damning indictment of how deeply entrenched and desperate is the climate fraud. We see how observational data is being deliberately faked to hide the decline in sunspot activity; an event which independent scientists say could trigger a new ice age if it is prolonged.



The source, who fears losing his position if identified reveals, “The fact is for years we have been watching the magnetic fields wane both here on Earth and on the Sun.”

But NASA has conspired with advocates of the man-made global warming cult to 'hide the decline' which would make a mockery of their trumped claims mankind has created a new and warmer Anthropocene Climatic period.

Continued Rate of Cooling to Cause New Ice Age

Our nameless expert explains that since the 1990's and into the 21st century magnetic fields have dropped by about 50 gauss per year. No one denies that in itself, this is not a remarkable drop if it were to be soon reversed. However, if such a trend continues for a decade or more then the fears of solar scientists that we are entering a new Ice Age will be realized with potentially devastating consequences for life of Earth.