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Title: Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh
Source:
The Australian
URL Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.a ... /0,25197,23583376-7583,00.html
Published: Jun 25, 2008
Author: Phil Chapman
Post Date: 2008-06-25 02:36:28 by RickyJ
Keywords: None
Views: 1228
Comments: 131
THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity. What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot. Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously. All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over. There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770. It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years. This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers. It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon. The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790. Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots. That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern. It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850. There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it. Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases. There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet. The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years. The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years. The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027. By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining. Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time. If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale. For example: We could gather all the bulldozers in the world and use them to dirty the snow in Canada and Siberia in the hope of reducing the reflectance so as to absorb more warmth from the sun. We also may be able to release enormous floods of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from the hydrates under the Arctic permafrost and on the continental shelves, perhaps using nuclear weapons to destabilise the deposits. We cannot really know, but my guess is that the odds are at least 50-50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades. The probability that we are witnessing the onset of a real ice age is much less, perhaps one in 500, but not totally negligible. All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead. It will be difficult for people to face the truth when their reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming, but the fate of civilisation may be at stake. In the famous words of Oliver Cromwell, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco. He was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut.
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 40.
#11. To: RickyJ (#0)
It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
the average number of sunspots a day last January was 3.4, followed by 2.1 in February and 9.3 in March. So why are you lying? From ftp://ftp.ngd c.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SUNSPOT_NUMBERS/2008
The number of spots is not as important as the cycle they come from. ------------------------------------------------------------------- The 12-monthly best fit gives around the year 1797. The Dalton minimum reigned 1798-1823. It's anybody's guess what happens next. At least the Earth is already cooling. Sunspot number from Jan to May = 3, 2, 9, 3, 3 = 20.6 = 19.45(from 23) + 1.15 (from 24). Spotless days Jan to May = 20, 21, 16, 20, 23.
I love how you cut and paste stuff with no reference where the info came from, and no understanding of what it means. As stated earlier, the earth is NOT cooling in regards to average temperature, any cooling is due to a cyclic effect known as La Nina, and sunspots have very little effect on the climate to begin with.
University at Buffalo scientists working with ice cores have solved a mystery surrounding sunspots and their effect on climate that has puzzled scientists since they began studying the phenomenon. The research, published in a paper in the May 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, provides striking evidence that sunspots -- blemishes on the sun's surface indicating strong solar activity -- do influence global climate change, but that explosive volcanic eruptions on Earth can completely reverse those influences. It is the first time that volcanic eruptions have been identified as the atmospheric event responsible for the sudden and baffling reversals that scientists have seen in correlations between sunspots and climate. "Knowing the mechanisms behind past climate changes is critical to our understanding of possible future changes in climate, such as global warming, and for assessing which of these changes are due to human activities and which arise naturally," explained co-author Michael Stolz, doctoral candidate in the Department of Physics in UB's College of Arts and Sciences. According to the UB researchers, their work reveals two different mechanisms by which climate is affected by cosmic rays, charged particles that stream toward Earth and which are strongly influenced by solar activity. "For a long time people have tried to find out whether, for example, periods of maximum sunspots will influence the climate to behave in a certain way," said Michael Ram, Ph.D., professor of physics at UB and co-author on the paper. "Whenever scientists thought they had discovered something, say, they were seeing a positive correlation between temperature and sunspots, it would continue like that for several years and, all of a sudden, there would be a reversal and, instead, they would start to see a negative correlation," said Ram. "There seemed to be no consistent relationship between what the sun was doing and what the climate was doing," he said. To truly confirm any connection between sunspots and climate, a consistent correlation would have to be observed over a long period, covering many solar cycles, Ram explained. That's what he and his graduate students and co-authors have done with their study of ice cores, long cylinders of ancient ice from Greenland that serve as a frozen archive in that they record climate details from thousands of years ago. "This is the beauty of working with ice cores," said Ram. "They go back 100,000 years, so we can study how dust concentrations vary along the ice core, reflecting past atmospheric dust concentrations." Plain old dust, Ram added, holds the key in these experiments because it reflects how dry conditions were in a particular year. "Dust is a very sensitive parameter of climate," he explained. Drawing on climate data derived from ice cores obtained through the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2, (GISP2), the scientists used laser-light scattering techniques to determine the level of dust in the atmosphere for roughly the past 300 years, which is how far back sunspot data have been recorded. The scientists started out with the assumption that a low level of cosmic rays on Earth resulting from high sunspot activity would lead to less cloud cover and less rain, with resulting high dust levels. "This was true for the first three or four solar cycles we studied, from about 1930 to 1962, but then the correlation reversed itself, demonstrating that the mechanism couldn't be what we thought," said Ram. It turned out that during those 32 years of positive sun/dust correlation, there was relatively little explosive volcanic activity worldwide. The researchers found that the same conditions existed between 1860 and 1882. Each of these relatively "quiet" periods came to an end with increased volcanic activity. For example, in 1883, the Indonesian volcano Krakatau erupted in one of the deadliest volcanic disasters, killing 36,000 people. At exactly the same time, the data started to exhibit low dust concentration whenever there was high sunspot activity, a correlation that violated the scientists' original assumptions. "By carefully studying the timing of other volcanic eruptions, we found that they coincided with all of the correlation reversals between sunspots and climate," said Ram. A chart in the paper shows how six major volcanic eruptions between 1800 and 1962 occurred during precisely the same years when there were reversals in the correlation between sunspot activity and climate. That revelation provided a further insight into how sunspots affect climate. "All energy comes from the sun, but the change in visible radiation from the sun during any one solar cycle is less than one half of a percent," explained Stolz. "Scientists have said it's impossible that so small a change could influence any signal in the climate. But here we have evidence to show that it's not just radiation energy from the sun that is affecting climate, it's the solar-modulated cosmic rays that have a strong influence because of their impact on cloud cover." With fewer clouds, and therefore less rain, the scientists reasoned, maximum sunspots should cause levels of atmospheric dust to rise. "That is true sometimes," said John Donarummo, Jr., UB doctoral candidate in the UB Department of Geology and a co-author on the paper. But, the researchers discovered, during periods of high volcanic activity, high sunspot activity also results in high levels of atmospheric dust. According to Donarummo, it long has been known that volcanoes add more dust and more sulfates to the atmosphere. The UB team discovered that these additional sulfates cause cosmic rays to have a more pronounced effect on Earth by spurring the formation of small droplets in the atmosphere that, in turn, cause the formation of a type of cloud that does not produce rain. "During these times of high volcanic activity, the sunspot/climate correlation reverses and dust levels rise, even in the absence of high sunspots," explained Stolz. The work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.- By Ellen Goldbaum
According to Donarummo, it long has been known that volcanoes add more dust and more sulfates to the atmosphere. The UB team discovered that these additional sulfates cause cosmic rays to have a more pronounced effect on Earth by spurring the formation of small droplets in the atmosphere that, in turn, cause the formation of a type of cloud that does not produce rain. So are you trying to say that sunspots cause volcanic activity? What exactly ARE you trying to say here? Should high sunspot activity make the earth warmer or cooler?
I'm not saying anything, just countering your unsourced unsupported notion that "any relationship between climate and sunspot activity is minimal." Do you want to source that? Support it in any way?
#44. To: farmfriend (#40)
How can you be countering what I posted if you don't know what effect sunspots have on the climate?
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestThis is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.
#13. To: farmfriend, RickyJ, angle (#11)
This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers. It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
DAILY SUNSPOT NUMBERS 2008
===============================================================================
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Yr Day
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7 11 0 16 0 2008 01
7 9 0 9 0 2008 02
7 9 7 9 0 2008 03
12 8 0 7 7 2008 04
10 0 0 0 8 2008 05
11 0 8 0 0 2008 06
11 0 0 0 0 2008 07
9 0 0 0 0 2008 08
0 0 0 0 0 2008 09
8 0 9 0 0 2008 10
8 0 0 0 0 2008 11
0 0 0 0 0 2008 12
0 0 0 7 8 2008 13
0 0 0 7 0 2008 14
0 0 7 0 9 2008 15
0 0 7 0 14 2008 16
0 0 7 0 12 2008 17
0 0 0 0 15 2008 18
0 0 0 8 11 2008 19
0 0 0 0 7 2008 20
0 0 0 0 0 2008 21
0 0 0 8 0 2008 22
0 0 0 8 0 2008 23
0 0 19 7 0 2008 24
0 8 32 0 0 2008 25
0 8 36 0 0 2008 26
0 8 35 0 0 2008 27
0 0 34 0 0 2008 28
0 0 30 0 0 2008 29
8 31 0 0 2008 30
8 25 0 2008 31
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.4 2.1 9.3 2.9 2.9
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Values are preliminary after Dec 07.
#22. To: FormerLurker (#13)
the average number of sunspots a day last January was 3.4, followed by 2.1 in February and 9.3 in March.
The situation with sunspots from July 2007 to May 2008. The cycle 23 that began already in 1996 still reigns superior.
From cycle 24 there are three tiny signatures: one in January (1 day), one in April (2 days)and one in May (2 days).
In 2008 there has been 14 groups from cycle 23 lasting together 80 days, and 3 groups from cycle 24 lasting together 5 days.
From July 2007 to December 2007
month
year
spotless days
days with below 10 Wolfs (1 sunspot group)
days with below 20 Wolfs (most probable 2 groups)
days between 20-30 Wolfs (3-4 groups)
07 2007 08 10 09 04
08 2007 08 22 01
09 2007 22 07 01
10 2007 28 02 01
11 2007 24 04 02
12 2007 12 05 05 08
-------------------------------------------------------------------
January 2008
spotless days 20
one spot group from cycle 23 (southern hemisphere) on 11 days
one spot group from cycle 24 (northern hemisphere) on 1 day (4.1.)
4.1. there were two spot groups at the same time, one from cycle 23
and one from cycle 24
Sunspot number 3.4 (3.1 from cycle 23 0.3 from cycle 24)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
February 2008
spotless days 21
one spot group from cycle 23 (southern hemisphere) on 8 days
none spots from cycle 24
Sunspot number 2.1 (all from cycle 23)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
March 2008 (some ending in April)
spotless days 16
one sp-gr from cycle 23 (SH) on 2 days (5.-6.3.) max size 30 per mil
one sp-gr from cycle 23 (SH) on 1 day (10.3.) max size 90 pm
one sp-gr from cycle 23 (SH) on 3 days (15.-17.3.) max size 20 pm
a triplet (3 at the same time 25.3.-31.3.):
first sp-gr from cycle 23 (SH) on 12 days (23.3.-31.3.)
second sp-gr from cycle 23 (SH) on 13 days (24.3.-2.4.)
third sp-gr from cycle 23 (SH) on 13 days (25.3.-3.4.)
max size together 520 pm (26.3.), above 100 from 24.3.-2.4.
none spots from cycle 24
Sunspot number 9.3 (all from cycle 23)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
April 2008
spotless days 20
remnants from sp-gr from cycle 23 1.4.-3.4. (see March)
one sp-gr from cycle 23 (SH) on 2 days (19.-20.4.) max size 20 pm
one sp-gr from cycle 23 (NH) on 3 days (22.-24.4.) max size 40 pm
one sp-gr from cycle 24 (NH) on 2 days (14.-15.4.) max size 10 pm
this is number 2 cycle 24 spot 102 days after the first in January
Sunspot number 2.9 (2.45 from cycle 23 and 0.45 from cycle 24)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
May 2008
spotless days 23
three simultaneous sp-groups from cycle 23 (SH) on 1 day (16.5) ms 45
two sim. sp-groups from cycle 23 (SH) on 4 days (17.5.-20.5.) ms 80
one sp-gr from cycle 23 (SH) on 1 day (26.5.) ms 10
one sp-gr from cycle 24 (SH!) on 2 days (4.-5.5.) ms 20
sunspot number 2.9 (2.5 from cycle 23 and 0.4 from cycle 24)
#26. To: farmfriend (#22)
#31. To: FormerLurker (#26)
(Edited)
and sunspots have very little effect on the climate to begin with.
Of Sunspots, Volcanic Eruptions And Climate Change
#38. To: farmfriend (#31)
But, the researchers discovered, during periods of high volcanic activity, high sunspot activity also results in high levels of atmospheric dust.
#40. To: FormerLurker (#38)
So are you trying to say that sunspots cause volcanic activity? What exactly ARE you trying to say here? Should high sunspot activity make the earth warmer or cooler?
Replies to Comment # 40. I'm not saying anything, just countering your unsourced unsupported notion that "any relationship between climate and sunspot activity is minimal."
End Trace Mode for Comment # 40.