Workshop speaker: Sunspots, not fossil fuels, agents of climate change

Based on recent sunspot activity, Sides told ranchers attending the fifth-annual Cattleman’s Workshop, global warming appears to be giving way to a period of global cooling that could signal the next mini ice age.

And contrary to Al Gore and others, Sides contends, the changes have nothing to do with greenhouse gases.

The theory that sunspot activity, rather than the burning of fossil fuels, drives global climate change could have major implications not only on individual ranches and farmers, but on the world’s food supply, Sides said.

Unless alternative fuels become readily available and affordable, he contends, fossil fuels will remain vital to the world’s ability to feed its ever-growing population, particularly in developing regions.

The standing-room-only crowd at the Blue Mountain Conference Center erupted into cheers when Sides said he believes that evidence supporting the sunspot theory of global warming and cooling is winning over scientists around the world.

“In August 2008 there were zero sunspots on the sun,” Sides said. “That’s the first time that’s happened in 300 years, and we had a mini ice age (then).”

He displayed graphs which show no correlation between peaks and valleys in greenhouse gases and global warming and cooling periods over the years. Other graphs show that sunspot activity rose and fell along with global temperature changes.

The last mini ice age forced farmers in the United Kingdom to switch from growing wine grapes to grains, which is one reason inhabitants of England, Scotland Wales and Ireland are beer drinkers, Sides said.

That’s just one example of agricultural changes that resulted from the last mini ice age, Sides said. He suggested that farmers and others consider the potential for colder weather when choosing what to plant this spring.

He pointed to temperatures 10 to 20 degrees below normal in many regions this winter, and to snow and sub-freezing weather that hit as late as June 11 last spring in Oregon and other western states as an indication that global cooling stemming from declines in sunspot activity has already begun.

If projections of a possible mini ice age come to pass, Sides said ranchers will have to figure out how to keep their calf crop from freezing and how to keep their cows healthy so their birth rates don’t fall as low as they are in the mountains of Peru, where the weather is so harsh cows have a calf every two or three years.

Laughter filled the conference center when Sides joked that he became a believer in stories about the U.S. military allegedly recovering a crashed spacecraft and alien bodies near Roswell, N.M., in 1947, when he learned that Gore was born nine months after the incident.

Sides went on to blast environmental groups for calling past government support of the fossil fuel industry a mistake.

“What would our society look like without the internal combustion engine?” Sides said.

He showed slides of people struggling to scratch out an existence in areas of Africa, the Middle East and South America where farmers still rely on horses rather than gas- or diesel-powered machines.

Sides reminded the audience that less than a century ago, such primitive farming and ranching practices were prevalent in the United States.

He asked the audience to think about how much the world changed in one generation. He talked about his grandfather, who grew up in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when farming was done with horse-drawn plows and wagons.

Sides said his father died in 1953, 15 months after he was born, because the polio vaccine was not yet widely available.

More than 5 million people in the United States and 50 million worldwide died from the Spanish flu between World War I and World War II, including 75 out of 80 people in an Alaskan village who died within five days after an infected postal carrier delivered the mail.

Without modern vaccines and antibiotics made from fossil fuel derivatives, Sides said a worldwide pandemic like the Spanish flu could have similar or worse effects in the future.

“We take technology for granted today,” Sides said, asking the audience to imagine what it would be like if the world runs out of fossil fuels before alternatives are available to run machines and make everything from clothes and computers to fertilizers and vaccines.

With the world’s population projected to add between 1 billion and 3 billion people in the next 40 years, Sides said farmers and ranchers will need ever-improving technology to triple food production on the available land.

On the upside, Sides said ranchers should benefit from higher beef prices created by soaring global demand as workers with rising wages in China, India and other countries compete for available beef with Americans, Europeans and other beef consumers.

Showing a slide of comparatively puny Angus cattle raised in the 1950s, Sides said technology doubled beef production, and it would take twice as much land to produce the same amount of beef today without he petroleum-based products used to maximize grass and livestock growth and health.

“To use 1950s technology we’d need another 200 million acres; that’s the size of four states,” Sides said.

Sides said he believes that groups pushing to end the use of fossil fuels and to return parts of America to wilderness don’t realize that without modern tractors and other farm machinery, fertilizers, pesticides and medicines, crop and livestock production would plunge so far that a third of the world’s population could face starvation.

He also contends that in such a situation all arable land would have to cultivated, leaving no open spaces or recreational areas.

He said the quest for alternative fuels when gas prices doubled last summer fostered a major shift of corn production from food to ethanol, but that trend is losing momentum due to lower gas prices and concerns that using corn and other grains for ethanol exacerbates world hunger problems.

If you look at the chart below, you will see that sunspot activity (during solar maxes--the individual peaks every apprx 11 yrs) has been relatively high since about 1900 and almost non-existent for the period between about 1625 and 1725. This period is known as the Maunder (sunspot) Minimum or "Little Ice Age".-ETL

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From BBC News [yr: 2004]:
"A new [2004] analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years. Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past. They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer."..."In particular, it has been noted that between about 1645 and 1715, few sunspots were seen on the Sun's surface. This period is called the Maunder Minimum after the English astronomer who studied it. It coincided with a spell of prolonged cold weather often referred to as the "Little Ice Age". Solar scientists strongly suspect there is a link between the two events - but the exact mechanism remains elusive."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3869753.stm
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It's really hard to imagine how this little ball of fire could have any impact on our climate at all. /s

But the main arguments being made for a solar-climate connection is not so much to do with the heat of the Sun (the sun isn't getting warmer) but rather with its magnetic cycles. When the Sun is more magnetically active (typically around the peak of the 11 year sunspot cycle --we are a couple of yrs away at the moment), the Sun's magnetic field is better able to deflect away incoming galactic cosmic rays (highly energetic charged particles coming from outside the solar system). The GCRs are thought to help in the formation of low-level cumulus clouds -the type of clouds that BLOCK sunlight and help cool the Earth. So when the Sun's MF is acting up (not like now -the next sunspot max is expected in about 2011 or 2012), less GCRs reach the Earth's atmosphere, less low level, sunlight-blocking clouds form, and more sunlight gets through to warm the Earth's surface...naturally. Clouds are basically made up of tiny water droplets. When minute particles in the atmosphere become ionized by incoming GCRs they become very 'attractive' to water molecules, in a purely chemical sense of the word. The process by which the Sun's increased magnetic field deflects incoming cosmic rays is very similar to the way magnetic fields steer electrons in a cathode ray tube (old-time television tube) or electrons and other charged particles around the ring of a subatomic particle accelerator.-ETL
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There's an excellent new book out on the subject titled The Chilling Stars. It's written by one of the top scientists advancing this theory (Henrik Svensmark).

http://www.sciencedaily.com/books/t/1840468157-the_chilling_stars_the_new_theory_of_climate_change.htm
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And here is the website for the place where he does his research:
2008: "The Center for Sun-Climate Research at the DNSC investigates the connection between variations in the intensity of cosmic rays and climatic changes on Earth. This field of research has been given the name 'cosmoclimatology'"..."Cosmic ray intensities – and therefore cloudiness – keep changing because the Sun's magnetic field varies in its ability to repel cosmic rays coming from the Galaxy, before they can reach the Earth." :
http://www.spacecenter.dk/research/sun-climate
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From a well-referenced wikipedia.com column (see wiki link for ref 14):
"Sunspot numbers over the past 11,400 years have been reconstructed using dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations. The level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional — the last period of similar magnitude occurred over 8,000 years ago. The Sun was at a similarly high level of magnetic activity for only ~10% of the past 11,400 years, and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.[14]"

[14] ^Solanki, Sami K.; Usoskin, Ilya G.; Kromer, Bernd; Schüssler, Manfred & Beer, Jürg (2004), “Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years”, Nature 431: 1084–1087, doi:10.1038/nature02995, . Retrieved on 17 April 2007 , "11,000 Year Sunspot Number Reconstruction". Global Change Master Directory. Retrieved on 2005-03-11.

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"Reconstruction of solar activity over 11,400 years. Period of equally high activity over 8,000 years ago marked.
Present period is on [the right]. Values since 1900 not shown."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
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From NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory's "Not So Frequently Asked Questions" section:

Q-Does the number of sunspots have any effect on the climate here on Earth?

A-Sunspots are slightly cooler areas on the surface of the Sun, due to the intense magnetic fields, so they radiate a little less energy than the surroundings. However, there are usually nearby areas associated with the sunspots that are a little hotter (called falculae), and they more than compensate. The result is that there is a little bit more radiation coming from the Sun when it has more sunspots, but the effect is so small that it has very little impact on the weather and climate on Earth.

However, there are more important indirect effects: sunspots are associated with what we call "active regions", with large magnetic structures containing very hot material (being held in place by the magnetism). This causes more ultraviolet (or UV) radiation (the rays that give you a suntan or sunburn), and extreme ultraviolet radiation (EUV). These types of radiation have an impact on the chemistry of the upper atmosphere (e.g. producing ozone). Since some of these products act as greenhouse gases, the number of sunspots (through association with active regions) may influence the climate in this way.

Many active regions produce giant outflows of material that are called Coronal Mass Ejections. These ejections drag with them some of the more intense magnetic fields that are found in the active regions. The magnetic fields act as a shield for high-energy particles coming from various sources in our galaxy (outside the solar system). These "cosmic rays" (CRs) cause ionization of molecules in the atmosphere, and thereby can cause clouds to form (because the ionized molecules or dust particle can act as "seeds" for drop formation).

If clouds are formed very high in the atmosphere, the net result is a heating of the Earth - it acts as a "blanket" that keeps warmth in.

If clouds are formed lower down in the atmosphere, they reflect sunlight better than they keep heat inside, so the net result is cooling. Which processes are dominant is still a matter of research.

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/classroom/notsofaq.html#SUNSPOT_CLIMATE
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NASA graph of sunspot activity over the past 400 years [note the profound lack of sunspot activity during the "Little Ice Age" period (apprx 1650-1720), AND the sharp INCREASE particularly during the past 60 years:

http://science.nasa.gov/ssl/pad/solar/images/ssn_yearly.jpg

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