Solar awakening: Two sunspots shown / July 4, 2009 / Dave Tyler
Posted on 07/05/2009 4:34:03 PM PDT by neverdem
During the past four years, the sun has been in a prolonged quiet phase which has led some to claim this signals a period of global cooling. The number of “blank” sunspot days, a measure of overall solar energy output, has been more than 30% above the long-term average.
The year 2008 saw the sun with its lowest number of sunspots for any year in a century. This only fueled the speculation of an impending global cooling scenario.
In fact, slight cooling has been observed since the year 2001, but the link to lower solar activity is inconclusive at best. Shifting ocean patterns are the more likely, or at least primary, cause.
Some climatologists point to the “Maunder Minimum”, a very cold period between 1645 and 1715 when there were virtually no sunspots, as a parallel to the current solar sleep and slight global cooling.
The error in this line of thinking is found by looking at the climate picture outside of the Maunder Minimum itself. Europe and indeed the entire Northern Hemisphere descended into the LIA (Little Ice Age) around 1325 and stayed in this cold period until the 1850s.
History suggests that events as wide ranging as the Plague in 1348 to the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s are linked to this cold spell. Even the Pilgrims suffered the shivers in their first in the New World (1620) because of the LIA.
So this long period of a Big Chill ran well before and after the Maunder Minimum. While it’s certainly possible the sluggish solar period enhanced the cold during the 17th Century, we simply don’t have enough data from that time period to arrive at a solid scientific conclusion. We have very little hard data of ocean temperatures or even surface readings to get a compete picture of what happened back then. Tree rings only give us so much.
It may be a moot point anyway: the solar trend has ramped markedly upward since May 2009 with more and more sunspots erupting on the solar sphere. Time alone will show us whether this trend will continue, but the latest signs of an awakening sun are consistent with new solar research.
You can read more about that here.
Either way, don’t forget the Sunblock when you’re out in the rays for an extended period of time!
Ping
/johnny
Must be all of the CO2 we're spewing, good thing the Democrat's are going to turn thing around with the Cap & Trade bill. /s (if required)
Only since the last Ice Age or two or three...
thats funny
as if the price of wheat could have any effect on the sun.
why not the price of sunflower seeds, that at least makes some sense
I assume you’re joking.
Herschel used wheat prices because there were long reliable records.
Moot point ? Sunspots show up for two days and now the past 2 years of inactivity can just be ignored because there are a moot point ? Are you leftist really this stupid ? We are going to have one of our worse winters in the Northern Hemisphere most of us have ever experienced. Solar activity needs to increase dramatically and even then it will be too late for this winter.
The other items were just very tiny magnetic storms ~ NASA couldn't even determine if they wer eassociated with Solarcycle 23 or Solarcycle 24.
Astronomers and Sunspot fans have all gotten into referring into the imaginary NASA Sunspots as "the official Sunspots".
There were pretty clear records way back into Roman times, and intermittent records that would take you right back to Ancient Sumer.
But not of sunspots, unfortunately. Sunspot records only go back 400 years.
sunflower records are even longer
Herschel’s mistake, I suppose.
I'd like to see a correlation of the Chinese/Korean sunspot records to the C-14 tree ring data, and the ice core data as well.
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Is there some place on the net or on FR with a daily report on sunspots?
It includes a lot of useful information besides sunspot activity.
The relevant daily information for today is found here.
Of direct interest are the F10.7 cm solar flux data, which is a proxy measurement of the solar UV output; and also the Geomagnetic A indices, which describes the rate at which charged solar particles are captured by the Earth's magnetic field.
FWIW, these values are generally used for modeling the density of the upper atmosphere, which is in turn used for satellite drag modelilng, which in turn is used as part of orbit prediction.
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