I agree with your assessment generally, but the flux density number has noticeably dropped in the last 12 days. This would indicate that sun activity/magnetism has not yet reached the bottom of its current cycle. To think it could get cooler before it starts warming again! Like you, I think the next warming period will be short and mild leading into an even cooler period (but what do I know? I’m not a washed up politician from TN!).
After a solid week of sunspots — January 29 to February 4 — the following three days have been blank. February 2 was an active geomagnetic day with a solar wind stream spewing from a coronal hole near sunspot 982. Another solar wind stream from a coronal hole is expected to strike Earth on Sunday, February 10 causing unsettled conditions.
Several readers wrote to ask about the recent sunspot mentioned in last week’s bulletin, hoping it was a Solar Cycle 24 spot. Alas, sunspot 982 had Cycle 23 polarity. Any Cycle 24 spots in the near future will be reported here.
Seems the reduced solar activity of the past few months is continuing. The longer it continues, the more validity the point about global cooling in the near future will have. Cycle 24 is already late by historical standards...........ARRL Amateur Radio News - Jan 18 8:51 AMWe’ve seen another seven days with no sunspots. After observing the first sunspot of Solar Cycle 24, we hope to see more and more of these, signaling the beginning of the next sunspot cycle and the end of Solar Cycle 23.
What’s Fred Thompson (or any politician) got to do with science again? LOL!
As for “global warming” in general, sure it DOES exist. Man MADE global warming is wholly different subject, and that is where the LEFT tries to point the finger, without actually pointing the finger. Notice, for instance that when anyone says “global warming” everyone automatically assumes we’re talking about “man made global warming” and everyone (all of us who are Conservatives for instance) jump the poster, caller (on a show) or about anything else, including politicians, because we assume (wrongly in some cases) that we’re all talking about the same thing.
From a purely “astronomy” point of view, “global warming and cooling” exists, because of the sun. Period. Ok, with some minor complications to that, but essentially, our Ice Ages and Warming Periods are ALL dictated by solar, and some internal, volcanic phenomena. (There are some ideas that massive dust clouds either drift past us, or we drift through every so many thousands of years, which scattered heat and light from the sun, thus dropping temps.)
So... in my LEARNED opinion (astrophysics, astronomy, physics) Global warm does indeed exist, as does global cooling effects. However, to say that these things are MAN MADE is a completely made up story, used by anti-Capitalists to try to get a handle on “global Capitalism” and to try to bring us under some kind of socialist scheme of things.
Oh, and for the records, I have NO PROBLEM with recycling things (I don’t do it on a regular basis) and with alternative power sources. In fact, I think we all ought to go “solar” in areas where we have plenty of sunlight. Eventually it will be cheaper, and we can produce our OWN power, without regard to having to pay some company to provide it for us (and believe me in emergency situations, I WANT to be able to produce my own energy - and I DO).
So... all that said... Man made Global Warming is hogwash, and if anything I tend to agree with the originally assessment that we’re going to see cooling of the planet before we see warming spinning us off into some “Venus like atmosphere” even WITH all the CO production by vehicles...
Oh, yeah...
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/FLUX/flux.html
Check that out too, and you can see that this is a 2800 mhz radio flux. If you examine this carefully, you can see we are actually bottoming out even now.
I have doubts that the sun will just “Stop” acting like it has for the past recorded history. Further if you examine sunspot numbers, you will see that the curves and peaks and valleys track year by year in a similar fashion.
We only have radio data from the 1950s or so, but sun spot data goes back a few hundred years now.
Our sun is a variable star that changes it’s radio intensity every 11 years, and IF you were an observer a good distance from the sun, you would see it’s light intensity vary slightly over that time period as well (as sun spots develop and fade). This is probably very difficult to measure (and I sure can’t tell the difference up close haha), but I’m sure that since we can currently measure the variability of stars’ light over time we could measure the sun at a distance.
My point is that “variable stars” - which we now tend to believe includes near every star out there (for reasons too complex to go into at this point) change constantly, some on a short time scale, others on a very long time scale.
The fact is, we simply don’t know EVERYTHING there is to know about stars, and the sun being the closest to us has not give up all it’s secrets. I am not sure I want to see some of them up close and personal either!