28.03.2017
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Sunspot cycles
Spotless Sun heralds Solar Minimum after CME producing Region 2567 departs
H/t reader squodgy:
“Food shortages of a general nature are on the horizon for us all, which means initially higher prices, followed by actual shortfall.
The shortfall will be compounded by the monoculture mentality of genetically modified and thus tainted produce like corn, soy, oilseed rape, sunflower, maize, and now alfalfa, which are not designed to meet the needs of the human population.
Natural, seasonal vegetables are essential for our wellbeing, but space for these is constantly being challenged by the profit/greed motive of BigAgri. In addition, home grown seasonal has been overtaken by the ‘globalised’ culture where much of the northern hemisphere produce is uneconomically produced overseas for minimum wage then transported by ships and airplanes over vast distances.
As that despicable apology for a human, Henry Kissinger’s mantra says….”
– Spotless Sun heralds Solar Minimum after CME producing Region 2567 departs:
After Active Region 2567, the source of 7 M-class and numerous C-class solar flares between July 21 and 24, rotated away from the visible disk, our Earth facing Sun is again spotless.
This is the third ‘spotless Sun’ since June 3, and although it is a temporary state, it signals that Solar Minimum is approaching.
Read moreSpotless Sun heralds Solar Minimum after CME producing Region 2567 departs
Are You Prepared For An Extremely Bitterly Cold Winter? Solar Activity Is At A 100 Year Low
– Are You Prepared For An Extremely Bitterly Cold Winter? Solar Activity Is At A 100 Year Low (The Truth, Sep 23, 2013):
Are you ready for bone chilling cold this winter? The Old Farmer’s Almanac and other weather forecasters that rely on solar activity as a factor in their weather forecasts are projecting that this upcoming winter will be bitterly cold. Solar activity is at a 100 year low, and even though we were supposed to be in the midst of a solar maximum this year, our sun has been eerily quiet. So precisely what in the world is going on? There have been other periods throughout history when solar activity has been extraordinarily quiet, and those times have corresponded with periods of extreme cold. For example, the “Maunder Minimum” which stretched from 1645 to 1715 corresponded with the most bitterly cold period that the earth experienced in the last 1000 years. So could we be heading toward another “mini-ice age”? That is a question that some scientists are now beginning to ask.
Read moreAre You Prepared For An Extremely Bitterly Cold Winter? Solar Activity Is At A 100 Year Low
Study: Sun May Soon Have Four Poles … Sunspot Activity Appears To Resemble Maunder Minimum
– Sun may soon have four poles, say researchers (Asahi Shimbun, April 20, 2012):
The sun may be entering a period of reduced activity that could result in lower temperatures on Earth, according to Japanese researchers.
Officials of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Riken research foundation said on April 19 that the activity of sunspots appeared to resemble a 70-year period in the 17th century in which London’s Thames froze over and cherry blossoms bloomed later than usual in Kyoto.
In that era, known as the Maunder Minimum, temperatures are estimated to have been about 2.5 degrees lower than in the second half of the 20th century.
The Japanese study found that the trend of current sunspot activity is similar to records from that period.
The researchers also found signs of unusual magnetic changes in the sun. Normally, the sun’s magnetic field flips about once every 11 years. In 2001, the sun’s magnetic north pole, which was in the northern hemisphere, flipped to the south.
Read moreStudy: Sun May Soon Have Four Poles … Sunspot Activity Appears To Resemble Maunder Minimum
NASA: Quiet Sun Means Dramatic Cooling of Earth’s Upper Atmosphere
HAMPTON, Va., Dec. 16 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — New measurements from a NASA satellite show a dramatic cooling in the upper atmosphere that correlates with the declining phase of the current solar cycle. For the first time, researchers can show a timely link between the Sun and the climate of Earth’s thermosphere, the region above 100 km, an essential step in making accurate predictions of climate change in the high atmosphere.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO)
Scientists from NASA’s Langley Research Center and Hampton University in Hampton, Va., and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., will present these results at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco from Dec. 14 to 18.
Earth’s thermosphere and mesosphere have been the least explored regions of the atmosphere. The NASA Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) mission was developed to explore the Earth’s atmosphere above 60 km altitude and was launched in December 2001. One of four instruments on the TIMED mission, the Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER) instrument, was specifically designed to measure the energy budget of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. The SABER dataset now covers eight years of data and has already provided some basic insight into the heat budget of the thermosphere on a variety of timescales.
The extent of current solar minimum conditions has created a unique situation for recent SABER datasets. The end of solar cycle 23 has offered an opportunity to study the radiative cooling in the thermosphere under exceptionally quiescent conditions.
“The Sun is in a very unusual period,” said Marty Mlynczak, SABER associate principal investigator and senior research scientist at NASA Langley. “The Earth’s thermosphere is responding remarkably — up to an order of magnitude decrease in infrared emission/radiative cooling by some molecules.”
Read moreNASA: Quiet Sun Means Dramatic Cooling of Earth’s Upper Atmosphere
Japan’s boffins: Global warming isn’t man-made
Climate science is ‘ancient astrology’, claims report
Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission.
Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN’s IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.
One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.
The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure, and a vote of confidence in Japan’s native marine and astronomical research. Publicly-funded science in the West uniformly backs the hypothesis that industrial influence is primarily responsible for climate change, although fissures have appeared recently. Only one of the five top Japanese scientists commissioned here concurs with the man-made global warming hypothesis.
JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields, and acts as a government advisory panel. The report appeared last month but has received curiously little attention. So The Register commissioned a translation of the document – the first to appear in the West in any form. Below you’ll find some of the key findings – but first, a summary.
Sun Makes History: First Spotless Month in a Century
The record-setting surface of the sun. A full month has gone by without a single spot (Source: Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO))
Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth.
The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.
The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots — is an influencing factor for climate on earth.
Read moreSun Makes History: First Spotless Month in a Century
The Sunspot Enigma: The Sun is “Dead”—What Does it Mean for Earth?
Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future.
Although periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, this current period has gone on much longer than usual and scientists are starting to worry-at least a little bit. Recently 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered to discuss the issue at an international solar conference at Montana State University. Today’s sun is as inactive as it was two years ago, and solar physicists don’t have a clue as to why.
“It continues to be dead,” said Saku Tsuneta with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, program manager for the Hinode solar mission, noting that it is at least a little bit worrisome for scientists.
Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. But so far nothing is happening.
“It’s a dead face,” Tsuneta said of the sun’s appearance.
Tsuneta said solar physicists aren’t weather forecasters and they can’t predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Coincidence? Some scientists say it was, but many worry that it wasn’t.
Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory also show that there are currently no spots on the sun. He also noted that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.
“This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,” Dr Chapman noted in The Australian recently.
If the world does face another mini Ice Age, it could come without warning. Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder. Could something like this happen again? There’s no way to tell, and because the changes can happen all within one decade-we might not even see it coming.
Read moreThe Sunspot Enigma: The Sun is “Dead”—What Does it Mean for Earth?
Sunspot cycles may hold key to global warming, cooling
The 2008 winter was the coldest in 40 years for the upper Midwest, Plains states and most of Canada. Minnesota newspapers report that this year’s opening of the locks to Mississippi barge traffic, delayed by three weeks, was the latest since the modern waterway opened in 1940.
Eau Claire, where “old-fashioned winters” have been a thing of the past, recorded 43 days of below-zero temperatures, while folks down in Madison shoveled away at a 117-year record snowfall throughout the season, as did many in New England and Canada.
Rare snowfalls struck Buenos Aires, Capetown, and Sidney during their mid-year winter, while China continually battled blizzards. Even Baghdad experienced measurable snowfall.
Antarctic pack-ice far exceeded what Captain Cook saw on his 18th century voyage into the Southern Ocean. On the continent itself the miles-thick ice continues to accumulate despite peripheral melting along the Antarctic Peninsula and occasional calving of an ice block. At the opposite pole, flow-ice once again spans the entire Arctic Ocean, and by April it had extended into the Bering Strait, making up for the much heralded melt-back last summer.
From January 2007 through the end of January 2008, the average global temperature fell by nearly a degree Fahrenheit, based on data obtained by the MET Office in Great Britain and other international temperature monitoring networks.
What are we to make of this? The recent climate conference held in New York City, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, provides some answers. Several hundreds climatologists in attendance dispelled notions that the global warming debate is over. Most attendees, who readily acknowledge the existence of post-Little Ice Age warming, believe man-made emissions are unlikely to cause major climate change and signed a declaration to that effect.
Read moreSunspot cycles may hold key to global warming, cooling