Sunday 20 December 2009

Science Corner: Whats missing from this picture?



Apparently its sun spots. We're not getting any. I don't like science much. Its a bit dull and it makes me fall asleep.

An international panel of solar scientists now predicts that the next solar storm season, which should peak in 4 years, will be the weakest since 1928. The most common measure of a solar cycle's intensity is the number of sunspots, the more spots, the more solar storms. Earlier predictions allowed for a higher number of sunspots.

The panel predicts that the upcoming solar cycle 24 (which keeps getting delayed) will peak in May of 2013, with a maximum of 90 sun spots per day on average.

If this new prediction is correct, it would make solar cycle 24 the weakest since 1928, when it peaked out with 78 sunspots. Solar cycle 24 would also be the 9th weakest season since the 1750's, when numbered cycles began.

Also, solar cycle 23, which is ending, could end up being the longest cycle since 1823.

An unusually long, deep lull in sunspots led the panel to revise its 2007 prediction that the next cycle of solar storms would start in March 2008 and peak in late 2011 or mid-2012. The persistence of a quiet sun also led the panel to a consensus that the next cycle will be "moderately weak," according to the NOAA press release.

Many scientists believe that long periods of low solar activity has a noticeable cooling effect on the planet.

Oh right! Great! That'll explain why I can't move my flippin' car! Bring back global warming! Everybody! Start breathing harder! We need more people! Breed like rabbits!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The true believers do not want you to know, "It is not the heat; it is the humidity”
What the ego geocentric believers always miss is a subtle study from Denmark. Two geophysicists (Friis-Christensen and Lassen, 1991) found a 95% correlation with sunspot peak frequency, cooling, and heating. When the peaks are farther apart, all the planets cool and when the peaks are closer, all the planets warm. It is such a strong correlation that the editor of Science magazine said, “now the ball on anthropogenic global warming is in the other court”. published in Science in 1991, it is such a strong correlation that AGW was held at bay for four or five years and came back with “Correlation is not causation.” George Monbiot of the Guardian debunked the study by reversing the effect, and citing the conclusion as false. He could be just in error or worse, intellectually fraudulent. That column has been deleted from the Guardian archives. Variation in heat output, however, is a red herring, only varying in the fourth significant figure and probably has nothing to do with it.
The sunspots are simply a proxy for the sun’s magnetic shield that shields earth too. In a sunspot minimum, the shields are down and cosmic radiation (iron nuclei mostly) bombard the earth and seed the clouds. Experiment supports solar causation. Successful cloud formation has since been subject to experimentation by the successor scientists at the Danish National Space Centre.
The Danes now have international support and an experiment scheduled for the Hadron Collider soon. I cannot wait to see if there is more support for the sun in global warming. It is a variable star. It is not the heat, it is the humidity… precipitation in the form of ice and snow and changes in reflectivity are huge as is the cooling effect of evaporation. I have just exceeded my safe zone of knowledge on the subject. Speculation for me is that the centre of gravity of the solar system (Sun-Jupiter centre of mass) has a pronounced wobble and controls the magnetic behaviour of the sun.
Toronto, where I live, is particularly sensitive to the magnetic (sunspot) cycle because the Great Lakes Basin is a huge cloud chamber. The rainiest summers on record were in 2008-9. The previous rainfall record was during the sunspot minimum of 1986, a 22-year cycle low. 22-year cycles are more pronounced than the 11-year cycle for some unknown reason. Every 22 years the magnetic poles of the sun shift. Right now is mysterious because they are horizontal instead of parallel to the rotational pole. Maybe we are stuck mid-flip.
The Medieval church squashed the Galilean proposal for the earth following the sun; now it is the church of the environmental lobby groups. I am choosing my words carefully because we are all environmentalists.

The Pope Who Won't Be Buried

It has been a long time since I have put finger to keyboard to write about our holy Catholic Faith, something I regret, but which I put larg...