It’s a shame that discussion on global warming, climate change, and conservation have all become so politically charged. Because, frankly, I don’t know whether I’m supposed to trust this sort of news (via Watts Up With That):
The first new sunspot in weeks has emerged today. The spot that has emerged is small and on the equator, so it appears that it is a cycle 23 spot rather than one from the cycle 24 that is gave one spot on January 8th, signaling a start of cycle 24, but has given no cycle 24 type spots since.
Based on what we know about the sun, a cycle 24 spot would be reverse polarity to cycle 23 spots and high latitude. The longer cycle 24 continues to delay producing its spots heightens the concern that we may be in for a longer inactive period on the sun, such as a Dalton type minimum.
In case you’re wondering what a “Dalton type minimum” is, Wikipedia provides this bit of trivia:
The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity, lasting from about 1790 to 1830. Like the Maunder Minimum and Sporer Minimum it coincided with a period of lower than average global temperatures.
There is even a blog dedicated to the prediction of an imminent Dalton-type minimum, entitled “Dalton Minimum Returns.
A recent post there links to a presentation by David Archibald which goes into a bit more detail about such predictions.
Personally, I’m not familiar enough with long-term climatology and the science of global warming to feel comfortable in knowing whether to believe or disbelieve such discussion.
True, I have previously expressed a willingness to believe in global warming, although recent warm years I’d attribute to the effects of other cycles and normal random variation.
However, the idea of cyclical variation of solar activity on the earth’s climate does fit in on my cycles-upon-cycles view of the world.
It would actually be amusingly ironic if human-induced climate change lead to the potential upcoming Dalton-like minimum being not quite as bad as it would otherwise be.
Bah. Now I have a headache from thinking about all these correlations.
Despite that headache, I still think that there are good reasons to pursue conservation and more sustainable technology, beyond the global warming predictions/hype.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Doze // 6 Mar 2008 at 2:43 pm
Is it not easy to prove that the sun is or is not causing our weather by looking at the temperature on other plants on our solar system? If the sun is the cause then the other planets will have climbed and fell comparably to what we are seeing here. Is there any one that looking in to the temperature of the other plants? I can not find it if there is.
2 Criticism Published of Solar Cycles Being Linked to Current Climate Trends // 13 Mar 2008 at 10:11 pm
[...] Competing With Global Warming—A Quiet SunGray Decries Gore HypeWarmer Oceans Linked to Stronger HurricanesWorld’s Largest Solar Power Plant Planned for NevadaGoogle Goes Solar [...]
3 Bob Cormack // 15 Mar 2008 at 3:18 pm
Doze: Here is a news article on warming on other planets of the Solar system:
http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=551bfe58-882f-4889-ab76-5ce1e02dced7
You can find scientific papers on the subject by using google-scholar
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) proponents usually take the tack that, since the radiative output of the Sun doesn’t change by more than a fraction of a percent, that this must be coincidence. There is a fairly long and strong corellation between the length of the Sunspot cycle and global temperatures, however. To explain this a coincidence requires postulating a nearly astronomical improbability, so rational folk are looking for a mechanism that doesn’t involve direct increase or decrease of Solar radiation. One possible mechanism is that when the Sunspot cycle is long, the Sun’s magnetic field strength is low, allowing more high energy cosmic rays to penetrate low in the Earth’s atmosphere and create ionized particles that can seed cloud cover. The Sun’s magnetic field has been larger the last century than at any time in the last 1000 years. This (cosmic ray-cloud link) is pretty difficult to measure or model quantitatively, so is still research in progress.
One reason I strongly distrust the AGW types is that I’ve seen many papers “debunking” the Solar-climate link by just knocking down straw men. For instance: 1) Graphing Solar output vs. climate — which shows little correlation, but neglecting to also graph the smoothed Sunspot cycle length vs. climate — which show extremely strong correlation; and 2) Plotting total cosmic ray intensity at high altitude observatories vs. cloud cover — which shows very weak correlation, but not doing the plot with the high energy cosmic rays that are postulated to effect the cloud cover at low altitudes over temperate areas of the Earth.
When someone ignores scores of scientific papers showing an effect and just “debunks” something not claimed by these papers, you know you are being scammed.