Solar Cycle 24 - More Evidence that It’s The Sun, Stupid!
Have you noticed, as I have, that it has been a relatively comfortable summer? I haven’t even heard Al Gore or his bleating sheep baah baahing out global warming lies. Could it be that even they realize that it might just be possible that the sun could — potentially, mind you — have something to do with earth’s temperatures? Naaah. I think I must be dreaming. Yeah, that’s gotta be it. Global warming means too much for Al Gore’s pocketbook for him to acknowledge what the entire world has known forever. That big yellow thing in the sky, which warms us during the day and cools us at night, which warms us when we’re closer to it and cools us when we’re further away, effects earth’s climate!
Now, the NOAA tells us that this summer was the 39th hottest on record for the contiguous United States, but given the curious placement of their weather stations, we had better look to the satellite data instead:
Solar cycle 24 was observed to have very late last year. It took longer than usual for the start of the current 11 year cycle to actually start because the sun was basically inactive, but then things picked up … a very little bit. Well, there has been VERY little solar activity through this year, and last month, there was not one single sunspot noted! Did we miss it? Man has been recording sunspots for centuries. We’ve monitored them relatively closely since before the United States was formed. Well, one observatory has modified one data point to indicate that there might have been a slight indication of activity in one area last month, so they gave it a half-sunspot count, but others laughed that spec off. The last time a whole month passed without a single sunspot was June 1913.
Extended periods of little to no sunspot activity has corresponded to periods of global cooling. (Note that Gore and friends have shifted to blathering about global climate change since their warming hoax is looking weaker these days.) Michael Asher, of DailyTech, says
In the past 1000 years, three previous such events — the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a “mini ice age”. For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who runs a climate data auditing site called Watts Up With That, noted:
Many have been keeping a watchful eye on solar activity recently. The most popular thing to watch has been sunspots. While not a direct indication of solar activity, they are a proxy for the sun’s internal magnetic dynamo. There have been a number of indicators recently that it has been slowing down.
Watts notes that it is believed that the main factor in modulating Earth’s climate is solar magnetism modulating galactic cosmic rays, and hence creating more cloud nuclei. He adds:
We’ve had indications since October 2005 that the sun’s dynamo is slowing down. It dropped significantly then, and has remained that way since. Seeing no sunpots now is another indicator of that idling dynamo.
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William Livingston and Matthew Penn, of the National Solar Observatory inTucson, Arizona wrote in their paper “Sunspots May Vanish by 2015”
Our data show that there are additional changes occurring in sunspots, independent of the sunspot cycle, and these trends suggest that sunspots will disappear completely. Such an event would not be unprecedented, since during a famous episode from 1645-1715, known as the Maunder Minimum, the normal 11-year periodicity vanished and there were virtually no sunspots visible on the solar surface (Eddy 1976). Recent studies of the appearance rate and latitudinal drift of sunspots (Hathaway et al., 2004) and of the solar magnetic field (Svalgard etal, 2005) predict that the number of sunspots visible in future cycles will be significantly reduced. Finally the occurrence of prolonged periods with no sunspots is important to climate studies, since the Maunder Minimum was shown to correspond with the reduced average global temperatures on the Earth.
What does the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Gore’s co-Nobel prize winners, offer in light of the recently observed cooling and solar inactivity? Their BIG announcement was:
Eat less meat to curb global warming.
At least they seem to be taking themselves as seriously as the rest of us take them these days.
As the US election approaches, BOTH major party platforms include planks for attacking man-made global warming. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have been sucked in by Al Gorebbels’ Big Lie, Repeated ENDLESSLY. It is incumbent upon us all, we, the people, to keep the pressure on our elected officials and wannabe elected officials to convince them to pay at least some attention to actual data instead of someone’s opinion of that data.
