The Sun Has First Spotless Month Since 1913 571
radioweather writes "August 2008 has made solar history. As of 00 UTC September 1st 2008 (5PM PST)
we just witnessed the
first spotless calendar month since June 1913.This was determined according
to sunspot
data from NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center, which goes back to 1749.
In the 95 years since 1913, we've had quite an active sun, but activity has been
declining in the last few years. The sun today is a nearly featureless sphere and has been spotless for 42
days total, but this is the first full calendar month since 1913 for a spotless
sun. And there are other indicators of the sun being in a funk. Australia's
space weather agency recently revised their solar cycle 24 forecast, pushing the
expected date for a ramping up of
cycle 24 sunspots into the future by six months."
As one of the links above indicate, there was a "sunspeck" reported August 21/22, though. Reader MikeyTheK adds a link to a story at Daily Tech on the spotless record.
Re:Standby and get ready! (Score:5, Insightful)
to 'prove' that global warming isn't manmade.
There we go, asking people to prove negatives again. Why don't you start by proving that it IS man-made?
Or conversely, prove that it ISN'T caused by the belly button lint of invisible space goats.
Re:The real reason this is News for Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
All joking aside, does anyone else get the feeling they're changing the definition of a sunspot just so they can claim it was a spotless month?
"Sunspeck" my arse.
Re:Standby and get ready! (Score:5, Insightful)
"There we go, asking people to prove negatives again. Why don't you start by proving that it IS man-made?"
The argument being made is that it HAS been proven, as far as one can prove anything in such indeterministic systems.
Of course, we had proof for years that ulcers were caused by stress. Nope - bacteria.
Proof that the continents were immobile in their positions. Well, not so much proof as that it was just so totally OBVIOUS that continents couldn't move, and that "continental drift" was a crackpot theory. Until it wasn't.
AIDS was a breakdown of the immune system because of IV drug use, exposure to multiple venereal diseases, and the generally unhealth lifestyle of the gay community. Until they isolated a virus.
The reality is that scientific "proof" consists of general agreement among communities of people about the interpretation of observed phenomena, and that agreement can be driven by MANY factors, not just how well the data fits. One CANNOT get to the level of mathematical proof. So there will always be a role for skeptics, and those that just won't accept that, if you have a square peg and a round hole, you just pretend the peg's squareness doesn't exist, because it MUST fit into the round hole.
And yet, what is being missed (Score:4, Insightful)
Cue the theories (Score:5, Insightful)
As to how the Earth is heating up due to there being too few sun spots or birds are falling out of the sky and little children are being eaten by monsters at the worlds edge.
I'm really interested in stories about science but every one like this seems to be taken as an excuse for the uninformed to come up with todays hair brained theory to scare the masses. I wonder if we can link this to terrorism in some way.
Re:I can't wait (Score:3, Insightful)
And isn't President Bush the only leader of an industrialized nation which actually cut carbon dioxide emissions, Kyoto or not?
Re:Maybe that's why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that recorded history is but a tiny fraction of human existence, which is in turn but a tiny fraction of earth's existence, I have a hard time believing anything anyone says about long-term trends. We just don't know.
Re:Standby and get ready! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course atmospheric/climate scientists have considered the impact of the sun. Please, don't assume they're complete idiots.
The problem with global warming alarmism is not not the climate science is poor, but that it is used to rationalize unnecessarily intrusive interventions in people's lives that have little to do with preventing catastrophe, and very questionable impact on net emissions.
The obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem is to simply internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off, either by tradeable caps or a tax, and then apply the funds to mitigating the damage. Then, you don't have to do impossible calculations about which activities are "truly wasteful", and people can decide how they cut back. And even if they don't, such a solution is still robust, as such a decision would just generate more funds with which to handle the problem.
But the most vocal alarms don't want this. Instead, they propose a laundry list of intrusive interventions, and then want to pick and choose which technologies are the "right" ones. If they were honest about wanting to avert catastrophe, the debate today would be about the size of the tax or cap, not about whether we should ban this particular product on the grounds that it gets an emotional reaction out of some people. Alarmism has been more about whether you're "on the team" or not. If the most efficient solution for you is to get better insulation rather than a hybrid, well, the latter would signal that you're "one of them" and the former wouldn't, so ...
Re:And yet, what is being missed (Score:3, Insightful)
"what happens when sunspots increase?"
Uh, let me guess here. Temps increase.
I think what needs to be focused on is not the "who's right or wrong about global warming," but the fact that there are so many factors involved. We need to understand how CO2 (or any other green house gas) affects the temps so we can manipulate temps and offset the cooling cycles of the Sun and keep a more consistent temp base for the planet. UNLESS, the Earth itself requires heating and cooling cycles to sustain life.
The process of mass extinctions are inevitable, humans included. Either by the Earth, extra-terrestrial (rocks/frequencies/etc, not ET beings), or the fact that one species consumes so much of the biomass that it kills itself by lack of diversity.
Re:Standby and get ready! (Score:4, Insightful)
The argument being made is that it HAS been proven, as far as one can prove anything in such indeterministic systems.
If by GW you mean AGW then like hell it has. If you read ./ summaries, a few newspapers and A. Gore, then perhaps its a "fact". But read the source peer reviewed articles they claim to summarize. They use phrases like "it suggests", and "gives support to" rather than phrases like "statistically significant".
A good question to ask is how is the "mean" earth temperature measured, both current and Historic and whats the variance?
There are some facts out there that do matter (e.g. CO2 increases from industrialization). But thats not a proof of any claimed causal effects.
We simply have not been doing this sort of modeling long enough nor tested it enough to give credible confidence intervals yet. I'm not saying that mitigation programs now don't make sense. They do, but I can think of a lot of better reasons that AGW.
And in regard to general agreement in the scientific community WRT AGW? If you don't agree or are even just a little bit skeptical, you would have left that community a long time ago. Using a set of examples where there "was general agreement" that turned out to be wrong does not support the idea that "general agreement" on AGW is evidence of AGW.
Re:And yet, what is being missed (Score:3, Insightful)
Not conservatives, scientists (Score:3, Insightful)
As a conservative I believe more power to the individual and local governments rather than federal, lower taxes, lower spending.
Conservatives are cautious about global warming because Liberals are trying to introduce legislation based on it. We are handcuffing business, raising taxes, and affecting our day-to-day lives because of "global warming."
If this is what has to be done, so be it. We have a federal government for a reason.
On the other hand there is plenty of evidence that Global Warming does not exist and it is being pushed by Liberals with an agenda. This is unacceptable. We should not be destroying our economy because of "maybes."
Re:The real reason this is News for Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, the Earth is about be destroyed in the Rapture anyways, so why do we care?
Would be funny if it wasn't true - my mother-in-law just told me that global warming doesn't matter because when the world ends it will be an act of God and there will be nothing we can do about it anyway. The implications of this worldview are frightening.
Re:Standby and get ready! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not even Christian and I find this kind of tripe unbelievably ignorant.
Re:The real reason this is News for Nerds (Score:2, Insightful)
It's hardly more of a stretch than the fact that global warming "caused" the earthquake that made the big tsunami a couple years ago... how many times did we hear that claim (more than a couple for me, anyway)?
Re:Maybe that's why... (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell are you smoking? There was a warning that it *could* be ice free. Not to mention that North Pole being ice free is not the same as no ice anywhere. And so far, they're on track to have the smallest summer covering ever. By a few million square kilometers.
Really. If climate change wouldn't be such a huge issue, I'd take comfort in the fact that the only people disputing it can't even read the articles they're quoting. Instead, it's just depressing.
Re:The real reason this is News for Nerds (Score:3, Insightful)
I blame Clinton for the 8 years of abnormally high sun spot activity during the 90s.
Re:Sunspots down... temperature down? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok. I'll bite.
What are you trying to say? Dont be vague, just say it.
I'm not "addicted" to the theory of CO2 having a negative role in "climate change". I'm as "addicted" to that "theory" as I am "addicted" to the theory of "gravity". I simply dont know any better, logical, explination. Perhaps CO2 impact is more of a hypothesis, but a lot of scientists are pretty sold on it.
So if CO2 isn't a negative catalyst in global climate change, then what effect is it having on our planet? I mean, as far as I know, the CO2 isnt blowing out into outer space. Its going into the atmosphere and staying there (or being sequestered by other catalysts, but the pace of carbon output is known to currently be greater than the system can take it).
I mean, stand in an air tight room, and pump CO2 into that room. You will quickly learn how changing an atmosphere by adding additional gases can really change things up.
Again, for the "anti-greenhouse gas" people, please explain what effects CO2 is having, if its not having an effect on "climate change".
Re:Standby and get ready! (Score:5, Insightful)
They use phrases like "it suggests", and "gives support to" rather than phrases like "statistically significant".
Actually, the Fourth Assessment Report [www.ipcc.ch] produced in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report with several hundred scientific contributors and co-authors, uses phrases like "very high confidence" and "very likely".
"There is very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming" (p. 37)
"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations" (p. 39)
Re:Standby and get ready! (Score:3, Insightful)
My test of whether someone is genuinely concerned about catastrophe rather than power over others, is not passed by offering voluntary "carbon offsets" that have questionable impact anyway and aren't subject to 3rd party auditing.
To pass it, the alarmist would have to advocate replacing all measures to combat CO2 emissions, with some method of internalization of the environmental costs (possibly with a subsidy to those that remove it from the atmosphere). That means they would advocate:
-No subsidies for specific technologies.
-No efficiency mandates.
-No banning of products on the grounds that they are "inefficient".
-No subsidies for ethanol.
In other words, make people pay for the mess they make, and then let the market, armed with this price signal, ferret out the easiest places to make the reductions. (90% of them happen before any end user actually makes a decision: Wal-mart reducting truck wind drag, Tide shipping a more concentrated detergent, products being shipped from nearer places, etc.)
Al Gore therefore does not pass. And "buying" credits from your own business certainly doesn't qualify for praise.
There's a general point to made here: unilateral reduction of fossil fuel use is really an empty gesture. Since there are millions of uses that fossil fuels could be put to, you're simply allowing some person with different ethics to go buy what you didn't so they can go ahead with the use they had planned for it. So unless we all act in unison to internalize the CO2 emission costs for everyone, all we're really doing is turning over the fuel to someone else.
Politics in Science (Score:5, Insightful)
> All joking aside, does anyone else get the feeling they're changing the definition of a sunspot just so they can claim it was a spotless month?
Actually my thought was more the opposite. I have made spaceweather.com one of my daily visits. When it looked like a sunspot MIGHT be forming the official sunspot number went from zero to three. Eh? Don't you actually have to have a spot to count it? Then the area of interest went away and they put the number back at zero. Looks like somebody decided somebody jumped the gun and corrected the records.
Now why might this have happened? Why do papers predicting a period of low solar activity fail to be published (see the full articles)? Could it be the same reason scientific papers questioning global warming end careers without ever seeing the light of day? And of couse the refrain from the warmers is "all peer reviewed science supports man made Global Warming!" Science isn't becoming politicized, it IS politicized. Global Warming is the vehicle whereby "Scientific Socialism" is to bring untold political power to the 'elite educated and wise' few, and a rational planned and controlled world to the poor miserable peasants who would otherwise revert to cannibalism (or worse, a life of free markets without the elites) without their enlightened rule. Thus whether it is true or just a fairy tale is a question that must not be permitted to be entertained by 'serious people.' And the quickest way to ensure that is to define the phrase 'serious people' such that it excludes all who disagree with the official party policy.
Re:Does this mean less solar output? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sunspots do not correlate with solar heating by irradiation in the sense of "the sun feels warm on my skin." However, they do correlate with the degree that the upper atmosphere gets swept by magnetic fields and particles from the sun, and this in turn appears to have an effect upon cloud formation -- changes of 3-4% in cloudiness and concurrent changes in cloud top temperatures have been correlated to the 11 and 22 year solar (sunspot) cycles -- and that affects the amount of energy that reaches the ground. More info here. [wikipedia.org]
Re:The real reason this is News for Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
The real sad part is, if she truely believed that then she would also believe/realize that we've been charged by God to be stewards of the land till that time. In other words, we should still care because he'll be taking it out of our security deposit.
Re:The real reason this is News for Nerds (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't even make sense within the worldview.
Even assuming that the world won't end until God's ready, that leaves plenty of room for us to screw up the planet and make life hard. If the entire east coast of America is submerged under the sea, the world isn't ended, now is it?
That kind of thing is moral & intellectual laziness in any worldview.
Re:Does this mean less solar output? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. It is global. Not regional. Arctic is continuing to warm despite "cold in my area" bull.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7585645.stm [bbc.co.uk]
2. We know *SHIT* about mars climate.
3. Solar output is monitored.
It is really sad when these deniers bring out Mars as their joker card when they are talking about Global Warming. Just few years ago they were saying that there is not enough data on EARTH to even say that EARTH was warming. But given one or two data points on other planet from REMOTE INDIRECT OBSERVATION and they launch themselves to conclusions about it.
It is sad that these people justify their positions by their "beliefs" without knowing or understanding any data.
Is it SO difficult to go to the library, you know, sit down and read the temperature read some books about expeditions to the arctic? Number of people that died trying to conquer it?? Now we have people kayaking to the damn north pole!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7588329.stm [bbc.co.uk]
But no, there is no global warming. The ice just "went because god made it so"
Re:The real reason this is News for Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sunspots down... temperature down? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sunspot activity or lack thereof has absolutely nothing to do with human caused global warming. Bear with me for a second here.
It's been conclusively proven that increased carbon dioxide in a system prevents more incoming solar energy from escaping a system. This is demonstrable on a small scale with basic equipment, and is readily observable.
It is also simply a fact that humans have been dumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I doubt anyone on this website doubts this.
This known cause (carbon emission) has a known effect (warming), and humans have been performing this known cause for centuries with ever-increasing pervasiveness.
What is less clear cut is the end result and magnitude that this human-caused warming effect has. The earth is obviously a hugely complicated system. Innumerable factors, like the exact ability of each various sub-system to absorb carbon, are just now being explored. The amount of solar input of energy, clearly, has a --huge-- bearing on the end net temperature.
But please... don't make the logical fallacy of saying that since sunspots also affect temperature, therefore carbon doesn't matter, or that humans aren't having a climactic impact.
It does, and we are.
Tell her to read Revelation 11:17-18 (Score:1, Insightful)
Tell her to reread the part about being 'good stewards' of the Earth. Most Christians are pretty sure that means we have responsibility towards the environment [cgg.org].
Yes, there are some people so mired in politics that they can't separate the good from the bad. But I don't think most Christians want that, whatever others say of them.
But point out the part in Revelation about, "[...] and that You should reward Your servants the prophets and the saints, and those who fear Your name, small and great, and should destroy those who destroy the earth." Not to mention all the talk about 'stewardship'. All normal churches say that it applies to the environment and that we have a duty to care for it.
Even fringe groups like RaptureReady say they're only against liberal environmental politics, not against saving the environment. Of course, they're one of the groups too tied to politics so it's hard for them to separate the two.
Most of us are more normal than that. Most of us don't give a damn about the politics and just want to do what makes sense to protect our environment.
But you don't hear about most of us, because we don't make the news by doing idiotic things like protesting funerals, praying for storms to rain on our political enemies, or whatever other mean-spirited nonsense those "Christians" are doing today.
Obviously, you don't make the news by being normal.
Re:Not conservatives, scientists (Score:3, Insightful)
Political ideology does not refute accumulated scientific knowledge.
Can you reference any "evidence that Global Warming does not exist and it is being pushed by Liberals with an agenda"? Your belief is not sufficient.
Re:Standby and get ready! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Evidence? (Score:5, Insightful)
Notice that contrary to your assertion that there is some sort of conspiracy to stiffle critics and ruin their carers, Mann's web site goes to the trouble of pointing out it's own critics in the "other opinions" section on the RH side of the page.
Skepticisim: First you post an "insightfull" anti-science troll worthy of M.Chrichton, then you do exactly what you claim this cospiracy is doing by backing up your claim with politically inspired psuedo-science regurgitated from a right-wing rag. That is not skepticisim, it is in fact what phycologists call "projection".
Occam's razor: Would indicate that it is YOU allowing YOUR politics to intefere with science and this global conspiracy of which you speak is nothing but a figment of your imagination brought about by your apparent inability to be skeptical of your own assumptions.