The Sun's Odd Behavior

gyrogeerloose writes "Most of us know about the sun's eleven-year activity cycle. However, relatively few other than scientists (and amateur radio operators) are aware that the current solar minimum has lasted much longer than expected. The last solar cycle, Cycle 24, bottomed out in 2008, and Cycle 25 should be well on its way towards maximum by now, but the sun has remained unusually quiescent with very few sunspots. While solar physicists agree that this is odd, the explanation remains elusive."

Re:Enough data?

[quanticle]

Its a good point, but, ever since Galileo observed that there were sunspots, scientists have observed the sun to be on a fairly regular 11 year cycle of maxima and minima. So, until now, the scientific consensus was that the 11 year cycle was due to some kind of underlying fluctuation in the sun itself. Now that theory has to be revised (or maybe even rejected entirely) as this prolonged solar minimum continues.

Solar cycles have always varied

[Alrescha]

Over the past few hundred years, the solar cycle has regularly varied from as short as 9 years to as long as 14*. The tone of the summary (and the S.A. article) make this sound as if it is a new thing.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_cycles [wikipedia.org]

A.

Re:Enough data?

[Bobke]

That is not entirely correct. There is a period after Galileo's discovery called the Maunder Minimum where sunspots "became exceedingly rare", from wikipedia:

The Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period roughly spanning 1645 to 1715 by John A. Eddy in a landmark 1976 paper published in Science titled "The Maunder Minimum",[1] when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum [wikipedia.org]

So, is it really odd behavior?

Re:Global warming is the cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Well somehow I thought it was cycle 23 that finished and cycle 24 being underway... so much for journalistic accuracy. Look for instance here: http://www.solarcycle24.com/ [solarcycle24.com]

Re:I think you're off by a bit

[Mashiki]

We had an extreme low solar output about 400 years ago too, and no one has a clue what caused that. Except most of the world was an ice cube at the time. Now for those of us here in Ontario, we're in a mini-heatwave. But the rest of the country? Below average, last I heard even the easties were hoping for spring to start, they're still getting snow.

Re:Enough data?

[techno-vampire]

Given that the Maunder minimum led to global cooling, killing off (every last man, woman and child) in the -then- populated Greenland, almost a million people, and caused a number of famines everywhere else, I sure hope so

That's not only wrong, it's nonsense! First, the Norse Settlement [wikipedia.org] died out in the early to middle Fifteenth Century, two hundred years before the Maunder Minimum or the journal you cite. Second, the colony never exceeded a population of about 4500 or so. Not only couldn't the land have supported the million you claim, if you tried to stuff that many people into the sites of the two settlements, they'd be standing on each other's toes.

Two Techniques

[Roger W Moore]

Off the top of my head I can think of two ways to put a firm upper and lower boundary on the sun's age:

• Upper bound from the ratio of U235 and U238. In supernovae these are produced in roughly equal quantities and each has a half life measured in billions of years. Currently the Uranium on Earth is about 99.3% U-238 and 0.7% U-235 so, using the different half-lives, you can calculate the age of the supernovae which preceded the solar systems formation as about 6 billion years ago so the sun must be younger than this.
• Lower bound from the age of the Earth itself. Again radio dating techniques used on rocks put the age of the planet as about 4.5 billion years so the sun must be older than this.

Combine this with simulations about how long it would take an Earth sized mass to form an cool and you can probably come up with reasonably accurate value for the age of the sun. Of course this is just off the top of my head - there may be better and more accurate techniques which geologists and astophysicists have developed.

Wrong

[Roger W Moore]

Native Americans have long known the sun to be on an (average) FIFTEEN (15) year cycle.

They are demonstrably wrong. The data is unequivocal that the cycle has been 11 years in length for the past several hundred years. Look at the plot in this article [wikipedia.org]. There is no way that this is in any way consistent with a 15 years cycle. There may be other, longer cycles which the sun goes though - certainly there are multiple cycles for Earth's ice ages - but there is no evidence whatsoever to support a 15 year cycle.

Solar minima

[Anonymous Coward]

I assure you that we amateur radio operators are _very_ much aware that the sunspot activity is low for much longer than normal. There is much discussion about the Maunder Minimum
  http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
and the American Radio Relay League has regular reports on sunspot activity and the lack thereof
http://www.arrl.org/news/the-k7ra-solar-update-113

Solar flux is very real to radio amateurs, thank you very much.

Re:Enough data?

[AliasMarlowe]

...ever since Galileo observed that there were sunspots, scientists have observed the sun to be on a fairly regular 11 year cycle of maxima and minima...

Where did that "fairly regular" assertion come from?
The cycle is on average just under 11 years in duration, but is somewhat irregular. Individual cycles have varied between 9 and 14 years in duration in the couple of dozen cycles for which adequate observations are available. See http://www.infiniteunknown.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/sunspot-observations.png [infiniteunknown.net] or http://odin.physastro.mnsu.edu/~eskridge/astr102/bfly.gif [mnsu.edu] for example. The variations in sunspot cycle duration do not appear to be related in any simple way to the variations in amplitude.

Re: Plants are the cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought The Sun, as in the newspaper.

Re:Effects on the weather

[Abcd1234]

Although yes, the Sun's becoming more active there's been a lot of discussion as to whether the low solar activity was responsible for the coldest winter in 17 years in England (and longer than that in Scotland).

Doubtful, given that:

For the year-to-date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 13.3C (56.0F) was the warmest January-April period. This value is 0.69C (1.24F) above the 20th century average.

Citation [noaa.gov].

Furthermore:

The decade of the 2000s (2000-2009) was warmer than the decade spanning the 1990s (1990-1999), which in turn was warmer than the 1980s (1980-1989). More complete data for the remainder of the year 2009 will be analysed at the beginning of 2010 to update the current assessment.

Citation [wmo.int]. Which, of course, makes the idea of solar drive GW look pretty silly, what with the solar minimum during this decade.

So, alas, apparently I *once again* need to point out: Local temperature != global temperature. Seriously, people, how many times does this have to be repeated before you start to actually get it?

Re:Anthropomorphic

[Abcd1234]

some (many) pro-agw people have been saying for a couple of years that man-made co2 has caused temps to increase but the lack of solar activity has negated the increase so we don't see an increase in measured temps.

Pity that statement is, itself, simply false. This was the warmest decade on record, period. Furthermore, most of the warmest years occurred in the last ten years. Can you cherry-pick you results to find outliers in the 90s, so as to make the current decade look not so bad? Sure. But that's tantamount to lying, plain and simple.

Re:Enough data?

[Mspangler]

"That's not only wrong, it's nonsense! First, the Norse Settlement [wikipedia.org] died out in the early to middle Fifteenth Century, two hundred years before the Maunder Minimum... "

You are correct. Although the northern Norse settlement died out first about 100 years before the southern one. They went down due to the same cooling trend that hit Europe in the 1300's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315 [wikipedia.org]–1317

"The Great Famine of 1315–1317 (occasionally dated 1315-1322) was the first of a series of large scale crises that struck Europe early in the fourteenth century, causing millions of deaths over an extended number of years and marking a clear end to an earlier period of growth and prosperity during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. "

Re:Global warming is the cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. He's talking about a scenario where a very small piece of a very complex curve is taken as a trend. People who tinker with such things as cesium clocks learn very quickly not to infer trends from short observation periods.

Re:Easy to fix

[painandgreed]

>braces

What?

Braces are the proper term (ie British, eg Boots & Braces of Skinhead culture) for suspenders, or at least the type that don't clip onto your pants but button. I suspect that is what the OP is saying.

Re:Conspiracy!

[MacDork]

You're wasting your breath dave. He's a coward and ultranova is trolling. Don't let it bother you. Here's some ammo for you next time (^_^)

• The missing carbon [eoearth.org]
• Graph showing ice age with 12 times more CO2 than today. [geocraft.com]
• Polar bears [guardian.co.uk]
• Ethanol [gmu.edu]
• Ethanol again [slashdot.org]
• Climate cultist whack job from "Whale wars" believes quote We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. [seashepherd.org]
• NASA's chief on global warming. [mindfully.org]
• The IPCC get their their asses handed to them in front of Congress in 1997. [loc.gov] A personal favorite is this quote:

  The observed warming since the late 19th Century has only been 0.5 degrees Celsius, or less than one-third of the predicted value. Critics argued, as I did before this committee, that there would have to be a dramatic reduction in the forecast of future warming in order to reconcile the facts and the hypotheses.

  By 1995, in its second full assessment of climate change, the IPCC admitted the validity of the critics' position: `When increases in greenhouse gases only are taken into account, most climate models produce a greater mean warming than has been observed to date, unless a lower climate sensitivity to the greenhouse effect is used. There is growing evidences that increases in sulfate aerosols are partially counteracting the warming due to increases in greenhouse gases.'

  Let me translate this statement. It means either it is not going to warm up as much as we said it would or something is hiding the warming. I predict that every attempt will be made to demonstrate the latter before admitting that the former is true.

My links are getting old it seems. I have a folder full of them, but a lot seems to have been eradicated by the cult of climate change. [slashdot.org] Feel free to use this stuff in your next big flame war, but I think you'll find that arguing with these idiots is pointless. Your best bet is to put together a well reasoned, informative essay... then wait for a related story and top post. You may be marked troll, but it doesn't matter. People like myself who don't agree with /.s group think tend to read at troll +6 anyway. In fact, I would have never seen your response if you had not been marked troll above... anyhow, we'll mod you up if you're hit with -1 disagree mod.