Are scientists giving us a 'heads-up' for possible extended Global Cooling in the near future?
I've read suggestions of this happening near-term, however it appears that more credence is being given the possibility of an extended Cooling period. Do we have any institutions/agencies working on a Global Cooling contingency plan? "Say Goodbye to Sunspots?" by Phil Berardelli on 14 September 2010, 2:41 PM "Scientists studying sunspots for the past 2 decades have concluded that the magnetic field that triggers their formation has been steadily declining. If the current trend continues, by 2016 the sun's face may become spotless and remain that way for decades—a phenomenon that in the 17th century coincided with a prolonged period of cooling on Earth. Sunspots appear when upwellings of the sun's magnetic field trap ionized plasma—or electrically charged, superheated gas—on the surface. Normally, the gas would release its heat and sink back below the surface, but the magnetic field inhibits this process. From Earth, the relatively cool surface gas looks like a dark blemish on the sun. Astronomers have been observing and counting sunspots since Galileo began the practice in the early 17th century. From those studies, scientists have long known that the sun goes through an 11-year cycle, in which the number of sunspots spikes during a period called the solar maximum and drops—sometimes to zero—during a time of inactivity called the solar minimum. The last solar minimum should have ended last year, but something peculiar has been happening. Although solar minimums normally last about 16 months, the current one has stretched over 26 months—the longest in a century. One reason, according to a paper submitted to the International Astronomical Union Symposium No. 273, an online colloquium, is that the magnetic field strength of sunspots appears to be waning. Since 1990, solar astronomers Matthew Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, have been studying the magnetic strength of sunspots using a measurement called Zeeman splitting. Named after the Dutch physicist who discovered it, the splitting is the distance that appears between a pair of lines in a spectrograph of the light given off by iron atoms in the sun’s atmosphere. The wider the splitting, the greater the intensity of the magnetic field that created it. After examining the Zeeman splitting of 1500 sunspots, Penn and Livingston conclude that the average magnetic field strength of sunspots has declined from about 2700 gauss—the average strength of Earth's field is less than 1 gauss—to about 2000 gauss. The reasons for the decrease are not clearly understood, but if the trend continues, sunspot field strength will drop to 1500 gauss by as early as 2016. Because 1500 gauss is the minimum required to produce sunspots, Livingston says, at that level they would no longer be possible. The phenomenon has happened before. Sunspots disappeared almost entirely between 1645 and 1715 during a period called the Maunder Minimum, which coincided with decades of lower-than-normal temperatures in Europe nicknamed the Little Ice Age. But Livingston cautions that the zero-sunspot prediction could be premature. "It may not happen," he says. "Only the passage of time will tell whether the solar cycle will pick up." Still, he adds, there's no doubt that sunspots "are not very healthy right now." Instead of the robust spots surrounded by halolike zones called penumbrae, as seen during the last solar maximum (photo), most of the current crop looks "rather peaked," with few or no penumbrae. "It is a very interesting sequence of observations," says solar physicist Scott McIntosh of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The researchers "have carefully analyzed their data and the trend appears to be real," he says. Solar physicist David Hathaway of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, agrees but with a caveat. "It's an important paper," he says. But the sunspot magnetic field calculations don't take into account a lot of small sunspots that appeared during the last solar maximum. Those sunspots have weaker magnetic fields, which, if not included, could make the average sunspot magnetic field strength seem higher than it really was." http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/09/say-goodbye-to-sunspots.html
Global Warming - 5 Answers
Random Answers, Critics, Comments, Opinions :
1 :
Possibly... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sunspots I watch sunspots on a daily basis and the sun is getting more awake than it was, but we haven't had a sunspot number higher than about 50 at any time in the last year. At this part of a normal 11 year cycle, we'd be at about 150-200, almost every day, and we keep bouncing back at zero. So, so far, my expectation is continued cooling, but we don't have enough data to be able to predict what the sun is going to do.
2 :
Some of the Warmistas are engaged in a bit of preemptive CYA... <QUOTE>Latif, is a professor at the Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University and an author of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Latif is a prominent scientist in the UN’s IPCC climate research group.Latif thinks the cold snap Americans, Brits, and Europeans have been suffering through is the beginning of another cycle, this one a down cycle. He says we’re in for 30 years of cooler temperatures.</QUOTE>
3 :
There is certainly a lack of certainty about both what the sun will do and what it's effects are to earth's climate. One thing that is not certain is whether the earth actually cooled during the Maunder Minimum. Some researchers believe what we call the Little Ice Age was only a European phenomenon. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/42298 What we do know is that during the past minimum we did not get cooling and in fact have just completed the warmest 12 months on record and the warmest decade on record. (The decade is more meaningful and any single year is influenced by short-term factors.) A correlation between sunspots and global temperatures is disputed among researchers, but we are certain that if such a correlation does exist naturally it has not existed for the past 30 years. Global temperatures have increased rapidly without a leading increase in solar activity. If a quiet sun does create cooler temperatures on earth, then we have seen that the enhanced greenhouse effect has been overwhelming that factor at least since 1980. And if the sun cycles back-up to a normalish active part of it's cycle, and the correlation is real, then we will see accelerated warming, even faster than what we have seen so far. On the other hand, if Mike Lockwood's (author of the research mentioned above) conclusions are correct, a quiet sun over a long period of time could bring a double-whammy to England and Northern Europe: cold weather regionally against a backdrop of ongoing global warming unaffected by solar activity, i.e., cold weather in Europe and rising sea levels.
4 :
Baccheus, So now we do not even know if the Little Ice Age affected just Europe or the entire world. It is good to hear we have such a strong grasp on the past. It is really cool to rely on these records up to millions of years ago to come up with some correlation between CO2 and warming, so that we can assume correlation equals causation and use this information to predict out 100 years into the future (something I would not suggest with any computer model). Then with these computer models claim some sort of certainty and relative small confidence intervals. All the while, we can not say for certain what the temp was a few hundred years ago. I absolutely love the AGW scientific process. Uncertainty + Uncertainty + Uncertainty=Certainty Please enlighten me as to how this equation works!!! David Walters, Above anything, the CIA is a political organization. While tasked with protection of the Constitution, they know where they get their funding and they are highly political in the missions they choose. Further, climate change is some meaningless misnomer that the warmers choose to hide under, because they know that you can't argue with climate change. The climate always changes, always has, always will. The argument that I should accept the proposition of 7 degree warming and the end of the world scenarios that you warmers constantly propagate solely because the CIA is using the politics of the time to creeate a section that deals with climate change (something that has been happening forever) is completely absurd.
5 :
"Scientists studying sunspots for the past 2 decades have concluded that the magnetic field that triggers their formation has been steadily declining. If the current trend continues, by 2016 the sun's face may become spotless and remain that way for decades—a phenomenon that in the 17th century coincided with a prolonged period of cooling on Earth." http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/09/say-goodbye-to-sunspots.html -That would be great if global temperatures did decrease due to solar forcing. But what if it doesn't stop the steep upward trend in global temperatures? Would the deniers come clean and work to stop CO2 emissions? Even the CIA admits the reality of global warming.....do you really think they are a bunch of liberal wacko's too? "The Central Intelligence Agency is launching The Center on Climate Change and National Security as the focal point for its work on the subject...... Its charter is not the science of climate change, but the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts, and heightened competition for natural resources. " https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/center-on-climate-change-and-national-security.html