Climate, Sunspots and The Future

[Hippie3]

scary news. The latest sunspot cycle should have started up around the middle or end of 2006; it didn't. According to NASA's forecasts, there should be a sunspot index of 70 or more, as the new cycle ran up. I looked at a real-time photo of the sun on a recent morning; there are no sunspots at all. There have only been a couple of brief, tiny ones since the last cycle ended. Not only that, but the longer trends tell us that by 2020, we will be experiencing an unusually low-energy sun. Apparently, these are exactly the conditions that preceded the Maunder_Minimum and ushered in the Little_Ice_Age.

NASA’s recent study that the global oceans are cooling and expected to cool for several years.

data from the new Jason oceanographic satellite that the PDO [Pacific_Decadal_Oscillation: 20 to 30 year warming and cooling of the north-central Pacific Ocean)] is entering a multi-year cooling period.

experiments conducted by the Danish Space Research Institute, which links global climate behavior to variations in the magnetic wind of the sun, which is changeable, driven by sunspot cycles. Contrary to expectations, the current cycle (Cycle 24) is turning out to be very weak with negligible sunspot activity.

Two scientists at the National Solar Laboratory in Arizona project that sunspots will vanish by 2015, leading to a multi-decade down cycle in solar activity. The last time this happened was in 1645-1715 leading to bitterly cold winters and repeated crop failures.

Between January 2007 and May 2008 the earth cooled by as much as it had warmed in the past 100 years, according to a meteorologist at the University of Alabama

[steeq]

Great information, its hard to know how to take it though. I read some of the same information on the ocean water cooling down close to Antartica, which shocked the scientist conducting the observations. Ocean temperatures have a big impact on land temperatures, so maybe this is just what we needed to stop global warming.

Or maybe worse and we will head into an ice age. Some scientists believe that once a certain point is reached with the melting of the fresh water our ocean cycles will slow and possibly stop, which would trigger an ice age.

It just goes to show how little we truly know in the grand scheme of things. There are so many variables that come into play with our weather, be it here on Earth or on the sun; and there's always the X factor.

[Oblivion]

I would believe it more than most of the "data" supporting man made global warming. It is undeniable that sun activity has a greater impact on our weather than we do.

[Santiago]

So what do y'all think the answer is, for our survival?

Will this herald a drastic, and much needed, population drop?

Can people survive that are able to harness water or wind energy to power HID lights and gardens, or create energy in some other fashion?

[prism1234]

Human beings alter the environment by nature. We change our surroundings at whim, and we change it more and more with the advent of better technologies etc. We are the most environmentally destructive organism this planet has ever seen, killing the rain forest to create farmland and inadvertently destroying the only natural processes that the planet has to filter CO2 and provide balance in the atmosphere by creating oxygen. We are causing CO2 levels to rise at an unprecedented rate though burning fossil fuels. CO2 causes temps rises due to the greenhouse effect.

The planet is not in danger, life is not in danger. There have been several mass extinctions in the earth's lifespan so far. Sometimes they even happen for the better. (Mammals evolved into humans after the mass extinction in the time of the dinosaurs.)

We are in danger. We are committing suicide as a species. We are killing ourselves in the name of low prices, economic stability and "progress".

We have been handed an opportunity to make the future better and I have much hope , but, I fear we are pushing the envelope with our criminal inaction. If something is not done NOW, we may send ourselves the way of the dinosaur.

We are much like yeast...

Take yeast, sugar and water and let it sit... The yeast will create more and more waste (alcohol) untill the waste becomes toxic and the yeast dies.

The question is,

Are we intelligent enough to change our lives and technologies so that we do not drown in our own filth ?

[Santiago]

We haven't shown ourselves to be very capable of the foresight necessary to skirt a disaster, in my opinion. And yes, obviously we're the ones in trouble, not the Earth. That's just human vanity. Over millions of years, the planet itself will do its thing, and one day maybe someone will be using the remains of our civilization as their fuel.

[prism1234]

I am not the most religious person, but the bible says that Adam was created to tend "The Garden", and I feel that this is truly is our purpose and we have the duty to become the Gardeners on the cosmic level. Cultivating life and protecting it on a planetary scale...

We have the challenge of either being the destroyers of ourselves, or the protectors of our planet and all the wondrous variety it provides.

I personally choose the latter...

[FDK]

Yep, but unlike yeast we are a much more adaptable critter. Since the last mini ice age we have made vast steps forward with horticultural technology. With the abundance of manufacturing industries having been "outsourced" we have an abundance of large scale industrial buildings which could be retrofitted to act as massive indoor gardens. Nuclear & Geothermal technology could ensure a consistant source of power with which to produce energy for lighting these grow houses. And for the rural areas, theres always the hothouse and / or bio-dome options. Somewhat pricey yes, but when faced with a potential global catastrophy and the consequences of failing to act in the best interests of our species survival it's likely that society will learn to adapt. Either as a whole, or as wingnuts living off in the hills, using the shells of old mobile homes as private or co-op large scale terrariums. Come to think of it, it might be good to refocus our beef industry over to raising Buffalo (nothing against your pimp assed ride aumbrella ) I think they're more cold hardy creatures. Of course all this only applies if we do indeed slip into a deep freeze. Thou even for now, the indus-terrerium would make interesting use of currently existing vacant warehouse space.

[Ras Asad]

Originally Posted by prism1234

Human beings alter the environment by nature. We change our surroundings at whim, and we change it more and more with the advent of better technologies etc. We are the most environmentally destructive organism this planet has ever seen, killing the rain forest to create farmland and inadvertently destroying the only natural processes that the planet has to filter CO2 and provide balance in the atmosphere by creating oxygen. We are causing CO2 levels to rise at an unprecedented rate though burning fossil fuels. CO2 causes temps rises due to the greenhouse effect.

The planet is not in danger, life is not in danger. There have been several mass extinctions in the earth's lifespan so far. Sometimes they even happen for the better. (Mammals evolved into humans after the mass extinction in the time of the dinosaurs.)

We are in danger. We are committing suicide as a species. We are killing ourselves in the name of low prices, economic stability and "progress".

We have been handed an opportunity to make the future better and I have much hope , but, I fear we are pushing the envelope with our criminal inaction. If something is not done NOW, we may send ourselves the way of the dinosaur.

We are much like yeast...

Take yeast, sugar and water and let it sit... The yeast will create more and more waste (alcohol) untill the waste becomes toxic and the yeast dies.

The question is,

Are we intelligent enough to change our lives and technologies so that we do not drown in our own filth ?

[Hippie3]

We are committing suicide as a species ...

i'd like to point out
that human activity
has no effect
on the sun
whatsoever.

not our fault, in any sense of the word,
if the sun cools off.

so would you please
just give it a freakin' rest
from denouncing civilization, capitalism, etc.

you're off-topic.

[HUMBLE STUDENT]

sorry my nose is so far up your ass prism1234 but this post hits the nail square on top of the head also the post you made before this is really weel thought out and typed. when ever I try to share any wisdom I might have on a subject witch gets me goin my rage usually gets most of the air time any ways very nice posts!

Originally Posted by prism1234

I am not the most religious person, but the bible says that Adam was created to tend "The Garden", and I feel that this is truly is our purpose and we have the duty to become the Gardeners on the cosmic level. Cultivating life and protecting it on a planetary scale...

We have the challenge of either being the destroyers of ourselves, or the protectors of our planet and all the wondrous variety it provides.

I personally choose the latter...

[steeq]

Wouldn't it be ironic if all of this extra CO2 we're dumping that's causing global warming actually saves us in the end from a cool sun period? Don't know if that's possible, but intriguing to think about. Hmmmm

Any thoughts?

[Hippie3]

that would be ironic.

but this data does illustrate the need
to not go off half-cocked
like the greens did
with corn ethanol.

in 200 years, possibly even much sooner-
as the ice and snow blankets the earth
yet again-
we may find ourselves
huddled around nuclear campfires.

[apokalypse]

Not sure if you guys saw this one.. apparently we can reduce CO2 emissions by adding lime to the oceans. Cool idea but I don't see it coming to fruition until it has to

http://www.physorg.com/news135820173.html

[Hippie3]

dumping mega-tons of limestone in the world oceans
without knowing all possible consequences
seems like dangerous folly to me.
doing chemistry experiments
on the base of the world's food and oxygen supply
would make the effects of the Industrial Revolution
pale by comparison.
way too many variables to predict the outcome
on marine life.

[Hippie3]

MSU News Service Wednesday, 25 June 2008 BOZEMAN –
The sun has been laying low for the past couple of years,
producing no sunspots and giving a break to satellites.
That’s good news for people who scramble when space weather interferes with their technology,
but it became a point of discussion for the scientists
who attended an international solar conference at Montana State University.
Approximately 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered June 1-6 to talk about “Solar Variability, Earth’s Climate and the Space Environment.”
The scientists said periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, but this period has gone on longer than usual.
“It continues to be dead,” said Saku Tsuneta with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, program manager for the Hinode solar mission.
“That’s a small concern, a very small concern.”...
Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. ....
The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012.
Today’s sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago,
and scientists aren’t sure why.
“It’s a dead face,” Tsuneta said of the sun’s appearance.
Tsuneta said solar physicists aren’t like weather forecasters; they can’t predict the future.
They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity.
In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots.
That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700.

[Hippie3]

By Lawrence Solomon
You probably haven’t heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don’t. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. That of your children and their children could fare worse still, say some scientists, because Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of profound long-term change in the climate. As put by geophysicist Philip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and former president of the National Space Society, “It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age.”
The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today’s spotlessness — what alarms Dr. Chapman and others — may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn’t – and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not – we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome.
Sunspots have been well documented throughout human history, starting in the fourth century BC, with written descriptions by Gan De, a Chinese astronomer. In 1128, an English monk, John of Worcester, was the first person known to have drawn sunspots, and after the telescope’s arrival in the early 1600s, observations and drawings became commonplace, including by such luminaries as Galileo Galilei. Then, to the astonishment of astronomers, they saw the sunspots diminish and die out altogether.
This was the case during the Little Ice Age, a period starting in the 15th or 16th century and lasting centuries, says NASA’s Goddard Space Centre, which links the absence of sunspots to the cold that then descended on Earth. During the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, a time known as the Maunder Minimum (named after English astronomer Edward Maunder), astronomers saw only about 50 sunspots over a 30-year period, less than one half of 1% of the sunspots that would normally have been expected. Other Minimums — times of low sunspot activity — also corresponded to times of unusual cold.
The consequences of the Little Ice Age, because they occurred in relatively recent times, have come down to us through literature and the arts as well as from historians and scientists, government and business records. When Shakespeare wrote of “lawn as white as driven snow,” he had first-hand experience – Europe was bitterly cold in his day, a sharp contrast to the very warm weather that preceded his birth. During the Little Ice Age, the River Thames froze over, the Dutch developed the ice skate and the great artists of the day learned to love a new genre: the winter landscape.
In what had been a warm Europe , adaptations were not all happy: Growing seasons in England and Continental Europe generally became short and unreliable, which led to shortages and famine. These hardships were nothing compared to the more northerly countries: Glaciers advanced rapidly in Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia and North America, making vast tracts of land uninhabitable. The Arctic pack ice extended so far south that several reports describe Eskimos landing their kayaks in Scotland. Finland’s population fell by one-third, Iceland’s by half, the Viking colonies in Greenland were abandoned altogether, as were many Inuit communities. The cold in North America spread so far south that, in the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, enabling people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.
In the same way that the Earth shivered when sunspots disappeared, the Earth warmed when sunspot activity became pronounced. The warm period about 1000 years ago known as the Medieval Warm Period — a time of bounty in which grapes grew in England and Greenland was colonized — also was a time of high sunspot activity, called the Medieval Maximum. Since 1900, Earth has experienced what astronomers call “the Modern Maximum” — the 20th century has again been a time of high sunspot activity.
But the 1900s are gone, along with the high temperatures that accompanied them. The last 10 years have seen no increase in temperatures — they reached a plateau and then remained there — and the last year saw a precipitous decline. How much lower and for how long the temperatures will fall, if at all, no one yet knows — the science is far from settled on what drives climate.
But many are watching the sun for answers, and for good reason. Several renowned scientists have been predicting for some time that the world could enter a period of cooling right around now, with consequences that could be dire. “The next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do,” believes Dr. Chapman. “There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the U.S. and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.”
We are now at the beginning of Solar Cycle 24, so named because it is the 24th consecutive cycle that astronomers have listed, starting with the first cycle that began in March, 1755, and ended in June, 1766. Each cycle lasts an average of approximately 11 years; each is marked by sunspots that first erupt in the mid latitudes of the sun, and then, over the course of the 11 years, erupt progressively toward the sun’s equator; each is marked by a change in the polarity of the sun’s hemispheres; each changes the temperature on Earth in ways that humans don’t fully understand, but cannot in all honesty deny.

[aumbrellaforainydays]

Originally Posted by FDK

Come to think of it, it might be good to refocus our beef industry over to raising Buffalo (nothing against your pimp assed ride aumbrella ) I think they're more cold hardy creatures. Of course all this only applies if we do indeed slip into a deep freeze. Thou even for now, the indus-terrerium would make interesting use of currently existing vacant warehouse space.

good ideas. i believe we have to stop cattle, chicken, sheep, pig concentration camps... err "feedlots." its a WASTE of Solar energy. all that land, all those grains, all that fuel and water to grow one of those things in a feedlot is the opitomy of post-modern capitalist excess.
when you hear "concentrated feeding operation" do you normally picture a pleasant green summer meadow with happy cows chewing contently while birds sing and insects hum around them?
no what comes to mind is an offshoot of industrialism's non-feeling, its uncare, its total disregard for life spun off on animals just because they arent human.

okay now i'm offtopic, but maybe the CO2 were producing might stem the next Cool Period. it wont be a medieval cool period. what age are we in? Internet, Nuclear, Global, Nano? i forget...

so is the next cycle on the sun starting around 2012 supposed to create more sun spots or more sun flares? if more sun spots, earth gets cooler then 2012-2062 will be a mini ice age?

[Hippie3]

the next solar cycle doesn't start in 2012,
that's when it's supposed to be at PEAK of cycle-
the cycle has already begun recently
as a few spots with reversed polarity have been spotted.
problem is
now well over two years into the cycle
there are not nearly enough spots as there should be,
and IF that keeps going
the earth might cool off.
on the other hand,
if the number of spots starts increasing soon
then everything is 'normal',
for now.

[FDK]

so is the next cycle on the sun starting around 2012 supposed to create more sun spots or more sun flares? if more sun spots, earth gets cooler then 2012-2062 will be a mini ice age?

Actually, if there are little or no sunspots then the earth cools. Which makes sense as our atmosphere is being bombarded by much less charged particles during these periods, thereby reducing the heat generated from the reaction of the particles in our atmosphere. (Speculative on if thats what causes a percentage of our derived thermal energy from the Sun, but as it has been proven that Energy can not be created nor destroyed and that these particles are "absorbed" by our atmosphere, then it stands to reason that their energy is being changed into thermal energy . Thou I'd have to guess it's more due to interaction with the earths magnetic field than it is with our gaseous atmosphere)

This of course brings to (my) mind some very interesting possibilities for the designers of supercolliders,,, If the Sun stops sending us these charged particles, why not make our own fueled by nuclear energy? (There goes my inner-mad-scientist again.)


But thats the general theory, but what I'm leaning towards personally is accepting the fact that it seems Science is still in it's infancy, barely a stones throw from the Alchemists of old in the grand scheme of things and as such, these cyllic events we observe and theorise on in nature and the universe are only but a few degrees of the full circle. It could be cycle 24, it could be cycle 2304 which inevitably leads us into the next deep freeze, we can only guess, ponder and theorise as to the "if" and when it will eventually repeat.

[prism1234]

Originally Posted by HUMBLE STUDENT

sorry my nose is so far up your ass prism1234 but this post hits the nail square on top of the head also the post you made before this is really weel thought out and typed. when ever I try to share any wisdom I might have on a subject witch gets me goin my rage usually gets most of the air time any ways very nice posts!

Glad someone likes to read my off topic rants!

Sorry hip

[Hippie3]

who doesn't like flattery eh,
esp. if it sounds sincere.

[Santiago]

I'm really confused. Didn't Roc post an article about a month ago that said that we are already experiencing large-scale solar activity in this cycle? Let me see if I can't find the thread...

Okay, so it was actually TVCasualty, and it seems like it was mostly just everybody speculating.

[FDK]

It was and we were, based on predictions from NASA and other sources from 06' or prior IIR.

This is basicly them saying, "Ummm, we forgot to carry the 1,,, Sorry."

I'd just love to watch the look on Al Gores face when he gets this news.

[Hippie3]

Originally Posted by Santiago

I'm really confused. Didn't Roc post an article about a month ago that said that we are already experiencing large-scale solar activity in this cycle? Let me see if I can't find the thread...
Okay, so it was actually TVCasualty, and it seems like it was mostly just everybody speculating.

http://forums.mycotopia.net/resist-r...i-doing-2.html (The Reality of what the FBI is doing.)
what a difference 6 months make.
but in truth
we'd need another year or even two years
of no / damn few sunspots
to really have any reason for alarm,
we are just coming out of a solar cycle minimum, after-all.
presumably soon more sunspots
will start popping up in abundance
to re-assure us that
all is well.

[prism1234]

Originally Posted by Hippie3

who doesn't like flattery eh,
esp. if it sounds sincere.