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Longest recorded streak of sunspot inactivity broken

The Sun reminding us of how irregular it really is

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 2nd, 2008 at 01:58 PM  | 

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Via Slashdot comes the report that The Sun has broken a 95 year old record. Quoting the Daily Tech:

Spotless Sun

The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.

The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots — is an influencing factor for climate on earth.

Read the whole thing to get a bonus story of the scientists who predicted this, but were prevented from publishing their theory’s predictions by the peer review process, but to me the important story here is the sunspot cycle.

Scientists have been watching the Sun and recording sunspots for about 400 years. For the first 30 years of measurements, the Sun was as active as it normally is, but abruptly, activity died way down. For the whole second half of the 17th century there were hardly any sunspots recorded, a period known as the Maunder minimum. Eventually activity did pick back up, getting back to what appears to be a ‘normal’ pattern by about 1725.

The Sun’s magnetism appears to run on cycles within cycles within cycles. Every 10 years or so there is a very short period cycle, with spots going high and low, high and low. Right now we are at the trough of one of those, with the Sun having zeroed out in fact. However the highs and lows aren’t the same. Sometimes they go higher, as they have for the period of about 1940-1990. Sometimes they go lower, too, as they did during the Dalton Minimum of about 1790-1820. And apparently, as we saw during the Maunder Minimum, sometimes the sun almost shuts down its magnetic activity completely.

Is the Sun’s magnetism about to shut down again, threatening us with the kinds of cold winters that battered the Pilgrims? Is it coincidental that as recorded temperatures have gone up, solar activity has also risen? Possibly. Only time will tell if the theories regarding Solar radiation and cloud formation will bear fruit.

But until we know, we must keep watching, and avoid doing anything rash. If a new mini ice age approached, it may yet turn out that dumping carbon dioxide into the air and getting a greenhouse effect may be the only thing that can prevent widespread famine.

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  • wennejunk

    Would. drive. the. envirofascists. absolutely. insane.

    Funny you should mention dumping carbon dioxide to heat things up.

    Its a long read, but here’s a story (free online) by SF writers Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn.

    The plotline deals with a modern ice (IIRC, ironically brought on by greenie anti carbon efforts).

    At various points in the story, you run into different enclaves that are warmer than the surrounding environs due to -gasp- their burning of wood/coal/abandoned buildings and creating a local greenhouse effect.

    A fun read by some classic SF writers.

  • kyle8

    global warming people the way they wanted to do to us?

  • Mord

    I have read every single book they have written together. Lucifer’s Hammer is my personal favorite.

  • General_Confusion

    The envirofascists will simply rework their model to fit the facts on the ground to prove yet again that they were right?um?despite what they said previously would now be proven wrong.

    Luckily for them they have the MSM approved History Erase button which allows them the contradict themselves without fear of the their previous predictions being brought up and their accuracy being questioned.

  • tcgeol

    Its amazing to think that the envirowackos believe that we understand every detail of this wondrous universe.

  • CJB68

       I believe there is supposed to be a 300-year cycle wherein warmer periods alternate with cooler ones.  One of those was referred to as the “Little Ice Age”, at around the time of the Maunder minimum that you mentioned.  It actually began in some point during the 14th Century and was marked by the growth of glaciers in the Alps which buried villages previously built on the mountainsides and increasingly servere winters which affected the growing season and led to the decline in agriculture.  Europe was basically beginning to starve after a period of population growth during the later Middle Ages when the Black Plague hit.

       The Little Ice Age more or less ended at some point in the 18th Century, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there were exceptionally cold winters which set in on occasion since then.  One such event could be traced to volcanic ash clouds from the Tambora eruption which took place in eastern Indonesia in the early 19th Century, after which snow was reported in New England well into June (“Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death!”).  More recently, there have been record cold spells in continental Europe which clashes with the scenarios painted by those advocates of the Global Warming theory.  And I recall a similar cold spell affecting the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States on two separate occasions within my lifetime: once during my later childhood years (late 1970s, during which the MSM was touting the Next Ice Age) and again during the early 1990s (some evenings even dipping past zero degrees Farenheit!).

       Just based on my own experience, there’s a 15- to 20-year cycle in which the weather totters back and forth between mild winters (little or no snow; lots of cold rain) and frigid winters (ice storms and/or blizzard-like conditions punctuating long cold snaps).  The mid-Atlantic is due for one, if the relatively mild summer (which hasn’t been the long scorcher that I’ve experienced lately) is an indication.  I better invest in long underwear and thermal socks…

  • wennejunk

    and he worked in the Ministry of Truth, altering history to conform with the current approved version of the truth.

  • wennejunk

    I loved Lucifer’s Hammer as an epic world disaster novel.

    I also loved Inferno as perhaps their most creative novel. Its a bit satirical, much as Fallen Angels is, but absolutely a delight.

    Both are still on my bookshelf waiting for the next readthru.