Thursday, September 16, 2010

Your Global Warming Blogging

Not here, since I've been terribly busy traveling and everything. Kind of feel like I'm letting down the team.

But not to worry, DirtCrashr has the latest news, and it's a doozy. Scientists expect sunspots to entirely disappear in the next few years. The last time that happened, the world got colder than it had been since the last glaciation. Go read, because if this is true, things are going to get ugly:
The cold caused incredible crop-losses, and an estimated 75 million deaths worldwide by the Black Plague, a disease spread by a flea parasite (Got DDT anyone? No? Why?) that was benign in its native hot-temperature locale of Africa, but in Europe's cold climate the gut of the flea constricted and caused it insatiable hunger, because no matter the amount of blood ingested, it couldn't swallow it.
The only thing I'd add to DirtCrashr's excellent post is to point out that Nigel Calder explained why sunspots effect the climate. Actually, they don't, but fluxuations in the Sun's magnetic field do, and that effects both sunspots and our climate: Cosmic Rays stimulate cloud formation, which cool the planet. When the sun's magnetic field is more active, it's stronger, and reaches out further into the Solar System, inhibiting Cosmic Rays. Fewer rays, fewer clouds, warmer temperatures.

We're coming out of a period of energetic sunspot formation, which is directly correlated with stronger a solar magnetic field. Sunspots have been dropping for several years, which -surprise! - is precisely the time that we've seen the climate cool.

This is a very interesting hypothesis, because it's directly observable, and 100% subject to falsification: if sunspots go down and temperature goes up in the next 5 years, the hypothesis is wrong. If sunspots drop to zero (as forecast) and the planet continues to cool, that's evidence in favor. The next few years look to be interesting, climate-wise.

And colder. Glad I'm moving south, but I may take my snowblower ...

7 comments:

New Jovian Thunderbolt said...

Well, I hope the glacier doesn't get as far as DC, but I will appreciate the cooler summers.

bluesun said...

I guess I'm pretty much sunk up here in MT...

NotClauswitz said...

Join us in Hawaii!!

Dragon said...

News Flash!!!

OK...the White House is now pushing a new name for the *crisis* in Oslo...

First it was Global Warming.
Then it was Climate Change.
Now its...get this...

GLOBAL CLIMATE DISRUPTION

Yes, boys and girls...its now a term so vague and massively broad that *any* variation in their hockey stick crap is part of a global climatic disruption.

Meteorologists on the nightly news are now going to be called *disruptionologists*....

Wonder what lamebrained plan they're gonna come up with when the sunspot activity stops totally, and we get a mini-glacation? Maybe they'll make us all go outside and run on treadmills, in the hopes that creating body heat that will dissipate into the air will raise the temps a few hundreths of a degree...

Ritchie said...

I guess I'm a little confused-sunspot numbers seem to be swinging upward per www.spaceweather.com :

Sunspot number: 20
What is the sunspot number?
Updated 15 Sep 2010

Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 0 days
2010 total: 41 days (16%)
2009 total: 260 days (71%)
Since 2004: 809 days
Typical Solar Min: 486 days
explanation | more info
Updated 15 Sep 2010

Many solar related links are also provided at the bottom of this page.
However, having glaciers overrun D.C. would not be all bad. See "Fallen Angels", Larry Niven.

Lissa said...

Damn, Dragon beat me to it.

Paul, Dammit! said...

Somewhere, Earlich et al are dry washing their hands and blowing the dust of their stacks of National Geographics from the 70's.