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A Month Without Sunspots: February 2019

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 05 2019, @10:11AM   
from the have-to-wear-shades dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A MONTH WITHOUT SUNSPOTS: There are 28 days in February. This year, all 28 of them were spotless. The sun had no sunspots for the entire month of Feb. 2019.

The last time a full calendar month passed without a sunspot was August 2008. At the time, the sun was in the deepest Solar Minimum of the Space Age. Now a new Solar Minimum is in progress and it is shaping up to be similarly deep. So far this year, the sun has been blank 73% of the time--the same as 2008.

Solar Minimum is a normal part of the solar cycle. Every ~11 years, sunspot counts drop toward zero. Dark cores that produce solar flares and CMEs vanish from the solar disk, leaving the sun blank for long stretches of time. These minima have been coming and going with regularity since the sunspot cycle was discovered in 1859.

However, not all Solar Minima are alike. The last one in 2008-2009 surprised observers with its depth and side-effects. Sunspot counts dropped to a 100-year low; the sun dimmed by 0.1%; Earth's upper atmosphere collapsed, allowing space junk to accumulate; the pressure of the solar wind flagged while cosmic rays (normally repelled by solar wind) surged to Space Age highs. All these things are happening again.

http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=01&month=03&year=2019

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Original Submission

• Re:Obvious cause Re:Obvious cause (Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday March 05 2019, @07:28PM (1 child)

  by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday March 05 2019, @07:28PM (#810382) Journal

  Meanwhile, Australia is literally on fire and setting heat record after heat record.

  2018-19 was Australia’s hottest summer on record, with a warm autumn likely too [theconversation.com]

  If you deniers want to bring anecdotes to this science fight I can find a crap-ton more of them than you can.

  Parent

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• Re:Obvious cause (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @08:42PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @08:42PM (#810414)

  The hubris of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology is on full display with its most recent remodelling of the historic temperature record for Darwin. The Bureau has further dramatically increased the rate of global warming at Darwin by further artificially lowering historic temperatures.

  This begins by shortening the historical temperature record so that it begins just after the very hot years of the Federation drought. Then by changing the daily values: that is changing the observed measured temperatures to something else.

  For example, on 1st January 1910 the maximum temperature recorded at the Darwin post office was 34.2 degrees Celsius.

  A few years ago, the Bureau changed this to 33.8 degrees Celsius, cooling the recorded temperature by 0.4 degrees. In its most recent re-revision of Darwin’s climate history the temperature on this day has been further reduced, and is now just 32.8.

  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/22/changes-to-darwins-climate-history-are-not-logical/ [wattsupwiththat.com]

  Parent