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The Sun is Quieter than Normal, but Don't Panic

posted by mrpg on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the SPF50 dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The sun is quiet ... very quiet.

In February, for the first time since August 2008, the sun went an entire month without any sunspots.

Sunspots are cooler regions of the sun. How many appear on the sun's surface depends on what cycle the sun is in. Every 11 years our star goes through a maximum, followed by a minimum (the entire magnetic cycle of the sun, when the poles flip, is 22 years).

Over the past three decades, the sun has been consistently dropping in activity. Maximum has been quieter than is typical; minimum has been particularly quiet. And this has caused some to make the false assumption that, as a result, Earth is going to cool.

It all stems from an incident that took place between 1645 and 1715, called the Maunder Minimum, where sunspots all but disappeared. This coincided with the "Little Ice Age" that stretched from 1500 to 1850 in the northern hemisphere. In England, the Thames River froze over; Viking settlers abandoned Greenland.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/solar-activity-1.5049337

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  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @10:02AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @10:02AM (#813645)

    This guy's predictions for solar cycle 24 back in 2009 were too high and needed to be constantly adjusted downwards: http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6418 [climaterealists.com]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @11:32AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @11:32AM (#813674)

    Why does cycle 23 peak at around 120 sunspots in those old plots while in current ones I see it closer to ~160:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle#/media/File%3ASolar_Cycle_Prediction.gif [wikipedia.org]
    http://www.sidc.be/silso/monthlyssnplot [www.sidc.be]

    Are they revising all the old sunspot data now too?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @11:41AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @11:41AM (#813679)

      Why does cycle 23 peak at around 120 sunspots in those old plots while in current ones I see it closer to ~160:

      ...

      Are they revising all the old sunspot data now too?

      Trump's a very hard to please guy.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @11:50AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @11:50AM (#813682)

        Yep, the past data was "homogenized/corrected" to support the global warning: https://astronomynow.com/2015/08/08/corrected-sunspot-history-suggests-climate-change-not-due-to-natural-solar-trends/ [astronomynow.com]

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @11:55AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @11:55AM (#813683)

          New conventional scale: The most prominent change in the Sunspot Number values is the choice of a new reference observer, A.Wolfer (pilot observer from 1876 to 1928) instead of R. Wolf himself. This means dropping the conventional 0.6 Zürich scale factor, thus raising the scale of the entire Sunspot Number time series to the level of modern sunspot counts. The 0.6 factor has always led to some confusion and now has lost its sense more than 130 years after Wolf's observations. This change is equivalent to a change of unit and thus raises the scale of the entire sunspot number time series by a factor 1/0.6, which may significantly affect software using the sunspot number as input. This scale change, when combined with the recalibration, leads to a net increase of about 45% (correction variable with time) of the most recent part of the series, after 1947.

          http://sidc.be/silso/newdataset [sidc.be]