sunspots (Page 2)

Alas, it’s us humans – People are in denial about climate change (and other things as well), but no matter what they say, scientists insist that sunspots and solar cycles are not the cause of current global warming.

The idea that sunspot activity is the cause of global warming just isn’t true. The problem started with studies published in 1991 and 1998 that claimed to establish a link between global temperatures and solar activity. However, most scientists now believe that these studies are seriously flawed. When the errors in them were removed by researcher Peter Laut, the link between sunspots and global warming disappeared as well. While the sun plays a role in climate change, it is a very minor one.
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…rather than a hot one – For the past two years, the sun has undergone a phase of relative inactivity, meaning usual solar phenomena such as sun flares, sun spots, and solar eruptions have all but disappeared. “It’s a dead face,” researcher Saku Tsuneta says of the solar surface.

Tsuneta is with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and was one of the participants at the MSU conferenceThe good news is that without such intense solar activity disruptions to space technology and even our beloved gadgets here on earth have been minimal. While this provides some relief to those of us whose cell phones dropped calls at the tiniest solar flare, scientists are concerned that this means bigger things to come for Earth’s climate.
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Sunspots are returning, just as predicted. But they’re not acting as they were expected to. Is this a good thing for global warming?On January 24, a reverse polarity sunspot appeared in the sun’s northern hemisphere. Such a sunspot usually marks the beginning of a new solar max. But the new spot was followed by a period of solar silence?no sunspots until last week. But these aren’t spots of the type that should be associated with the new solar cycle. Instead, they’re of the type associated with cycle 23, the last one. So, what’s going on?
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We may be entering the largest solar cycle ever recorded. While the sun is not responsible for global warming?human emissions are behind that?sunspots CAN make things worse?just when we thought we might be getting a reprieve.

In BBC News, Dr. David Whitehouse reports on a drilling of ice cores in Greenland that reveals that the sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the last 1,000 years. While we can now view sunspots with satellite technology, humans have been looking at them through telescopes for almost 400 years. Between 1645 and 1715, sunspot activity was greatly reduced and this brought on what has come to be known as the “little ice age” in Europe.
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