Is it time to pollute like its 1999. world heads towards ice age.

armchair_warrior

I say hell yeah, if the sun spot thing is true. Time for me to up my carbon foot print.

Just days after the earth came close to being struck by a solar flare, some scientists are saying the sun will actually be soon entering a relatively inactive phase, leading to a drop in sunspot activity. Counterintuitively, however, this could potentially be just as troublesome for the planet.

Recent data collected from different groups of researchers suggests the sun may soon enter a particularly "quiet" period after the current active phase is finished, due to peak in 2013. Scientists have recorded both a decline in the magnitude of sunspots—cooler areas of the sun's surface that are easily visible from earth—and a delay in the "rush" of chunks of the sun's magnetic field toward the poles, which usually signals the beginning of a solar cycle (in the current one, they were late).

On top of that, jetstreams of solar material almost always mark the start of the solar cycle, and they have yet to occur.

"It's like a leading indicator in the stock market," says Dean Pesnell, a project scientist with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. "We have leading indicators for solar activity as well. These zonal flows are one of those leading indicators that tells us the timing of the solar cycle. That leading indicator has been expected to show up for several years, and it still has not appeared."

Reductions in sunspot activity have correlated with particularly cool periods in earth's history, the most notable being the "Maunder Minimum," a 70-year span that began in 1645 when average temperatures in northern Europe and North America went down by a few degrees. The period is sometimes referred to as the Little Ice Age.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387098,00.asp

the collection next door

Not so fast please! Sunspot Drop Won’t Cause Global Cooling

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/solar-minimum-climate/

News that solar activity might fizzle for a few decades has prompted talk of a new “Little Ice Age,” even a quick fix for global warming. But that’s just not going to happen.

The cooling impact of the last prolonged solar lull “was probably only a couple tenths of a degree Celsius,” said climatologist Michael Mann of Penn State University. “It’s a tiny blip on the radar screen if you’re looking at the driving factors behind climate change.”

armchair_warrior

/cancels his pet adoption papers.

armchair_warrior

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/05/global_warming_on_pause_but_stop_burning_coal_anyway/

The refusal of the global temperatures to rise as predicted has caused much angst among academics. "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't," wrote one in 2009. Either the instruments were wrong, or the heat energy had gone missing somewhere.

Now a team of academics, after tweaking a statistical model to include sulphur emissions, suggest that coal power stations may be to blame for a lack of global warming since 1998. The IPCC's 2007 assessment but acknowledged the negative radiative forcing (aka, cooling effect) of both natural aerosols from volcanoes and manmade aerosols, but admitted the level of scientific understanding was low.

A team of two geographers and two economists headed by Professor Robert Kaufmann at the Department of Geography in Boston publish their results in a new paper Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008 [PDF], which includes manmade emissions of sulphur and simulates the flat temperatures since 1998. Kaufmann has a PhD in energy management policy. In this paper, he and his colleagues revisit "a simplified model" from 2006 (PDF) containing statistically estimated equations for three variables: global surface temperature, CO2 and CH4. The actual temperature differences described in the new paper are tiny – with variations from model predictions of 0.1°C.

"Results indicate that net anthropogenic forcing rises slower than previous decades because the cooling effects of sulfur emissions grow in tandem with the warming effects greenhouse gas concentrations. This slow-down, along with declining solar insolation and a change from El Nino to La Nina conditions, enables the model to simulate the lack of warming after 1998," the team explains.

The model estimates a 0.06W/m2 increase in cooling since 2002. Declining sulphur emissions between 1990 and 2002 – caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the switch to gas – had a warming effect of 0.19W/m2.

whynot_31

People who like to be afraid are always going to find something to fear.

As a result, I think it you should suggest a replacement fear whenever you tell people not to be afraid of something.

(please see if you can make them fear chocolate; this would leave more chocolate for me)

boygabriel

http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2011/07/new-paper-why-the-planet-did-not-warm-from-1998-to-2008/