sun – Page 11 – Behind The Black

Sunspots and the danger of crying wolf

June 28, 2011 11:54 am Robert Zimmerman

It’s that time of year again, buckos. Every June, like clockwork, stories and op-eds like these start to flood the media:

Washington Post: As the sun awakens, the power grid stands vulnerable.
New York Times: How’s the Weather?
Space.com: Earth Must Be Ready for Next Big Solar Storm.
PC Magazine: Massive Solar Flare Misses Earth, but Are We Ready for the Big One?
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: We could be due for a massive solar storm in 2011.

Not surprisingly, these stories always happen about the same time our federal bureaucracy puts together a one day June propaganda event called the Space Weather Enterprise Forum, designed to sell to journalists the idea that we are all gonna die if we don’t spend gazillions of dollars building satellites for tracking the sun’s behavior. Along with this conference come numerous press releases, written by the conference’s backers. Here for example is a quote from a press release emailed to me and many journalists:

Recent activity on the Sun, captured in stunning imagery from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and the resulting threat of significant radiation storms and radio blackouts here on Earth are vivid reminders of our need to better understand the science, improve our forecasts and warnings, and better prepare ourselves for severe space weather storms as the next solar maximum approaches.

The problem for these fear-mongers, however, is that shortly before their forum the scientists who actually study the sun held another press conference, where they laid out in exquisite detail the sun’s astonishing recent decline in activity, and how the next solar maximum will likely be the weakest in centuries and might very well be the last maximum we will see for decades to come.

In other words, the annual effort by government bureaucrats to drum up funding for more space weather facilities has collided head on with the facts.

That there are science journalists from so many major news organization so easily conned into buying this fear-mongering is pitiful enough. More significant, however, is the fact that this annual effort at crying wolf has not been very successful. For years Congress has not funded any new space weather satellites, and doesn’t appear ready to do so in the future, especially with the present budget crisis.
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The battle between global warming and the sun

June 20, 2011 3:59 pm Robert Zimmerman

The revelation last week that the sun is very likely about to go into a period of little or no sunspot activity has made a lot of global warming advocates, both scientists and journalists, very nervous. For years these climate activists have declared that the Earth’s climate is getting warmer, and that this warming trend was going to do us great harm. Putting aside whether these claims are based on fact (they are not), the possibility that the Earth might instead become cooler because of a dimming of the sun puts this political agenda under threat, and requires some form of immediate action to defuse that threat. See for example this short podcast (with full transcript) from Scientific American. The key quote:

A cooler sun might mean a drop in global average temperatures of at most 0.3 degree Celsius. But the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere today will add 0.6 degree Celsius to global average temperatures by the end of the century. And more, since greenhouse gas emissions show no signs of diminishing. So the slightly cooler sun won’t counteract a much hotter Earth.

In order to discredit the threat that solar variation poses to global warming, the journalist here acts to minimize any danger from a dimming sun. Unfortunately, he does so by extrapolating a result (warmer climates) based on a very weak foundation: an unproven theory and our very limited knowledge of the climate.
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Hadrian built his country estate with the buildings aligned with the sun

June 20, 2011 9:18 am Robert Zimmerman

The Roman emperor Hadrian built his country estate with the buildings aligned with the sun.

For centuries, scholars have thought that the more than 30 buildings at Hadrian’s palatial country estate were oriented more or less randomly. But De Franceschini says that during the summer solstice, blades of light pierce two of the villa’s buildings.

In one, the Roccabruna, light from the summer solstice enters through a wedge-shaped slot above the door and illuminates a niche on the opposite side of the interior (see image). And in a temple of the Accademia building, De Franceschini has found that sunlight passes through a series of doors during both the winter and summer solstices.