Apparantly the weather is about to turn 'game of thrones' ...

[AussieTrooper]

Interesting (mis)use of a hydrogen alpha image for comparison there, amongst a discussion on sunspot levels during the approaching solar minimum. The usual dash of tabloid sensationalism has been thrown in.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/technology/science/the-sun-has-gone-blank-twice-this-month-this-is-what-it-means/news-story/d775ecf894ab68415ed0108ced31a4e2

[The_bluester]

I had a little trouble peering through the sensationalism. Talk about take a simple statement and knead and stretch it to fill the room. Take one person saying "Looks like we are headed for the solar minimum" add a dash of inference that another has said "We will all freeze for decades"

Having skimmed the linked Zharkhova paper I cant read into it that we will all freeze for a couple of decades, perhaps they thought that some people might look at it, have their eyes glaze over at all the technical jargon and trust the Herald Sun's statement based on TL/DR, or better still not click the link at all. Without having time to really soak myself in it it looks to me that it is examining the relationship between sun spots and particular magnetic phenomena in the sun.

All I read into the "article" is that now would not be the time to buy a solar scope as it is going to be a comparatively dull target for a while.

[sharptrack2]

If you accept the concept as true, we might be able to take a little bit of solace in that fact that global warming would be offset for a short time. :question::whistle:

[The_bluester]

True enough, though I had difficulty seeing through my "Rupert against climate science" filter to even read to the end.

[Shiraz]

what utter cra*p - regurgitated again and again and ...

The referenced paper was published in 2012 and deals with magnetic activity on the sun - not climate. The (corrupted) interpretation has been put out as news for the third time (at least) because the news organisation in question desperately wants to publish something - anything - that could even remotely be an alternative to what is actually happening.

I have no idea what planet these people think we all live on.

[The_bluester]

Argh, you made me go back and read it again. It still just reads like sensationalized rubbish, only worse cause now I have read it twice.

Would love to see where the quote of "“I am absolutely confident in our research,” Prof Zharkova said."" is from, if it is actually in context of the linked paper at all or if (More likely) they just made it up themselves, just like the conclusions drawn by the HS.

I was blissfully unaware that it was not just complete rubbish, but twice recycled rubbish.

[AussieTrooper]

The HS are great aren't they!

I'm still waiting for the headline that 'the sun will expand and destroy the earth', with them hiding the fact that this is billions of years away in some poorly referenced link.

[The_bluester]

Now knowing my luck it will pop up in my Facebook feed too and I will end up having to explain what kind of rubbish it is to people who will believe everything that it says.

[pgc hunter]

The most infuriating thing is that these people get PAID to spruik this claptrap,

rofl at the comparison image of the sun, one in HA and the other visible light. The vis light image isn't even credited. Legit.....

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

[AussieTrooper]

That was my favourite. I mean, how else are you going to misrepresent a situation in order to sensationalise it if you actually portray easily available information correctly?

[Nikolas]

http://phys.org/news/2015-07-mini-ice-age-hoopla-giant.html
for persepctive

[Paul Haese]

The idea that the sun may be going into another Maunder minimum and yet be another longer term cycle which contains the smaller cycles is nothing new. The sunspot numbers of the last 50 years have been steadily getting lower and lower. This is backed up by the gauss (magnetic strength) of sunspots is dropping each cycle since. It has been suggested that once the gauss drops below 1500 the Sun will not be able to form sunspots. And; hence we get a Maunder minimum. Further evidence shows that the meridional flow (http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/dynamo.shtml)has changed and slowed enough to prevent the next cycle or the one after from occurring. Its all yet to be seen what the effects will be and very hard to predict with our current understanding of how the Sun actually works.

Another competing theory though is that the Sun's next cycle is going to be similar to the cycle at the start of the 20th century (http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif). It will be weak but then the following cycle will get stronger and the one after that stronger and so on and so on until the cycle returns back. Again time will tell.

However, I am sure I read recently on Space Weather that the association with the lack of any sunspot cycle during the Maunder minimum and colder than normal temperatures experienced in Europe during that time is probably purely coincidence and probably attributed to other factors like a massive volcanic eruption (I cannot remember where the article said).

It remains to be seen what effects on climate any such minimum will have. Most likely not any thing like that being suggested in the article. I remain firmly fascinated by how the entire system works on this planet and like many still trying to have a rudimentary understanding of all the elements involved.

[AussieTrooper]

Paul, that would be the Mt Rinjanin eruption of 1258.
But as you say, something the HS article fails to mention is that there is no consensus that the solar minimum is anything other than a co-incidence to the lower temperatures.

[The_bluester]

And unfortunately there is a portion of the readership who will take those confident statements and put "Maunder minimum causes mini ice age and we are headed for another" up alongside "Super moon causes flooding, earthquakes and volcanic eruptopns"

Seriously, the only way I could get that one to go away on another forum a couple of years ago was to allow the "Super" moon to come and go and for us to fail to "all be rooned" Even then some of them popped up again with the next one.

[andyc]

Speaking from a climate science perspective, it's not really news - Paul's summary of the solar side is excellent, but for those who like snowy winters or cold temperatures, don't get your hopes up! The climate forcing of solar variation is quite small - it's just about enough to create variations in a stable climate, and provides variations on top of our long slow Milankovitch cooling from the Holocene Optimum, but it's a small change compared to the CO2 forcing of industrialisation over the past century or so. See Feulner and Rahmstorf 2010 for a full paper on the exact subject! After we've set monthly global temperature records just about every month for the past year, you'd think people would realise it's not cooling. But I don't suppose News Corp journalists would be interested in evidence...

[rally]

Paul,

The reason the sunspot numbers have been "dropping" over the last 50 years is because roughly 60 years ago we had the the highest recorded annual peak since 1700 !
So, yes I guess its all downhill since then !
The relevance of it returning to "normal" is what ? - That its "Normal" or that its "Dropping" ?

But if you compared the last 50 years with what occurred 100 years ago you could then say that we now have roughly double the sunspots from that time !
Obviously man induced Global Warming - Im joking of course

This is obviously cherry picking the data and drawing any conclusions like these is meaningless misinformation.

If you look at the long term annual sunspot data you can see the cycles and see that the last 50 years is pretty ordinary and represents little variation to what has happened before (in fact quite similar to a similar period around 200 years ago) - what we can see is there is quite a lot of variation over time that probably indicates there is more going on inside the sun and given there is only a record of not quite 30 cycles since 1700 - we simply dont have a lot of data to truly analyse the internal cyclic nature of all that is going on inside the Sun.

jpg attached of chart showing annual sunspots since 1700
Graph X axis at ) actually represents 1700.
Data from reliable source - http://sidc.oma.be/silso/datafiles
Picture tells a 1000 words here - everyone can draw their own conclusions.

Rally

[rustigsmed]

And still the weather may go "game of thrones" who knows? Not me.
I don't pretend to be the all seer for earth's weather, so people what is the solution to the problem? I'd rather hear about treating issue rather than being happy about saying I told you so.

[The_bluester]

If you mean "The problem" as in mankind induced climate change, I will say that I am in the camp that does concludes that it exists. I am also in the camp that concludes that whatever is going to happen as a result is highly likely to happen unabated as collectively as a species we value "The economy" more than the world that sustains it.

The lack of sunspots and any climate effects which may come from that, hard to see that is a "Problem"to overcome. Should it prove to be the case that we are heading for a "Maunder" minimum and that it really does result in a mini ice age, hopefully that will result in us as a species for starters finding ways to waste less energy keeping ourselves warm.

No longer seeing a half million dollar, 30+ square double story house as "First home" territory would be a good start, I don't care how "Efficient" you make it, that is a lot of volume to heat and cool and the amazing size of the air conditioners they install on the display homes to keep them comfortable while they try to sell them to first home buyers says it all about how profligate we are with energy.

[Paul Haese]

Rally,

you are suggesting I am cherry picking and I am doing nothing of the sort. You seem to have miss read my post and decided I was saying the data from the last 50 years is definitive and that is not what I was saying. The observations of the Sun are more accurate for the last 50 years but the base line is not long enough to make any declarations. Of course looking at the long term can give a clearer picture but again not definitive. Many solar physicists think the idea that there are cycles within cycles as being a reality and that is what I was suggesting in the second paragraph. It's worth looking at some of the links to papers on the NASA site regarding meridional flow and gauss strength of sunspot numbers. The speculation amongst the scientists suggests there maybe one further cycle before a minimum starts or other scientists speculate this is just the start of another 100 year cycle. I highlighted the butterfly diagram to show a comparison between the 1906 maximum and the cycle 24, they have a similar appearance and hence this may be right. This might suggest that there is just another larger cycle starting. The sunspot numbers are the only long term data we have but without the space observatory data it is again limited to telling us as to what is going on within the Sun.

Sunspot numbers are one thing but only in the last 60 or so years have we had better observational tools. Space observatories are opening up better understandings of what lies beneath the solar surface and deep within the Sun. Like I said, there is still much to be learnt to understand what is going on. As pointed out the correlation between the Maunder Minimum and the mini ice age has been disputed with more probably causes.

[Shiraz]

As I see it, the problem raised by this thread is that a significant part of the media is presenting a heavily biased/corrupting view of the topic for it's own ends - in order to sell newspapers etc. They have not a skerrick of interest in the quality of the planet that our grandchildren will live on - everything is driven by this year's bottom line and everything else can get stuffed.

Don't know what can be done about that - no polly would dare take them on and the self regulation process is not working well. Maybe the best bet is that we all give stronger support to the media outlets that still report the facts and try to set the record straight where we can.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2012/09/24/the-murdoch-paradox-bias-in-climate-reporting/
http://theconversation.com/big-australian-media-reject-climate-science-19727

[glend]

Gee there is some serious stuff in this thread, and i thought it was about the fake Game of Thrones winters. Having spend many winters in Alberta Canada i don't mind a bit of warming. The real winters there are still just as cold, but yes summers may be a bit warmer than when i was young, but i didn't really take notice then. It happens so slowly that we adapt. Sure maybe more methane is released from frozen tundra, and ice melts, but this has all happened before, just like the sun spot cycle. We are still, thankfully, fairly insignificant in terms of what happens to the planet imho. Climate cycles, orbital tilt, sun cyckes, ice ages (yes they will occur again), are all part of living on planet, at least its not boring - like Mars. Mankind will adapt, or is that the Borg?

[andyc]

Sadly, not quite, Glen. I wish we were insignificant! Attached are views of the change in temperature between a base period of 1951-1980 and the past decade, 2005-2015, you can see that January to March (northern winter) has warmed much more rapidly than July to Sept, including in Canada. You might be interested to see it, the source from NASA is here (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/). This is exactly as expected. The rate of change is estimated to be among the fastest rate in at least the past 65 million years, and is getting on for an order of magnitude faster than the end of the last glaciation (that was 5C in 5,000 years, we've done 1C in 100 years). That, in geological/ecological contexts, is really very fast indeed and threatens all sorts of adaptation. Getting all serious, climate doesn't 'just change' (it's not a magical, Westeros world), it changes due to a change in forcing, and we know the primary radiative forcings (http://www.realclimate.org/images/ipcc_rad_forc_ar5.jpg) on global climate and their size. The people that told you all about these past changes are the same ones telling you about the present changes. Ice ages are history until we stop emitting then draw down greenhouse gases - the energy balance is all wrong now to trigger them with Milankovitch forcing. They're "off the table", so to speak.

But hey, the last episode of Game of Thrones was quite something :eyepop:

[AussieTrooper]

Quiet you! I'm only halfway through season two.
SWMBO is overseas for two weeks, so I actually get a chance to watch it now.

[rally]

Paul,

Not at all.
My post was all about people (usually the media) taking a carefully selected segment of contiguous data out of context and making a statement about just that piece of data without reference to the rest of the data.
ie use an isolated piece of data (fact) to draw a non factual but seemingly obvious conclusion in isolation.
For people who don't know or don't bother to look any further they are convinced by this - because after all its based on "Fact" - trouble is of course its not all the facts and its definitely not the whole story.
It then goes on and becomes a factoid.

I then deliberately extracted another potential factoid from another segment of the same data in order to draw an erronous and stupid conclusion to that data in order to highlight this very problem and I referred to that as "This is obviously cherry picking the data . . . "

Of course the real question is - Is it Game of Thrones weather ?
I guess in 200 years we will have a much better idea and in 20,000 years we might actually know !
The planet has regular Ice Ages and Global Warmings - the last Ice Age thaw was just over 10,000 years ago, so rapid global temperature change is nothing new - its more a Who Dunnit question.

Rally