The “Cooling Sun” Crock is as reliable and perennial as the Grass, or whatever they’re smoking in Denierville these days. Readers here, of course, always get the right dope.
Short take: The sun has cycles, they can affect climate on earth, but they are, in the big scheme of things, a rounding error compared to the big picture greenhouse warming.
New study by Dan Lubin at Scripps is being hyped by the usual suspects, so here’s the press release from UC San Diego, just so you’ll have the original story.
Dan appears in the video above, (I interviewed him during a similar blip in 2011) – so I think I’m clear on what he thinks about this topic.
I’m shooting an email nevertheless to see if he wants to update us. Stay tuned.
University of California San Diego:
The Sun might emit less radiation by mid-century, giving planet Earth a chance to warm a bit more slowly but not halt the trend of human-induced climate change.
The cooldown would be the result of what scientists call a grand minimum, a periodic event during which the Sun’s magnetism diminishes, sunspots form infrequently, and less ultraviolet radiation makes it to the surface of the planet. Scientists believe that the event is triggered at irregular intervals by random fluctuations related to the Sun’s magnetic field.
Scientists have used reconstructions based on geological and historical data to attribute a cold period in Europe in the mid-17th Century to such an event, named the “Maunder Minimum.” Temperatures were low enough to freeze the Thames River on a regular basis and freeze the Baltic Sea to such an extent that a Swedish army was able to invade Denmark in 1658 on foot by marching across the sea ice.
A team of scientists led by research physicist Dan Lubin at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego has created for the first time an estimate of how much dimmer the Sun should be when the next minimum takes place.
Continue reading “Like Spring Follows Winter, Another “Cooling Sun” Crock Ariseth”
