What On Earth Is Happening On The Sun?
-The Maunder Minimum Returns-
[Or Is This Just The 'Silly' Season?]
Have you noticed how cold it is in Wisconsin and Nebraska? Indeed have you checked how warm it is in Great Britain for this time of year? Or indeed the unusual climatic variations right across Europe in January-which are significantly at variation with previous years for the month of January? If you have, and like myself, you are interested in the political debate about global warming and global freezing [and to be quite honest, I am very confused and really don't know which of the scientific groups to believe], you might however want to check out an interesting technical and scientific article below about the sun's activity. For those of you too busy to check it out, the essence of the article is a quote from one of the world's most respected solar physicists, Richard Harrison, Head of Space Physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, who told the BBC that in his 30 years as a physicist, he has seen nothing like it. I must first say that even though this area is way way way outside my Ballpark (!)...but..(!)....on 15th December last year, I contacted one of the world's renowned experts in solar and space 'weather', Jan Alvestad, [ http://www.spaceweather.com.au/ ] to ask if, during a very specific period (in hours and minutes) between 14th-15th December, any unusual solar occurrences had transpired. His answer was negative and I apologized profusely for interrupting his observations. As I am not a professional in this matter and so as to the avoid ridicule and laughter of experts, I quietly but put my own observations to file and closed the case in the firm belief that I was hopelessly in error of an unusual pattern of climatic shift associated with a very specific set of my [imagined] solar events which may have 'peaked' on 'silence' in a given time frame I had [imagined I had] noted. Having just read an article posted by News Network Limited on 19th January, 2014 at 1:36AM [http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/science/scientists-baffled-as-sun-activity-falls-to-century-low/story-fnjwlbuh-1226805090679] someone with more scientific expertize [and journalistic courage!] has beaten me to it and boldly said that there is indeed unusual activity taking place on the sun and that there could be profound climatic implications resulting. The article is entitled 'Scientists baffled as Sun activity falls to century low'. The point I want to make here is that scientists should not be baffled. The arrogance in thinking that we [humans] understand the cycle of an entity which had been in existence roughly 4.6 billion years - when we just understand the workings of the female [human] menstrual cycle, is itself beyond belief. I don't know if there is something happening in the Sun's cycle which is a repeat of a pattern [Maunder cycle] which we can relate to from the first time of our own primitive empirical observations, or is part of a cycle which repeats every 50000 or 50 or 500 million years. What I do know is that politicians [and private institutes] had better release more funds to further observe such events because of their direct impact on our way of life over a relatively short timescale between observation and effect.
© Patrick Emek
Additional Reference [2014/01/28]:Sun Scientists Debate Whether Solar Lull Could Trigger Another 'Little Ice Age' -The Huffington Post- By Macrina Cooper-White http://www.spaceweather.com.au/tag/jan-alvestad/
http://www.spaceweather.com.au/
http://www.startribune.com/local/238780081.html
http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/01/05/blaze-turns-historic-nebraska-opera-house-into-icy-winter-wonder/
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/rare-snows-in-north-africa/61172
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2523259/Historic-snow-fall-turns-Holy-Land-scenes-Christmas-cards.html [13th December,2013]
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/snow-in-cairo-for-first-time-in-over-100-years.html
[12/13/2013]