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A Summer Without Sunspots

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64 pointsolivermarks36 comments

The next solar cycle is predicted to be about half as strong as 24, possibly leading up to a grand solar minimum not seen since the Maunder minimum in 1645. Based on historical records as well as ice core and tree ring data, there will be a profound effect on climate if this turns out to be true.

NASA prediction: https://youtu.be/jP9_4uoEdKg

If you think global warming is no fun, you haven't seen what global cooling will do.

Maybe they'll get together and we humans will just stay nice and cozy.

Ocean acidification wants to have a word with you.

Just as long as there's ocean basification to cancel it out...

Yup, throw in a few spoonfuls of baking soda, just like a keeping the pH balanced in your hot tub. </s>

Perhaps you mean olivine? https://projectvesta.org/

/serious

That's awesome! I was being tongue-in-cheek but also hoping that something similar existed.

https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=448

Just found that site randomly looking for Solar minimum and global warming. The effect seems limited. Still I would be OK if we got some (temporary) 0.3° temperature reduction for "free". Or maybe, we would lose another decade of complacency...

At least 2019 was the summer where every temperature records were beaten in Europe, so if this should be associated with lower temperature, we are all gonna roast for the next solar maximum.

'Human Influence on Climate Change is Bigger than the Sun's' is a very bold confident statement on that 'skeptical science' climate alarmist site

I don't ask you to blindly believe what is written on that site, but if the sun activity had a great effect, since we are at the solar minimum, we should have experienced a colder year or summer according to that theory.

So I don't know where exactly you live but this was the hottest summer since 1880, and if I remember last winter it was quite hot in Australia as well. As a matter of fact, I don't remember any place where people complained because it was significantly colder.

Don't you think that fact alone should make you doubt the solar activity had any meaningful impact and will lead to another ice age ?

If we had no sun at all, I'm pretty sure we'd be an ice ball, save for volcanic activity. These impacts from solar activity take some time to develop, as I understand it. If we are in some sort of grand minimum, just wait a decade or so. If the Earth was highly reactive to these events (like breaking cold records everytime a minimum happens), I'm not sure we'd be here. The oceans store/release a lot of heat over the short term (years).

"40 Inches of Snow in Montana: ‘It’s a February Storm in September’" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/us/montana-snowstorm.html

This is not an isolated event. Parts of North America & Europe has had snow & hale in the Summer. Australia had an unusually cold winter. There's also historical precedence for these anomalous weather events.

Growing Degree Days compared between 2018-2019 has been falling in all of the US States except Alaska & Florida; over 20% in the northern states. http://iceagefarmer.com/gdd

At what point would APGW be falsifiable? How much summer/early-autumn/late-spring snow would it take?

That was due to a weakening of the jet stream which normally keeps arctic air further north. There is evidence (inconclusive AFAICT) that global warming is partly to blame for a weak jet stream last winter.

This is why the term "climate change" is more accurate than "global warming". Increased energy in the atmosphere has uneven effects. The overall effect is to warm the earth but due to second-order effects (changes in cloud cover, changes in precipitation), some places won't experience warming but will experience change.

First, the GDD tool shows that most of America's landmass has a reduction of Growing Degree Days. This is more than "some places" and it throws doubt on the Hockey Stick graph model. The 1930's were hotter than the recent warm period, even though there was less CO2.

Do the models you are referencing account for magnetic fields & Birkeland currents?

During Grand Solar Minimums, the Solar Background Magnetic Field & Magnetic Field strength of sunspots is reduced, weakening both the Heliosphere & Magnetosphere, both of which repel cosmic rays, which trigger clouds, earthquakes, & volcanic eruptions. See the work of Dr. Valentina Zharkova, Dr. Heinrich Svensmark, & others (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13429... ) for more details.

Earth is also going through a Geomagnetic excursion of the poles, which is geologically rare.

I've never seen a climate scientist say that every change in temperature is linked solely to the effects of CO2 & etc. Everyone recognizes there are multiple drivers of fluctuating climate (e.g. el nino/la nina, solar cycles, natural CO2 spikes from volcanos, etc, etc, etc).

To jump back a few steps, I'd think that APGW could be falsified at least three ways.

1) From a top-down perspective, if warming over years & decades consistently decouples from models, then clearly the models are wrong. It's invalid to expect the models to be accurate month-by-month, that's not the granularity they are built to explore.

2) From a bottom-up perspective, if someone can establish on a theoretical basis that additional carbon dioxide & methane do not have a baseline or secondary warming effect, then we'd need a new theory to explain observations

3) If we see the regular surprise emergence of unexpected climate effects to the point where our models are invalid. I can't come up with a good example. Something like "Ocean water gets dramatically lighter above XX degrees, which vastly reduces the absorbtion of sunlight"

> Australia had an unusually cold winter.

We had bushfires in the middle of winter. That is not a sign of a cool winter. It is a summer event, happening in winter. According to the Bureau of Meterology (BoM), the recent daily maximum during this past winter was 1.79 degrees Celsius warmer than average.

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/season/aus/summary.sht...

Except that global warming is so out of hand that the 0.3 degree cooling effect means absolutely nothing now. Back in the 1600s, there wasn't much in the ways of industrialization and pollution to warm the planet.

Maybe, but I always get a bit skeptical if people throw air pollution and global warming into the same bucket.

Can you point at the data you based your claim that global warming is so out of hand that the 0.3 degree cooling effect means absolutely nothing now on? I've been going over a lot (and I mean a lot) of data from many different sources. What I mostly noticed is that the temperature has been going up steadily from the early 1900s to around the mid '40s, after which it went down again until the mid '70s, after which it went up again. The current warm period seems to resemble both the Roman warm period (~350BCE-450CE) as well as the Viking age/Medieval climate anomaly, two relatively warm periods in recent history. The Roman warm period was followed by the Dark ages cold period (~450-850CE), the Viking age/Medieval climate anomaly by the Little Ice Age (~1350-1850CE). Judging by previous data it is likely that the current warm period will also be followed by a cold period, just as has happened countless times already.

One of my favorite pics hinting at the coming solar minimum-

https://solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png

The role of the sunspot cycle on the Maunder minimum seems to be vastly overstated, at least according to wikipedia.

Furthermore, this post actually mentions that there is no indication that we will hit anything remotely related to that sunspot cycle.

We're not that accurate at predicting which cycle will start a grand minimum and we don't know for sure how many cycles a minimum will last for. This is a cutting edge research area. We know that a deep minimum is due and will happen this century. Some suggest cycle 25. Some suggest 26 as the start of it.

Sunspots themselves are not the big factor on climate, it's cosmic rays (which are inversely correlated) and clouds: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171219091320.h...

According to popular opinion (the new version of science), solar radio and particle forcing doesn’t matter - we have to do is eat some hamburgers, etc., and we can easily fix this problem by warming things up a few degrees.

I just this last year took my technician (american) ham radio test, but I'm having a hard time remembering my propagation rules (there wasn't a heavy emphasis because it doesn't really affect the 2m and 70cm bands that I'm actually allowed to use). I recall that the solar cycle coming around means better propagation, but I can't remember which bands and how much. Can someone help me out?

Top Google hit, apparently from 1996 http://www.arrl.org/here-comes-the-sun

Some other sites http://www.solarham.net/index.htm https://hamradioschool.com/sunspots-and-propagation/

Thanks for link, very informative

TLDR: Since we're at the minimum now, if you want to chase DX, stick to the 30, 40, 80, and 160 meter bands at night. You might get something on 15, 17, or 20 meters. It will be a few years before the higher bands open up again.

There's a nice chart of when you can get DX in each band in this article:

https://www.eham.net/newham/bands

It should help the higher HF bands the most, as I understand it. 20m, 17m, 15m, 10m. I've been doing SSTV on 20m because you can just fire up the decoder program and occasionally check to see what's come in. I frequently get signals from California, Illinois, Louisiana, Florida, and the Northeast, plus the occasional message out of Canada.

I don't hear a lot of voice on 20m, but digital and CW are reasonably active. I can pick up CW most times of the day, and FT8 is always hopping at 14074 khz.

"Bad propagation" is a real thing, but it's also a feedback loop. Everyone knows the bands suck during solar minimum, so fewer people call CQ. Fewer people calling CQ = fewer people hearing the calls and answering = less activity on the bands = people continue to assume propagation is just impossible.

I think a lot of the decline in calling CQ is that SSB is murdering itself. This is happening due to the poor propagation and general disinterest in trying to blast through people with huge PA's and beams as a novice/foundation user. The investment required to go hunting DX is quite high. CW, FT8, JS8call are on the scene and have a lot better performance, require less bandwidth and considerably less power. Much more practical.

I mostly run CW with a bit of FT8 occasionally. That keeps me smiling and that's all that matters :)

I really need to work up the courage and try a CW QSO soon. I might have to do it at 5 wpm but I've got all the letters and numbers down.

I encourage everyone to give SSTV a shot. My antenna is just a "hamstick dipole" and it's maybe 13 feet in the air, but like I said I've had successful 20m contacts as far away as Quebec.

If you call CQ at that speed you’ll get someone answer at that speed. Just go for it. First one I did I actually had a couple of drinks first :)

I’ve been meaning to try one of the ISS SSTV events on 2m but haven’t got around to it yet. Looks like fun

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