The sun's magnetic field is about to flip
space.com
space.com
1. https://home.web.cern.ch/news/news/physics/cloud-discovers-n...
That specific article, while interesting, doesn't mention the sun's magnetic field once.
Nor the sun, nor magnetic fields.
While certainly solar activity affects the atmosphere broadly, such as ozone levels influenced by UV radiation and solar particles, the CLOUD study writeup here doesn’t show a direct impact on the specific aerosol-forming reactions.
So, while solar activity influences some chemistry such as ozone formation, it’s unclear if it affects the reactions described by CLOUD.
http://solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
I wish that chart went further back to see if there is a greater cycle at play. At a glance it looks like this cycle is a slight rebound over the last.
Not sure if there's been additional research or conjecture since then.
Also, acidification is another problem of co2. Honestly you might rather release methane or refrigerant if your goal was only to heat/insulate the atmosphere with minimal changes to chemistry, but I'm not a chemist etc
Also never forget the great oxygenation event and the azola cooling the planet to the point of mass extinction and snowball earth
'those scientists' were from Sweden responding to protests over the increasing costs of food due to famine. When looked at from the lens of maximizing calories per dollar, it makes a lot more sense.
I'd guess that there are more people use that information to select lower calorie food than people who make their menu selections based on the maximum number of calories per dollar, although I'd bet both those groups are a tiny fraction compared to the number of people who just order whatever they're in the mood for/tastes best to them and knowing how many calories are in that meal doesn't influence their behavior/choices at that moment but may still inform their choices later on
(That said, if we make it past the next century, we're probably going to be disassembling entire planets with von Neumann replicators rather than concerning ourselves with something as small as a mere atmosphere).
which makes for a very convenient distraction/talking point of climate-focused science deniers. I am no expert, but every time I have checked into one of those supposed impending Grand Solar Minimum predictions (that will cause some sort of climate crisis), it has been pure pseudo-science with no legitimate or rational theoretical basis.
Also, you are conflating a mild temperature drop that would be expected to be caused by solar minimum with an ice age and a "pole shift".
It's a well established theory
And (while not clear in this case) usually when someone claims that a "pole shift" will happen, they are usually referring to the crackpot claim that the planet will suddenly do something like maybe flip over or wobble violently causing the end of civilization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_shift_hypothe...
You might want to read up on terminology.
Physics, thermodynamics, informs us that the glaciers aren't coming back while the insulation in the atmosphere is high and still increasing.
That's pedantic.
> Physics, thermodynamics, informs us that the glaciers aren't coming back while the insulation in the atmosphere is high and still increasing.
Meh. The running hypothesis on the "other side" is that we're going to have a pole shift and grand solar minimum at the same time. Now, as you can see, I haven't really done the prerequisite reading. I have, however, read about all the stupidity surrounding "global warming" and how it was totally going to end the planet in 2000 and 1980 and 2024 and whenever, every year's the last one so that people that don't have anyone's best interests at heart can get more leverage off this supposedly inevitable-and-totally-close scenario. Meanwhile, the "fringe" has decidedly stuck to one thing, and has repeatedly criticized the very real corruption of (climate) science by monetary interests (and now national / global policy decisions) and popular opinion. This only makes me NOT want to spend my free time untangling "conclusive" climate decisions backed by ""science"" and who-knows-what leverage by a slimy bureaucrat.
I, as an individual, don't have a horse in this race. I don't believe in either one because my carbon emissions can be eclipsed by a volcano or a plane in a few hours. It's completely useless to expect me to not buy a car or to watch my energy consumption when it's not going to make a dent anyway.
The "other side" in this instance is fossil fuel funded think tanks promoting bonkers denialism ala the same institutes and their pro tobacco work in the decades earlier.
What "pole shift"? Magnetic pole on earth or the sun? The Earth magnetic pole flipping this century or the next is improbable at best and the solar pole flip happens every 22 years or so, neither that nor a grand solar minimum has anything to do with the glaciers on earth.
> I haven't really done the prerequisite reading
You might like to start with Syukuro Manabe's 1967 Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity - it was 15 years old when I first read it in an applied mathematics class prior to a career in geophysical exploration for minerals and energy clients.
It's 57 years old but still an absolute stonker of a paper, rightly considered the single most influential paper in climate research. (and only 19 pages).
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...
> I have, however, read about all the stupidity surrounding "global warming" and how it was totally going to end the planet in 2000 and 1980 and 2024
Ignore that, that's not science that's media spin, half coming from people that really struggle to convey what a slow rolling train wreck climate change will be and desperate to urge people to take steps before it's too late, the other half coming from groups paid to up the FUD and hype in order to dilute the threat which has clearly woirked in many cases (you seem to be a fine example).
> This only makes me NOT want to spend my free time untangling "conclusive" climate decisions backed by ""science""
It's not much harder than understanding the heat equations.
> I, as an individual, don't have a horse in this race.
Exactly. Like many you're likely old, will be dead before this is a big issue, have no children, don't care about them if you did, and can't be arsed consuming less or making an effort. It's completely understandable.
> I don't believe in either one because my carbon emissions can be eclipsed by a volcano or a plane in a few hours.
Collectively though, it's the sum total of human emissions that are the problem, with a small percentage being the biggest problem and being reluctant to set an example.
> It's completely useless to expect me to not buy a car or to watch my energy consumption when it's not going to make a dent anyway.
Indeed, just rearrange your deck chair and listen to the band playing onwards.
Of course if you are in your 20s (as your HN profile claims) then you might want to do something that has an impact on the world about you and the people you know .. other than rolling coal and buying a lambo or whatever.
.. which means that the level of emissions we have right now is far, far beyond what’s necessary for avoiding global cooling.
This should be obvious if you look at best estimates of the rate of cooling/warming in the past. The warming we see now is happening much faster than anything seen before so it’s absolutely not a good thing in any conceivable way
There is a chart of all observed cycles on the same website.
Fortunately, most engineers in all of the fields above are well aware of the Carrington Event. And while it's not beyond possibility that there might be some corner cases if (when?) another one happens, we know how to design these systems to keep another one from causing any major outages or damage.
The visibility may be unrepresentative, newspapers always amplify what's bad rather than what's good.
It is interesting that Jupiter has an 11 year orbit and that kind of matches the flip, might just be coincidence but that mass has a huge tug though. Sun is only 1000 times the mass of Jupiter, if you think of it like a "failed star" it's kinda like a pseudo binary? Eh I am grasping at straws.
"Although Jupiter would need to be about 75 times more massive to fuse hydrogen and become a star,[66] its diameter is sufficient as the smallest red dwarf may be only slightly larger in radius than Saturn."
It got as big as it could be, though.
"Theoretical models indicate that if Jupiter had over 40% more mass, the interior would be so compressed that its volume would decrease despite the increasing amount of matter. For smaller changes in its mass, the radius would not change appreciably.[63] As a result, Jupiter is thought to have about as large a diameter as a planet of its composition and evolutionary history can achieve.[64] The process of further shrinkage with increasing mass would continue until appreciable stellar ignition was achieved"
Brown dwarfs (which fuse deuterium but not regular hydrogen, starting at about 13x Jupiter's mass) were thought to be in a fuzzy area, but then their own category was created for them.
Buried three sentences from the end of the article, after a wall of ads and filler (I'm impatient).
It appears the magnetic poles are in continuous rotation [1], that sometimes aligns to the rotational poles and sometimes doesn't, with a "flip" event being the binary classification from the slow and smooth traversal over the equator. I feel silly, but I always assumed it was from some more fairly sharp step in the rate of change!
Is this related to why my part of the US has had UV notices lately?
That said, the earlier paper was about two cycles, the already known 11 year cycle and seperate observations that only occurred every two 11 year cycles.
There's a chance the two papers are related via a common coupled driver, or not.
This is true for climate change and it's own challenges along with many other applications of similar nature where models are incomplete or entirely missing large portions of data needed to further true understanding of a given process.
It's a hard life being an amateur radio operator these days...
* Does the magnetic flip period tell us anything about the star that would otherwise be hard to figure out.
Are you hinting at the sun's poles or the earth's? Further do you mean the rotational pole, or the magnetic poles?
FWiW, NASA has written on all of these, for example:
Why Variations in Earth’s Magnetic Field Aren’t Causing Today’s Climate Change
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/flip...
Does someone here know more about this?
Astrum's channel on youtube has several pictures and complete analysis[1]. (I have downloaded the whole channel on my computer, that's the filename.)
[1] How The Earth Got Its Magnetic Field (And Why It Might Not Protect Us Much Longer)
We can see alternating bands of polarity in the rock that show what the orientation was over geological time. The bands that spread outward from the ridges are separated by millions of years and provide a clear picture of sea floor spreading, and continental drift.
Anyway the sun's magnetic fields is ridiculously weak on earth.
Telling time of day would be the first problem as it's always high noon. And star sightings might prove challenging, at least at optical frequencies.
(Am now thinking of an SF story set on the Sun in which navigation and timekeeping play critical roles....)
(Focusing on the non-obvious problems might make for a more interesting and/or fantastical story.)
Teenage, mutant, ninja, or otherwise.
"Write a short (300--600 word) story about how human explorers on the Sun would address the challenges of navigation, orientation, and timekeeping (including the challenges of starfinding). Ignore obvious effects such as heat, gravity, and radiation."
Results are ... not excellent literature, but amusing all the same.
If the sun is always directly down from the surface, doesn't that make it solar midnight from anywhere on the surface?
It's a story about a regular recurring solar phenomenon.
The current cycle seems to be stronger than usual. And produce some strong solar flares recently. Those could cause problems for electrical grid. But there have been stronger cycles back in the 1950s.
It's just something we do.
The summary is that the sun is actually metallic hydrogen, which forms a lattice similar to layers of graphite. This both explains the black-body radiation of the sun and provides a mechanism to explain sunspots and the solar maximum and pole flip: sunspots are non-hydrogen elements that are excluded from the metallic hydrogen lattice and push it upwards as they migrate to the surface and are ejected.
And God! What a convoluted theory full of ideas nobody can test.
Metal hydrogen is a liquid though, it doesn’t form a crystalline structure like an actual metal.
It isn't surprising that there is messy magnetic field when Sun is pure conductor.
Metallic hydrogen probably has something to do with magnetic field on Jupiter.
Here's a related Veritasium episode: "The Bizarre Behavior of Rotating Bodies"