Sunspot Minimum or "Is the sun going to sleep?"

[Al Skierkiewicz]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/sc...=2&ref=science

This from a local ham radio club reflector...

[Jared Russell]

When I was 6 years old my father took me to Fels Planetarium in the Franklin Institute and I watched a film about the sun. I remember hearing how the sun was going to burn out in 6 billion years and I spent the rest of the day in abject horror.

Sort of unrelated, but I wanted to share.

[JesseK]

There was a Science channel special on some abstracticians who were postulating how advanced intelligent lifeforms might survive in space once all of the stars burned out in billions of years. It was a very dismal existence indeed. They didn't even think about the lack of light that would be like driving down a dark road with no headlights on as the civilisations traveled from place to place. ::shudder::

I think we're on a role with Energy Conservation in general, and it'd be a shame if everything got cooler for a couple of decades. If you combine some NASA photos with findings (such as evidence that ice used to be at the top of a 1000-ft plateau in Madagascar) that support the 'Snowball Earth' theory, it seems logical that climate change is happening and that it can have huge ramifications. Yet I fear the uneducated masses will use a colder year that results from a docile sunspot maximum season as evidence that climate change is a myth.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Jesse,
We just don' have enough data yet. The Maunder Minimum, the longest period of no sunspot activity also coincided with the cold spell that gave Valley Forge such significance as well as all those winter scenes from northern Europe.

[EricH]

It may be (who knows) that the sunspots, huge volcanic eruptions, etc. that produce extra-cold winters and summers are acting as counters to global warming, giving the earth a chance to recover.

It also gives those who are so inclined a chance to poke fun at certain politicians/scientists. After a May blizzard a couple years ago in SD canceled classes (seen on a white board in the student lounge): "What happened to the global warming?" or something to that effect, along with this response: "It's now called global climate change."

[DonRotolo]

All I know is that High-Frequency (1.6-30 MHz) radio propagation is not all that good, and I'm anxious for more sunspots so I can "work the world on a Watt" again. This time on PSK31, I suppose.

[Mr. Pockets]

Originally Posted by JesseK

If you combine some NASA photos with findings (such as evidence that ice used to be at the top of a 1000-ft plateau in Madagascar) that support the 'Snowball Earth' theory, it seems logical that climate change is happening and that it can have huge ramifications. Yet I fear the uneducated masses will use a colder year that results from a docile sunspot maximum season as evidence that climate change is a myth.

Originally Posted by EricH

It may be (who knows) that the sunspots, huge volcanic eruptions, etc. that produce extra-cold winters and summers are acting as counters to global warming, giving the earth a chance to recover.

I know this might be a tad off topic, but as some comments have been made in reference to global warming I have a quick question: why are people so convinced that human activity is dominant cause of global warming. I'm not saying it isn't (I'm hardly anything remotely resembling an expert on the area), but warming and cooling far beyond what we are experiencing has happened in the past (way before humans industrialized). Take the end of the ice age, when the glaciers covering a massive portion of the northern hemisphere receded. There were no people spreading greenhouse gases at that point, so it's not as if natural warming has never occurred. I don't doubt that human activity plays a role in global warming (or cooling), but I think people might be a little quick to exaggerate it.
Just my $0.02

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Mr. Pockets

I know this might be a tad off topic, but as some comments have been made in reference to global warming I have a quick question: why are people so convinced that human activity is dominant cause of global warming. I'm not saying it isn't (I'm hardly anything remotely resembling an expert on the area), but warming and cooling far beyond what we are experiencing has happened in the past (way before humans industrialized). Take the end of the ice age, when the glaciers covering a massive portion of the northern hemisphere receded. There were no people spreading greenhouse gases at that point, so it's not as if natural warming has never occurred. I don't doubt that human activity plays a role in global warming (or cooling), but I think people might be a little quick to exaggerate it.
Just my $0.02

I just so happen to be one of those that likes a good jab at the folks that say global warming is happening. (And the best way to cool the earth? Have said folks be quiet and stop talking, because talking produces hot air!)

And I seem to recall that certain animals produce lots of greenhouse gasses (whatever those are). As in, close to as much as humans do. (And there are some other things, but that would start getting way way way off-topic, so I'll leave it at that.)

[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by EricH

I just so happen to be one of those that likes a good jab at the folks that say global warming is happening. (And the best way to cool the earth? Have said folks be quiet and stop talking, because talking produces hot air!)

And I seem to recall that certain animals produce lots of greenhouse gasses (whatever those are). As in, close to as much as humans do. (And there are some other things, but that would start getting way way way off-topic, so I'll leave it at that.)

Here is a little helpful hint for anyone who engages in a debate. Make sure that you don't just recall something you have read but that you know for a fact. I know what animals you are referring to. They are cows and they don't exist in the wild. Humanity is still responsible. Little jab meet right cross.

Originally Posted by IndySam

Global warming, or now what they call climate change because the earth has stopped warming in the 21st century, has become too much of a religion and not a science. Until experts like the Prince of Wails stops predicting that the earth will be ruined in ten years or the Chief High Priests of the Church like Al Gore stop calling non-believers Nazis I won't take them seriously.

Again???? Your citing the Prince of Wales. The Prince of Wales is a moron. He thinks that a homeopathy is a good ideas. It defies the laws of physics.

Engineering is a prime example of this. 100 years ago they had no such thing as CAD, computer simulations, or even a sort of mechanical calculators. Back then math was done by hand, and if they wanted a really precise answer, then that took loads of math. The more accurate they wanted, the more math. So they approximated a lot more back then. The Brooklyn Bridge was over-engineered by many orders of magnitude because the designers of the late 1800s did not possess a means of efficiently processing the vast amounts of equations necessary to build it just right. So they wasted a lot of money in extra materials as they erred on the safe side. Nowadays we have the computing power to do full bridge simulations on a computer, and engineers use that data to design a bridge that meets the safety requirements without being over-engineered. This saves time, money, and resources.

Actually didn't that also have to do with the variability of manufacturing processes? It also interestingly enough was a good move by the bridge makers as they did discover that some of the steel was bad.

Originally Posted by EricH

Or, as I pointed out earlier, spontaneous generation, once accepted as pretty much law and now you can hardly find a supporter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

To put it bluntly: Scientific knowledge can be wrong, even when the majority of scientists accept the same thing.

Then it wouldn't be science. Scientists at one point knew there was a problem with Newton's laws of gravity and Maxwell's equations. They didn't just think that there was a problem with those laws they knew there was a problem. They both worked and neither law could be fudged to solve the problem until Einstein.

[RMiller]

I don't think I will convince anyone of anything, but I want to point out a few things.

One, in both politics and science, follow the money. In politics, there are people to gain by trying to get the public to agree about global warming, on both sides, but much more so on the "there is global warming side" at the moment. Recent examples of politics being played here and here.

In science, it is similar. Just remember, if human caused global warming were to be proven false, lots of scientists lose their funding and their credibility. That is also true about many governmental organizations, like the IPPC.
Are there people (yes, even scientists in the field) who disagree with global warming being human caused? Yes, for instance see here (letter) and here (signatures).

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Yes, there is nothing wrong with people drawing their opinions from data. But there is a serious problem with spreading a belief that your amateur "conclusion" has as much weight as the conclusions of those which devote their lifetimes to it. No, you can have an opinion, but unless you actually go to graduate school, or law school, or med school and leave with a diploma, you are not qualified to form an equal conclusion to what they are.

If this was the case, why even bother going to college to become an engineer if Joe Sixpack can form a conclusion equal to a senior engineer on critical details of a nuclear reactor? Or why go to med school if Jane Doe is just as qualified to treat medical conditions as a practicing doctor because she reads WedMD? Or why go to grad school for meteorology if John Smith can form a conclusion equal to a scientist based solely upon reading Drudge Report?

We have institutions of higher learning for a reason! Like it or not, people with genuine diplomas (honorary ones don't count!) from these colleges and universities are more qualified than Joe Sixpack in their specific field. Period.

Have you heard about the object that recently hit Jupiter? Guess who discovered it? An amateur.

Take for example the main reason we post on this site, robotics. I know people who are not trained in any engineering who can design some extremely impressive robots.

I have worked with technicians who understand what is going on in a process much better than an engineer does.

In a company I worked for, after getting a bachelors and going into a research position for five years you were better off than the person who went to get their PhD in those five years. 1) You had experience the company valued. 2) Your five years were on-the-job like training. 3) You netted a whole lot more money than the student did.

How about Henry Ford? What education did he have?

Do you know why an "amateur" can sometimes be better than a "professional"? Because <i>if </i> they have worked with it, studied it, and come to an understanding of it from their own experiences outside of school, they can do just as well as others.

What is that to say? There are definitely some "amateurs" out there who have opinions that should be valued. In addition, if you are reading about a subject over a period of time, you can rightfully draw conclusions when considering the debate. Are you going to be able to write a paper on it in a published journal, unlikely, though there are exceptions, particularly if there is a great insight or discovery.

Originally Posted by artdutra04

The only way this argument would hold merit is if technology did not advance. If the technology available now was identical to that 30 years ago, then it would be hard to draw new conclusions from data, and anything new could more easily be construed as running on nothing but hot air. But because technology advances, especially in the computing department, we can now process data trillions of times faster than 30 years ago. The enormous amount of computer data processing alone can analyze data much more thoroughly than can be done by hand, and ascertain subtle causation and correlation patterns in existing data. This data can then be used to create more accurate simulations which better reflect reality.

Engineering is a prime example of this. 100 years ago they had no such thing as CAD, computer simulations, or even a sort of mechanical calculators. Back then math was done by hand, and if they wanted a really precise answer, then that took loads of math. The more accurate they wanted, the more math. So they approximated a lot more back then. The Brooklyn Bridge was over-engineered by many orders of magnitude because the designers of the late 1800s did not possess a means of efficiently processing the vast amounts of equations necessary to build it just right. So they wasted a lot of money in extra materials as they erred on the safe side. Nowadays we have the computing power to do full bridge simulations on a computer, and engineers use that data to design a bridge that meets the safety requirements without being over-engineered. This saves time, money, and resources.

Just remember, "garbage in, garbage out." If I do not give all the data or I give a wrong set of equations or I don't give the right units, I can get something that looks great on paper, but will fail miserably. In the case of human caused global warming, I think an emphasis has been put on the last 25 years, particularly to the public. As IndySam noted, in the 60s and 70s, it was global cooling that was the "problem."

Originally Posted by Adam Y.

Then it wouldn't be science. Scientists at one point knew there was a problem with Newton's laws of gravity and Maxwell's equations. They didn't just think that there was a problem with those laws they knew there was a problem. They both worked and neither law could be fudged to solve the problem until Einstein.

One thing that frustrates me is that sometimes the evidence is not brought to the table when it doesn't fit with a "scientific theory." For instance, how widely reported is it that since 2001, the average global temperature has remained steady, not an exponential growth.

Is the earth gradually warming? Yes, but it has for the last 150-200 years since the Little Ice Age. Yes, 200 years at the rate of about a degree F every century. The real question is: is it human caused? If it is, then all of the equations to predict global warming by IPPC are off since none of their predictions line up with reality (oh, you didn't know that? ). This is one of the things that bothers me when science, money, and politics collide (and not just in regards to global warming, but other issues as well that are not on topic). The scientific method goes out the window. One piece of evidence should be enough to cause a significant reworking of the theory at the least, but when money and politics is involved, it becomes more of a tangled web.

See here, here, and here (two pdfs links are linked from first link) for evidence.

Originally Posted by Don Rotolo

That's funny.

I think your estimates of the amount of hydrocarbons on the planet is off by an order of magnitude.

Oil will never run out, but it will eventually become too expensive to use it as we do today. I expect that to happen in your lifetime.

Let's see, current "proven" reserves of crude oil are around 50 years worth. That doesn't include shale oil (estimated 2x proven reserves), oil that is not economically/technically feasible at the moment, and crude oil that is unproven. Suffice to say, I think we have enough for a while. Your statement about it becoming too expensive might be true, but I think that will be more because a cheaper (that oil today even) technology comes along.

[JesseK]

If this was the case, why even bother going to college to become an engineer if Joe Sixpack can form a conclusion equal to a senior engineer on critical details of a nuclear reactor? Or why go to med school if Jane Doe is just as qualified to treat medical conditions as a practicing doctor because she reads WedMD? Or why go to grad school for meteorology if John Smith can form a conclusion equal to a scientist based solely upon reading Drudge Report?

We have institutions of higher learning for a reason! Like it or not, people with genuine diplomas (honorary ones don't count!) from these colleges and universities are more qualified than Joe Sixpack in their specific field. Period.

Be very careful here Art. There are many people who devote their lifetime to a specific narrow-minded piece of work who then fail to see the larger picture. In pop-culture they usually become stuck in the 'doomsday sayer' group and simply wait out the rest of their lifetimes to say 'I told you so'.

You don't need a degree to be able to analyze data. If I were to judge it, I'd say that most people who can finish a Sudoku puzzle have enough logic and reasoning to analyze this data. Combine that with the plethora of news, evidence, and life experiences that sway the argument either way and even Joe Sixpack can make a logical, valid argument from his perspective.

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by RMiller

Have you heard about the object that recently hit Jupiter? Guess who discovered it? An amateur.

Take for example the main reason we post on this site, robotics. I know people who are not trained in any engineering who can design some extremely impressive robots.

I have worked with technicians who understand what is going on in a process much better than an engineer does.

In a company I worked for, after getting a bachelors and going into a research position for five years you were better off than the person who went to get their PhD in those five years. 1) You had experience the company valued. 2) Your five years were on-the-job like training. 3) You netted a whole lot more money than the student did.

How about Henry Ford? What education did he have?

Do you know why an "amateur" can sometimes be better than a "professional"? Because <i>if </i> they have worked with it, studied it, and come to an understanding of it from their own experiences outside of school, they can do just as well as others.

What is that to say? There are definitely some "amateurs" out there who have opinions that should be valued. In addition, if you are reading about a subject over a period of time, you can rightfully draw conclusions when considering the debate. Are you going to be able to write a paper on it in a published journal, unlikely, though there are exceptions, particularly if there is a great insight or discovery.

Those are all exceptions, not the rule.

There will always a few exceptional amateurs that are competent enough in professional fields to do acceptable (or even amazing work, like Dean Kamen or your example of Henry Ford), but the vast majority of amateur people wouldn't even pass basic proficiency standards in specialized professional fields. That's why the average annual incomes of people with Bachelor degrees is higher than those without, and those with Master degrees is higher yet, with PhDs topping the charts. There will always be outliers, but this in general is the rule.

Originally Posted by RMiller

Just remember, "garbage in, garbage out." If I do not give all the data or I give a wrong set of equations or I don't give the right units, I can get something that looks great on paper, but will fail miserably. In the case of human caused global warming, I think an emphasis has been put on the last 25 years, particularly to the public. As IndySam noted, in the 60s and 70s, it was global cooling that was the "problem."

But in the 50s - 70s, the data at the time was showing that the Earth's temperature had stabilized. The decision at the time made sense that the Earth may have been entering a cooling phase. But since the late 1800s however, the temperature has generally "skyrocketed" in terms of the rate of the temperature increase in reference to the nominal fluctuations during the past two thousand years. 84% of scientists [source] agree with the findings that this recent upsurge since the "Little Ice Age" has been propelled to increase faster and to higher levels because of human activity than it would have otherwise occurred naturally.

Originally Posted by RMiller

One thing that frustrates me is that sometimes the evidence is not brought to the table when it doesn't fit with a "scientific theory." For instance, how widely reported is it that since 2001, the average global temperature has remained steady, not an exponential growth.

If there was ever an educational course that singlehandedly changed my life, I would give the honors to statistics. Without statistics, localized variations like that might look like a trend. But sometimes we get "weird" results that point more to the randomness of noise in data than actual trends. An example of this can be said about rolling a pair of dice three times and getting doubles each time (sending you directly to Jail without passing Go in Monopoly!). The odds of this happening are small (1/216), but does it mean the dice are loaded or inaccurate? No, it just means your sample size is too small to be conclusive.

Localized trends (over a few years) can be affected by a number of localized environmental factors. Some factors we know about - such as the case of the Mount Tambora volcano eruption in 1815 causing the Year Without a Summer in 1816 - but others we don't. In general, predicting short term weather and climate variations is much harder than predicting long term ones since more variables come into play in the short term. In the long term, the short term variations are smoothed out (very similar to the Law of Large Numbers), making longer term predictions a lot easier.

Originally Posted by RMiller

Is the earth gradually warming? Yes, but it has for the last 150-200 years since the Little Ice Age. Yes, 200 years at the rate of about a degree F every century. The real question is: is it human caused? If it is, then all of the equations to predict global warming by IPPC are off since none of their predictions line up with reality (oh, you didn't know that? ). This is one of the things that bothers me when science, money, and politics collide (and not just in regards to global warming, but other issues as well that are not on topic). The scientific method goes out the window. One piece of evidence should be enough to cause a significant reworking of the theory at the least, but when money and politics is involved, it becomes more of a tangled web.

See here, here, and here (two pdfs links are linked from first link) for evidence.



Let's see, current "proven" reserves of crude oil are around 50 years worth. That doesn't include shale oil (estimated 2x proven reserves), oil that is not economically/technically feasible at the moment, and crude oil that is unproven. Suffice to say, I think we have enough for a while. Your statement about it becoming too expensive might be true, but I think that will be more because a cheaper (that oil today even) technology comes along.

As you pointed out, there is a lot of oil left. But we use petroleum for more than just making our cars go and supplying power plants. Fertilizer, plastics, lubricants, and many more various hydrocarbon-based products all depend on various byproducts of the oil distillation process. When the price of oil goes up, all those prices go up as well, resulting in very volatile pricing. And real economic growth does not like volatile pricing - that's why you see so many companies with price guarantees to sell anything for their competitors price if it's cheaper. This isn't to save you money, it's because stable pricing leads to higher profit margins for them.

Switching from oil to more stable sources of sustainable or renewable energy (non-corn* ethanol, biodiesel, nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc) results in steadier prices (e.g. wind is always free!), which results in more stable economic growth and higher profit margins for industry. Thus, weening ourselves off oil is a smart and sensible long-term goal both economically and environmentally. The problem is the short term - volatile pricing can lead to massive short term profits for shareholders and executives then lead to a period of minimal profits at best or massive red ink at worst, as the financial industry is in now. These people are more interested in sticking around for five years, getting rich, and leaving the company rather than sitting in for 20, 30, even 40 years at the company and guiding it down the path of long term, stable, moderately-high profits.

* Corn is actually a pretty poor source of ethanol. Plants like plain prairie grass yield much higher returns, while not driving up the food and livestock feed prices for everyone else.

Originally Posted by JesseK

Be very careful here Art. There are many people who devote their lifetime to a specific narrow-minded piece of work who then fail to see the larger picture. In pop-culture they usually become stuck in the 'doomsday sayer' group and simply wait out the rest of their lifetimes to say 'I told you so'.

You don't need a degree to be able to analyze data. If I were to judge it, I'd say that most people who can finish a Sudoku puzzle have enough logic and reasoning to analyze this data. Combine that with the plethora of news, evidence, and life experiences that sway the argument either way and even Joe Sixpack can make a logical, valid argument from his perspective.

I'm not disagreeing with you. There are a lot of people who become close-minded to the big picture, both people with and without college educations. I've seen college professors with PhDs try to read deeper into things which don't really exist. Sometimes a joke or saying is just a joke or a saying. Others fall victim to confirmation bias after becoming attached to something, and fail to have the ability to see why or how an opposing group holds their particular point-of-view.

In general, pretty much everyone in society as you pointed out in a great example who can solve a Sudoku puzzle, can form qualified opinions about data, so long as they keep an open mind. Most of these decisions though, focus on a small perspective. What's directly good for them, their family, their community, their church, their friends, etc. There is nothing wrong with this, and most people live happy, satisfied lives.

But sometimes their decisions have implications that don't directly affect them - such as throwing garbage into a local stream - but may have larger negative externalities on society. The water carries it away, and unless they have a personal connection to something downstream, it doesn't affect them anymore. Or what about someone who eats a lot of junk food and doesn't exercise? They seem to be happy, even though being obese leads to greater health problems, which causes health care costs across the board to increase due to more people having health problems. Do either of these make this person bad? No. In their point of view, their decisions are perfectly rational. But sometimes it's things like this where scientists, or their doctors respectively, need to give them a helping hand towards better decisions.

We're all human, we all make mistakes, and we all need someone there to remind us when we begin making bad decisions. And as long as we all remember to keep an open-mind that we may be unintentionally making bad decisions, and actually change on recommendations from their doctors or other experts, we're all fine.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Mr. Pockets

I know this might be a tad off topic, but as some comments have been made in reference to global warming I have a quick question: why are people so convinced that human activity is dominant cause of global warming.

Multiple peer reviewed scientific studies support the hypothesis that humans are accelerating global warming. The consensus in the scientific community is that humans accelerate global warming. I could link to all of the papers if you feel like analyzing them (as you shouldn't just take people's word on anything in science), but I'm sleepy right now.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Multiple peer reviewed scientific studies support the hypothesis that humans are accelerating global warming. The consensus in the scientific community is that humans accelerate global warming. I could link to all of the papers if you feel like analyzing them (as you shouldn't just take people's word on anything in science), but I'm sleepy right now.

Peer-reviewed scientific studies are done by people. Also note the law of spontaneous generation.

(If you don't know what that law is, it was debunked by Pasteur a couple hundred years ago or so.)

[artdutra04]

I'm not a climate scientist. I haven't spent a lifetime drilling ice cores out of Antarctica, monitoring thousands of weather stations, designing complex mathematical climate forecasting algorithms, mapping the hole in the Ozone layer, recording the cyclical ocean temperatures of El Niño, measuring the accelerated extent of the shrinking glaciers and rising sea water, or any other of the highly specialized tasks that these scientists do every day.

As such, what qualifies me as being more competent than they are at drawing conclusions from their climate data? Subjective arguments and logical fallacies? I'm not a climate scientist, or even a meteorologist. But they are. And the vast majority of them (including the IPCC) all agree that global warming is not only real and observable, but that activity from humans has been primarily responsible for this current rapid upswing. (Note they are not stating that humans are solely responsible, since climate shifts obviously occurred in the four billion years prior to humanity.)

If Global Warming, which is the currently held scientific theory among the majority of scientists worldwide, works well enough for those which devote their entire lives to studying the climate, then it's good enough for me. Letting politics or personal ideas get in the way of science is like when Indiana tried to pass a law rounding pi to 3.2 to allow one to "square a circle", even though it had already been proven impossible with primitive actions.

But at the same time, if enough scientists find sufficient telling evidence to refute or alter the currently held theory of global warming (which at the current time is pretty unlikely, but not impossible), and if the majority of scientists worldwide support these changes, then I'll support those alterations.

Now as for the sunspots, there have been long lulls before, and subjectively they seem to line up with generic climate trends. But the only way to be sure is with data, numbers, with which we can run statistical analysis with decimal-point precision on it, and with a certain degree of confidence, make conclusions mathematically about whether sunspots have anything to do with our climate, or if it's just another textbook case of "correlation does not imply causation".