Sun going into hibernation

[KimberleyChris]

I thought this thread was about closure of Page 3 in the Sun - tit for tat move by Murdock haters

No, at the top it says;

"Sun going into hibernation Interesting stuff looks like sunspots will disappear completely in the next solar cycle"

Christ almighty.....

[pjclarke]

So extrapolating the trend in global warming is illegitimate, however extrapolating the (short) negative trend in sunspot magnetism is OK? Got that.

The solar minimum forcing is thus about 0.15 W/m2 relative to the mean solar forcing. For comparison, the human-made GHG climate forcing is now increasing at a rate of about 0.3 W/m2 per decade (Hansen & Sato 2004). If the sun were to remain "stuck" in its present minimum for several decades, as has been suggested (e.g., Independent story) in analogy to the solar Maunder Minimum of the seventeenth century, that negative forcing would be balanced by a 5-year increase of GHGs. Thus, in the current era of rapidly increasing GHGs, such solar variations cannot have a substantial impact on long-term global warming trends.

NASA

GHGs laugh at your puny solar variations .....

[BlasterBates]

Yes that puny little star in the centre of the Solar System. quite ridiculous to assume it could have any effect really.

[Spacecadet]

Yes that puny little star in the centre of the Solar System. quite ridiculous to assume it could have any effect really.

all the sun does is indicate day time / night time

hopefully it never goes out of sync

[KimberleyChris]

It's only a few weeks ago that I read another 'eminent' document stating that the current 'pause' in global warming was a short term blip, to be ignored and not be taken as evidence when quoted by sceptics.

Seems that they are hedging their bets in all directions.

It used to be called 'global warming' then, when it stopped warming, it became 'climate change'

Then it was nothing to do with the sun at all, now we hear 'solar minimum forcing'.

First CO2 was going to roast us all alive, now it is just going to reduce the effects of a possible 'mini ice age'.

Two things are certain:
1. Time will tell.
2. The chances of any substance being responsible for global warming appear to be in direct proportion to how easily taxable it is, and doubled if it is produced by a multi-national (particularly American) company.

[MarillionFan]

Just the beginning.

December 21, 2012 is the end.

[pjclarke]

Must try harder.

It used to be called 'global warming' then, when it stopped warming, it became 'climate change'

Uh-huh. Care to have a guess what the 'CC' in 'IPCC' , formed in 1988, stands for? See Also.

Then it was nothing to do with the sun at all, now we hear 'solar minimum forcing'.

Nope. That just refers to the the minimum of the 11-year solar cycle.

First CO2 was going to roast us all alive, now it is just going to reduce the effects of a possible 'mini ice age'.

Nobody credible is talking of a mini ice age. Just the usual denier websites.

The chances of any substance being responsible for global warming appear to be in direct proportion to how easily taxable it is, and doubled if it is produced by a multi-national (particularly American) company.

The greenhouse effect is based on physics going back to Tyndall, and the first qauntified (remarkably accurately) by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. While the US has the greatest responsibility for the greenhouse gases already swimming around up there, China is now the largest emitter....

Apart from those nitpicks, not a bad first effort.

[KimberleyChris]

"Nope. That just refers to the the minimum of the 11-year solar cycle".

Read the NASA article that you yourself linked to.

It is clearly talking about solar luminosity and heat output. As you know.sunspots are largely irrelevant to the climate change conversation.

"Nobody credible is talking of a mini ice age. Just the usual denier websites".

The very same NASA website is analogising the possible effects to the Maunder Minimum...otherwise known as the Little Ice Age.

[pjclarke]

Solar Variability

The sun is another source of natural global temperature variability. Figure 3, based on an analysis of satellite measurements by Richard Willson, shows that 2007 is at the minimum of the current 10-11 year solar cycle. Another analysis of the satellite data (not illustrated here) by Judith Lean has the 2007 solar irradiance minimum slightly lower than the two prior minima in the satellite era. The differences between the two analyses are a result primarily of the lack of accurate absolute calibrations and inadequate overlap of measurements by successive satellites.

This cyclic solar variability yields a climate forcing change of about 0.3 W/m2 between solar maxima and solar minima. (Although solar irradiance of an area perpendicular to the solar beam is about 1366 W/m2, the absorption of solar energy averaged over day and night and the Earth's surface is about 240 W/m2.) Several analyses have extracted empirical global temperature variations of amplitude about 0.1°C associated with the 10-11 year solar cycle, a magnitude consistent with climate model simulations, but this signal is difficult to disentangle from other causes of global temperature change, including unforced chaotic fluctuations

Your point escapes me. Btw, sunspots are a good proxy for TSI, which some have tried to implicate as a cause of GW.

[pjclarke]

I meant, of course, that nobody credible was proposing a new Little Ice Age as a plausible outcome.

Much ado was made over the recent news that the Sun’s magnetic activity may be cooling off over the next few years. Can this mean the Earth itself will literally cool off, slipping into an ice age? Some news sites are reporting it that way (of course, the execrable Daily Mail uses the headline "Earth facing a mini-Ice Age ‘within ten years’ due to rare drop in sunspot activity"; which isn’t even within a glancing blow of reality).

The answer — spoiler alert! — is almost certainly "no". I want to make sure that’s clear, because I will bet essentially any amount of money that some climate change denial sites will run with this story and claim that we don’t need to worry about global warming. That’s baloney, and what follows is why. The reasons take a minute to explain, but of course that’s where the cool stuff (haha!) is. So let’s take this one step at a time.

.....

The very excellent Bad Astronomy.