Interesting and entertaining perspective on sun spot cycle:
THE COXE STRATEGY JOURNAL
4. Global Climate Cooling?
Since we last published, the sunspots have been scarce and small, and the mostrespected
measures of global climate show a strong cooling trend in this decade.
(The projections for future sunspot activity are from the two best-known sunspot
research centres. For two years, they have been moving them forward as the
sunspots disappoint the astronomers by failing to return.)
As clients know, we use our study of history to compare popular views about
economics, fi nance, geopolitics with evidence of what has happened in previous
eras.
As all scientifi c studies have shown, since the early 19th Century, the world has
warmed up. Previously, the world went through roughly two centuries of serious
global cooling. Whether by coincidence or not, sunspot activity during those
centuries was extremely low.
Solar Cycle 23 and 24
Source: NOAA Spaceweather Prediction Center: Solar Cycle Progression.
swpc.noaa.gov
index.html
...the most-respected
measures of global
climate show a
strong cooling trend
in this decade...
Outside the Tropics, the world was cold. Example: Scotland suffered six straight
crop failures during the 1690s because of late Springs and early frosts. Some
historians believe this was the major reason why the Scots gave up their dreams of
independence and joined England. There were skating parties on the Thames each
winter. Polar ice caps expanded dramatically.
Then, in the early 19th Century, the sunspots returned. The pattern: ten years of
sunspot activity, a year of rest, then a new cycle.
The last sunspot cycle ended on schedule in 2006. Also on schedule, there was
minimal or no sunspot activity in 2007. Not to worry, said the global warmists:
they’ll be back next year.
They didn’t come back in 2008. They haven’t returned so far this year. In retrospect,
the record-breaking day-long super-spectacular series of 174 sunspot explosions
on Bastille Day in July 2001 was the equivalent of Gandalf’s fi reworks display
for Bilbo Baggins’s 111th birthday, which ended Bilbo’s ownership of the Ring.
Astronomers still speak with awe of the sunspots that day. Satellite and radio
communications across the world were devastated, and the Aurora Borealis was
seen as far south as Texas. Almost immediately, sunspot activity began to dwindle,
and then the spots completely disappeared in 2007. Periods of high sunspot activity
didn’t reach the levels seen in the 1980s and 1990s. Minimums were lower. Then
the sunspots virtually disappeared.
They haven’t come back, which means we are experiencing the longest sunspot
drought in more than two centuries. As NASA notes, solar wind activity is at a
fi fty-year low. As other astronomers have noted, that decline in solar wind could
be the factor that has dramatically reduced the depth of our atmosphere. Earth
has had, for most of the time that we could measure such things, 400 miles of
atmosphere between ground level and the Absolute Zero temperatures of outer
space. We’re down to 250 miles.
As the science writer of the Telegraph put it, we are 150 miles closer to outer space
than we were at the dawn of the Space Age.
As clients are well aware, we are infl uenced by the work of astronomers dating back
to the Astronomer Royal, William Herschel, who two centuries ago demonstrated a
correlation between the price of corn (wheat), and changes in sunspot activity. So
we have watched with growing interest as astronomers report surprise at the failure
of the sunspots to return.
...we are 150 miles
closer to outer space
than we were at the
dawn of the Space Age.
The Victorian scientists would have swiftly said that the two cold winters we have
been experiencing were inevitable, given the collapse in sunspot activity. There
hasn’t been such sustained spotlessness on the sun for so long that it seems that
the global warmists came to believe that those earlier Minimums were freakish
occurrences.
Historians learn to take history as it is reported, and not to impose their own
prejudices on it. We believe it highly likely that the temperate zones of the world—
where most people and most grains come from—will experience notably cooler
weather this year, which could imperil key crops.
Last year, according to some preliminary climatological surveys, the world
temperature fell one degree Fahrenheit, the biggest one-drop for which we have
authoritative records apart from the short-term cooling after Mount Pinatubo
erupted in 1991.
That temperature decline seems to have continued through winter, which has
been severe in many regions. It is, as of now, the 10th coldest in Chicago’s history.
Snow has been reported as far south as Malibu. The Pacifi c Northwest—including
Seattle, Vancouver and Victoria—has suffered the kind of snow and ice storms that
more resemble New England than the balmy Pacifi c Coast. London had one of its
biggest snowstorms in decades. Louisiana had a severe snowstorm in December
that closed the major bridge across the Mississippi, backing up traffi c for miles in
either direction.
The University of Illinois Climate Research Centre, which researches ice caps and
sea ice in the polar regions (“The Chryosphere”), has for years been reporting on
the shrinkage of sea ice. When they took their annual year-end portraits of the poles,
they were amazed: In just four months, the sea ice had expanded dramatically, and
the total ice was now back to the average level of the past thirty years.
But, (you may say), I’ve read the reports on the Arctic ice cap shrinkage and I
know that we face a crisis. One of the best-known reports is published by the US
National Snow and Ice Data Center, whose work was infl uential in the move to
declare polar bears an endangered species. The Institute kept reporting this year
that the ice was still disappearing, and its reports kept getting printed.
The Page 16 story came in mid-February when the Institute had to confess that
“sensor problems” had given some misleading readings. In fact, they had managed
to miss 193,000 square miles of sea ice, an area 18% larger than California.
...they had managed
to miss 193,000
square miles of sea ice,
an area 18% larger
than California.
Our take on all this is that the global warmists have such control over the
universities, politics and media, that discussion of the possibility of a new period
of global cooling is treated as something between hysteria and voodoo. Therefore,
farmers and agricultural planners are making no provision for the possibility that
this growing season could be far more challenging than last year. And, based on
the historical evidence, cooling is cumulative: if the spots don’t return, next year is
likely to be more problematic for farmers than this year.
’Twas ever thus. Our knowledge of sunspots dates back to Galileo and the records
of sunspots have been kept since his time. He wasn’t permitted by the Elites of his
time to say publicly that the earth revolved around the sun. The Vatican no longer
claims that kind of authority, but the Scientific Left (if that is not an oxymoron)
does.
One of Galileo’s contemporaries, Montaigne, expressed his exasperation about
the way science was treated. “We parrot whatever opinions are commonly held,
accepting them as truths, with all the paraphernalia of supporting arguments and
proofs, as thought they were something fi rm and solid…Thus the world is pickled
in stupidity and brimming over with lies.” That could describe today’s situation
whenever the subject of global warming is discussed publicly. |
