Even though it is towards the end of the present solar cycle, we still have bursts of energy coming from the sun. A fairly large sunspot has bathed the earth and the other planets with surges of energy that warm all systems up just like the absence of sunspot action causes cooling. The heat from these energy surges, some of which were short wave radio levels, has knocked out radio in the Pacific and is causing auroras at the North Pole. On my mountain in New York, it has suddenly caused the melting of what used to be four feet of snow. The suddenness of the warming is typical of the sun: when it is active, it warms within hours, then the heat is retained by our oceans but NOT by our atmosphere, for a much longer period.
Several minor CMEs propelled toward Earth earlier this week by active sunspot AR2297 are expected to arrive en masse on March 13th. Their collective impact could spark bright auroras around the Arctic Circle. NOAA forecasters estimate a 65% chance of G1-class geomagnetic storms when the CMEs arrive.
The simplest and easiest way to predict weather is to watch the sun. More sunspots=more heat. The intensity and frequency of sunspots determines the level of heat shed onto the planet Earth. Then there is the issue of dust obstructing the heating by the sun. More dust in higher stratosphere=less heating. Then there is the issue of the Ice Ages. They all end extremely abruptly which means the only mechanism for sudden changes like this could be the sun. Understanding why the sun varies in this odd way is highly important because all civilization and the invention of farming and domestication of animals happened only during the present Interglacial.
Interglacials are not the norm. Far, far from it. The norm is much colder. Below is an interesting graph showing how CO2 growth isn’t a straight line upwards but rather jags up and down a great deal and this reflects the fact that CO2 grows higher only if there is warming first. It trails the heating/cooling events.
The above graph from NOAA shows us that in early 1990s, CO2 growth declined very abruptly due to the Pinatubo dirty eruption. It hiked up in a sudden spike in 1998 when we had ferocious sunspot activity that year. The earth breathes in and out CO2 depending on sunspot levels. This is due to our oceans discharging or sucking down CO2. We have a fairly comfortable climate during this short Interglacial thanks to the oceans and this is why the West Coast of North America is much warmer as the sunspot activity begins to fade compared to the eastern half of the continent which is where the glaciers grow fastest during Ice Ages.
BBC News – Global CO2 emissions ‘stalled’ in 2014: note that the BBC which pushes warming like crazy, thinks this is amazing news when it happens all the time.
I am constantly amazed at how fast the sun heats things up whenever we get slapped by a X rated solar event. It doesn’t take more than a few hours if you are in daylight facing the solar surge of energy, to feel the effects. It heats up the atmosphere quickly. And if the oceans didn’t then absorb much of this, the effects would fade nearly as fast. This is why we have to remember the oceans, particularly the massive Pacific Ocean, are the main holders of solar energy and this keeps our planet much warmer than it would be if oceans were much smaller and shallower.
During earlier eras on this planet when it was much, much warmer than today, there was little to no glaciation and no continents like Antarctica or Greenland nearly completely locked in huge glaciers. The meant a lot of the low lying parts of the continents were under shallow water which warms up faster than deep oceans and this amplified global warming and there was little reflection of heat back into space due to there being little to no glaciers.
The earth has warmed significantly from the cold Little Ice Age and population growth has shot upwards thanks to the expansion of agriculture. The entire planet warmed quite significantly and the sun still spits out bursts of energy at our planet so it isn’t Ice Age conditions…yet. The difficult thing here is, figuring out how badly the sun ceased generating energy to send the planet into 100,000 year long cold cycles. Something is going on inside the sun that is very troubling because it means our sun isn’t a stable star anymore.
One of the things that cause variation in solar activity is the Gleissberg cycle that tracks planetary movements around the sun which causes the sun to ‘wobble’ in energy output: THE HOCKEY SCHTICK
“A century-scale (60–140 year) cyclicity was found in the summer temperature reconstruction from the Taymir peninsula (∼72° N, ∼105° E) and other high-latitude (60–70° N) regions during the time interval AD 1576–1970. This periodicity is significant and consists of two oscillation modes, 60–70 year and 120–140 year variations. In the summer temperatures from the Yamal peninsula (∼70° N, ∼67° E) only a shorter-term (60–70 year) variation is present. A comparison of the secular variation in the Northern Hemisphere temperature proxies with the corresponding variations in sunspot numbers and the fluxes of cosmogenic 10Be in Greenland ice shows that a probable cause of this variability is the modulation of temperature by the century-scale solar cycle of Gleissberg.
The last maxima of Gleissberg cycle appeared approximately in years:
1710-1720, 1760-1770, 1840-1850 and 1950-1960..
The last minima of Gleissberg cycle then fit approximately to years:
1740, 1810, 1900.
One Gleissberg cycle consists of seven consecutive sunspot cycles. Its average length is 77.5 years, max length 83.0 years and min length 72.0 years. It measures the intensity of the solar activity (Wolfian sunspot numbers).
The cycles vary in length and don’t explain Ice Ages. It does have an effect but not uniformly. It makes some events more probable but doesn’t explain why each series of events varies greatly in intensity and duration.
Here is today’s temperature map. Most of the nation is on the warm side as is normal in spring when the sun blasts us with extra energy. It will even be above freezing here on my mountain. This is NOT ‘global warming due to CO2’ it is global warming due to sun spot activity! And note how quickly it happens on continental landmasses. This will heat up the oceans a tad, too.
And this is the tail end of a fairly weak sunspot cycle. It began in 2010 and will zero out in 2020. It will be much colder during the cycle’s decline.
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