Grand Solar Minimum - Thoughts?

Hello everyone,

Has anyone heard of this?  Anyone have any insights?

https://abruptearthchanges.com/2018/01/14/climate-change-grand-solar-minimum-and-cosmic-rays

Cheers,
CJ

I find it vexing when people try to present these topics as either/or issues. The fact that we have caused there to be record levels of CO2 can in no way be tied to this phenomenon.

I see no explanation of how the Grand Solar Minimum is causing ocean acidification.

No mention is made on the effect on Galactic Cosmic Rays when passing through seawater on their way to those undersea volcanoes that are apparently the sole cause of ocean warming and ice cap melting.

Oh, and it's news to me that we are experiencing Arctic ice sheet renewal at an alarming rate. My impression was that we'd just lost huge sections that had heretofore been thought of as permanent.

And it makes the same fallacious claims of no warming since 2000, when apparently 2018 is set to be the fourth warmest year on record, on average (or was that the fourth record-breaking year?).

I am not saying that there's nothing to what is being claimed, only that there's nothing to back up what is being claimed. It's all just conjecture and supposition. There are some interesting ideas that deserve more scientific observation and study, but still.

Fiscal conservatives who balk at responsible economics that factor in environmental and social costs will look to use articles like this to argue that we shouldn't do anything about carbon pollution, when there are a whole host of related ills caused by the same practices that are causing anthropogenic climate change.

The carcinogenic nature of urban pollution, eutrophication and pharmaceutical poisoning of waterways downstream from urban areas, the scraping of the sea bottom in unsustainable fishing practices, all of these and more are problems caused by the outlook that if we focus our systems enough, we can identify some system output that we don't want to deal with as "waste" and chuck it downstream for someone else to deal with. Not having to pay for cleanup results in profit.

I would like to see more on the subject. Currently, it runs afoul of Occam's delicate sensibilities in trying to disprove anthropogenic climate change.

And for the permaculturalist on the land, it changes nothing. If it's humid but doesn't rain, it's time to start building air wells. If the trees are dying in the drought, irrigate in the meantime, and plant drought-resistant seedlings to replace them. If you're getting more dessicating winds, it's time to revamp or beef up your windbreak. If conditions are less predictable than previous seasons, diversify, and remain flexible in planning and execution, and store more food staples.

-CK

A grand solar minimum is ENTIRELY possible!

That being said, I do not understand how cosmic rays can trigger a volcano. The article is a bit lacking in the subject of "how".

That does not mean that a solar minimum will not take place: that only means that the article does not convince me that the article is based on good science.  Personally I do not believe in global warming any longer: climate change, yes, the weather where I live has been very odd lately. The climate may well be changing where I live.

And, I am aware that the polar ice caps are expanding very quickly, but, how much of that is because it is winter out? It is too soon to say if the rate at which the ice caps are growing is a cause for alarm or not. No doubt we will know more in a year's time

Most recent reports say we've lost arctic sea ice that was heretofore assumed to be permanent.

A grand solar minimum is indeed possible. That's not at issue. But the article makes claims that are directly contradicted by recent news reports.

Global warming is only accurate as a term if it is considered that the whole globe is trapping more heat energy than is normal. Which it must be, as annual average temperatures continue to break records.

The trapped heat energy messes with natural processes that futz with weather patterns, because these processes usually rely on things like the coriolis effect and temperature differences between the poles and the equator,  and between the surface and the sea floor.

Until and unless I see data from respected sources supporting the claims made, I am disinclined to give it any creedence.

-CK

Yeah GSM is a thing. It has always been a thing. We are near the end of a solar minimum, and the next solar minimum in roughly 15 years is most likely going to be a serious issue.

Anthropogenic global warming is a completely different topic and it's best to keep these things separate if a rational discussion is to take place.

Increased cosmic radiation and coronal mass radiation have a direct effect on seismic activity, volcanic activity, and weather.

Hopefully you all recognize that the earth is an electromagnetic system. It generates it's own magnetic field, and it is why you get 2 current events during 1 lightning strike. Our upper atmosphere (ionosphere) is also an electromagnetic system that encapsulates the earth, and is separated by a semiconducting layer (air, rocks, water etc). At the mantal / crust boundary, minerals slowly transition state from liquid to solid, forming crystals. Quartz and olivine are two such examples, and they form in very large sheets covering thousands of square kms.

These crystals are piezo-electric in nature, meaning that when an electromagnetic field is applied to them, they produce a physical force. This is how quartz crystal clocks work. When cosmic and solar coronal ejecta (both have very high energies) interact with the ionoshpere, the electric potential between the two electromagnetic systems increases. This in turn triggers physical forces within the earth crust, and especially along the plate boundaries.

Now consider weather systems, which are also electromagnetic systems. This increased charge potential couples with these weather systems too, intensifying them and also applying a physical force upon them that alters their course.

These cosmic rays and CME also act directly on clouds, which causes them to disperse. This means less rain, but also reduces the heat retention capacity of the atmosphere. during GSM, the total energy output from the sun is reduced, and the reduced energy entering the earth's system combined with the reduced ability to retain captured heat means that the GSM will bring with it significantly colder temperatures, especially in the Northern hemisphere. Since atmospheric convection drives oceanic circulations, we can expect disruptions to things like the gulf stream and the Beaufort gyre.

I live in a northern continental climate, and I have been preparing for a shift in hardiness zone downwards because of the approaching confluence of long time scale natural cycles. This last GSM was mild compared to the next one, and we experience widespread crop losses in every staple food.

Unfortunately for us all, this next GSM coincides with the earths magnetic pole reversal cycle. That's a different dynamic, but what it means is that the effects from cosmic rays and CME will be very much magnified.

Um, polar ice is most definitely on the decrease. You can see charts of measured sea ice extent at places like this: https://neptune.gsfc.nasa.gov/csb/index.php?section=234 and the data comes from photographic measurement. In other words, even a non scientist could download the satellite photos and compare them to see how the ice coverage has changed. For what it's worth, all the records for low sea ice extent have been repeatedly broken in the past two decades.

That's sea ice. Then there are the ice caps, which are losing mass in both the vertical and horizontal directions at an accelerating pace. Again, it's just like glaciers everywhere else in the world. Temperatures go up, and ice melts. The big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica that flow out to sea are retreating thanks to warmer ocean water melting them from below. As they lose their attachment to solid earth on the seafloor, it's sort of like pulling a dam out of a river and the ice flow speeds up and breaks off at the end. There have been some heatwaves on the Greenland ice cap in the past couple of years that turned the surface into a maze of rushing rivers.

This is all stuff that ordinary folks can verify for themselves if they don't trust the science. All you need is to get out there and measure things.

I submit this article for review.

This doesn't mean that the next solar minimum won't cause another ice age. It does seem to suggest that we're not cooling yet.

-CK

Phil Stevens wrote:Greg, it's not faith if we can measure it. Got a thermometer and some spare time?

(...from the article)

"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may have a boring name, but it has a very important job: It measures U.S. temperatures. Unfortunately, it seems to be a captive of the global warming religion. Its data are fraudulent.

What do we mean by fraudulent? How about this: NOAA has made repeated "adjustments" to its data, for the presumed scientific reason of making the data sets more accurate.

Nothing wrong with that. Except, all their changes point to one thing — lowering previously measured temperatures to show cooler weather in the past, and raising more recent temperatures to show warming in the recent present.

This creates a data illusion of ever-rising temperatures to match the increase in CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere since the mid-1800s, which global warming advocates say is a cause-and-effect relationship. The more CO2, the more warming.

But the actual measured temperature record shows something different: There have been hot years and hot decades since the turn of the last century, and colder years and colder decades. But the overall measured temperature shows no clear trend over the last century, at least not one that suggests runaway warming.

That is, until the NOAA's statisticians "adjust" the data. Using complex statistical models, they change the data to reflect not reality, but their underlying theories of global warming. That's clear from a simple fact of statistics: Data generate random errors, which cancel out over time. So by averaging data, the errors mostly disappear.

That's not what NOAA does.

According to the NOAA, the errors aren't random. They're systematic. As we noted, all of their temperature adjustments lean cooler in the distant past, and warmer in the more recent past. But they're very fuzzy about why this should be.

Far from legitimately "adjusting" anything, it appears they are cooking the data to show a politically correct trend toward global warming. Not by coincidence, that has been part and parcel of the government's underlying policies for the better part of two decades.

What NOAA does aren't niggling little changes, either.

As Tony Heller at the Real Climate Science web site notes, "Pre-2000 temperatures are progressively cooled, and post-2000 temperatures are warmed. This year has been a particularly spectacular episode of data tampering by NOAA, as they introduce nearly 2.5 degrees of fake warming since 1895."

So the global warming scare is basically a hoax.

This winter, for instance, as measured by temperature in city after city  and by snow-storm severity, has been one of the coldest on record in the Northeast.

But after the NOAA's wizards finished with the data, it was merely about average.

Climate analyst Paul Homewood notes for instance that in New York state, measured temperatures this year were 2.7 degrees or more colder than in 1943. Not to NOAA. Its data show temperatures this year as 0.9 degrees cooler than the actual data in 1943.

Erasing Winter

By the way, a similar result occurred after the brutally cold 2013-2014 winter in New York. It was simply adjusted away. Do this year after year, and with the goal of radically altering the temperature record to fit the global warming narrative, and you have what amounts to climate fraud.

"Clearly NOAA's highly homogenized and adjusted version of the Central Lakes temperature record bears no resemblance at all the the actual station data," writes Homewood. "And if this one division is so badly in error, what confidence can there be that the rest of the U.S. is any better?"

That's the big question. And for those who think that government officials don't have political, cultural or other agendas, that's naivete of the highest sort. They do.

Since the official government mantra for all of the bureaucracies at least since the Clinton era is that CO2 production is an evil that inevitably leads to runaway global warming, those who toil in the bureaucracies' statistical sweat shops know that their careers and future funding depend on having the politically correct answers — not the scientifically correct ones.

"The key point here is that while NOAA frequently makes these adjustments to the raw data, it has never offered a convincing explanation as to why they are necessary," wrote James Delingpole recently in Breitbart's Big Government. "Nor yet, how exactly their adjusted data provides a more accurate version of the truth than the original data."

There are at least some signs of progress, however. In the case of the Environmental Protection Agency, future reports and studies will include the data and the underlying scientific assumptions for public scrutiny.

That's one way to bring greater honesty to government — and to keep climate charlatans from bankrupting our nation with spurious demands for carbon taxes and deindustrialization of our economy to prevent global warming. The only real result won't be a cooler planet, but rather mass poverty and lower standards of living for all."

Greg, there are actual, physical pictures of glaciers a hundred years ago that are fractions of their size. Countries with major shipping interests have been drooling over the possible opening of the Northwest Passage north of North America.

This isn't futzing with data points. There has been measurable glacier and ice cap loss. The fact that errors in previous calculations were discovered and corrected to accord with other, independent sources of information, ice core data and dendrochronological data among others, doesn't indicate a conspiracy.

-CK

Chris Kott wrote:Greg, there are actual, physical pictures of glaciers a hundred years ago that are fractions of their size. Countries with major shipping interests have been drooling over the possible opening of the Northwest Passage north of North America.

This isn't futzing with data points. There has been measurable glacier and ice cap loss. The fact that errors in previous calculations were discovered and corrected to accord with other, independent sources of information, ice core data and dendrochronological data among others, doesn't indicate a conspiracy.

-CK

That is not the whole picture....

Antarctic Sea Ice Reaches New Record

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum

1) More Incoming 'heat' from the 'sun.'
2) Less Outgoing heat/energy leaving the earth due to greenhouse gases effect.
It doesn't matter which one is causing it.

What does matter is, do companies/governement/people want to buy/support/fund things that.
A) Do nothing about the climate change and in fact accelerate it
or
B) Do something do make it more stable and better.

We are not helpless bugs, we are stewards of the earth.
We do have a say in our environment.
We can do things to produce less smog/ozone depletion/warming that hurts our fellow humans
We can do things that help our rivers and ocean so that the future has more or at least the same quality/quantity vs less.

We can do things in a more responsible way.


We have been to the MOON so this idea that we have no control over anything, is not 100% correct.
We are stewards and we change our environment, and we can help to make it better for everyone, for future generation.

Also, Greg, the article to which you linked clearly states that sea ice levels returned to average levels in 2015, and that Arctic sea ice loss far outpaces any gains seen in the Antarctic.

-CK

Greg, a couple of things since I'm just taking a break before I go back out into the garden.

1) Antarctic sea ice did increase for a number of years. This was due to a couple of factors: high winds which kept cold air concentrated around the pole, and a layer of reduced salinity on the surface from the increased melting of the fast ice and glaciers. Both measurable and verifiable. Also, that trend has now reversed and sea ice in the south is showing a retreating trend similar to the Arctic, but not as severe yet.

2) Your assertion of "no trend" is not backed up by hundreds of data sets which do indeed show warming on a global scale. Here is a fun way to spot trends: Pick any city in the US. Now count the number of records in the past ten or twenty years. Compare the number of record highs, including all-time ones, to record lows. Pick another city and do the same thing. Then try it with some international locations. Let me know when you find one which has more record lows than highs since the turn of the century. Drinks are on me when you find it.

Even though I know that companies producing electronics/clothes/etc in China is destroying their rivers, and polluting the air. I am still going to religiously get new phones/clothes/computers/etc. Because I obviously don't really care about the horrible things that are happening in China or anywhere really. I am okay admitting that. Something has to die for me to live and enjoy yummy meat. And the world has to give something up and get degraded for me to enjoy the luxuries of life. And I can respect others who can come out and just be upfront. That said I am aware of the harm my lifestyle is causing and I am not going to lie and say it doesn't exist. Instead I will just say I am going to die in a decade or two and I selfishly don't care ENOUGH about people who live halfway around the world. I don't even care that much about myself, have you seen the list of unhealthy habits that I have. So I am not going to be a hypocrite and point no fingers.

That said Glacier on mountaintop in country after country is decreasing and vanishing.
We have personal stories and pictures showing this
I think very few people are going to say all of those personal stories and 'scientific' picture are all lies.
Now while the rest of the earth 'glaciers' are decreasing in surface area and volume.
The one at the southern pole is increasing in surface area. (And possible decreasing in volume for a trend that fits the rest of the world due to a possible weakening of the conveyor).

I think it is okay to say we humans have degraded the planet, we have harmed rain-forest, rivers, lakes, sea fisheries of the world, etc, etc and are now doing it to the air and world's temperature.
But there is hope, We have started to repair the Ozone that protect the earth vs just saying, oxygen and ozone levels of the earth's atmosphere have cycles. The river near me no longer changes color based on factory waste and the beach/estuary near me is now safe to swim in again, and there is no more raw sewerage being dumped into it.

Now some might say these hole in the ozone or the melting ice cap were 150% not cause by humans or at least not by my generation of humans. The truth is that we have the resources and skill to help the ozone/climate/mass-extinction, even if it isn't cause by us. The question is do we as social animals (mega-organisms) who are stewards of the earth plan to collectively come togather as a 'village' and deal with this problem.

Now, I know that all of what I said above is just my take on it and I don't plan on changing anyone's belief/convictions/religion/etc. We are who we are. And like most of us here I don't like being told that as part of the 'pack/village/world' I have to surrender and let the pack leader/government/noble dictate, what I can't and cant do.  But overall we aren't 100% hermits, we do share this space and we do need some rules.

Greg, if you want to know if the globe is warming or not then use the global thermometer, average global sea level.  Satellite altimetry data is very highly accurate and demonstrates without doubt that sea levels are rising and the rate is accelerating, currently it's rising at 3.4mm/year.  The sea levels are primarily rising due to the expansion of water with temperature rise, though melting ice is adding to this rise.  The Earths oceans absorb 90% of any heat gain and this is therefore the only data required to understand any shift in the energy balance.  We have fantastic data that shows the Earth is warming, there is no other explanation that covers the observations.  I'd really love to believe that human activity is not causing this problem, but it just doesn't line up with reality.  The science is pretty clear.

I wonder if the lowered solar output will affect how many solar panels I need. Will solar flares fry my personal solar panels. How about utility scale solar farms, that is a mile long, will they act like a huge 'antenna/disk' get fried by sun activities.  I vaguely remember hearing that it can fry the grid/transformers.

CO2 is great, heck, it's critical, but shifts in systems often have consequences.  Excess resources where they don't belong have consequences.  Society decided it was important to understand what those consequences are and so they spent money to research it.  The research came back.  The findings are that it will create a very costly disruption to our society and that we should therefore address it.  This does not seem unreasonable to me.  Taxes aren't necessarily required to address this issue, but perhaps we also then don't want to spend tax dollars to support pipelines for fossil fuels, especially when new technologies are ready to become a cheaper and much less damaging replacement.

I have an acquaintance that is sure last winter was the warmest we'll ever see again.  I suspect the Grand Solar Minimum is related to his thinking.  He offered to bet that the next 5 winters would all be colder than last winter's.  I think I'll take him up on that bet, purely from a statistical variability point of view.

I would like to make a few points about the article quoted in detail up thread in which it is suggested that NOAA  has made fraudulent adjustments to climate data.  The article itself is marked as an "Editorial" in Investors Business Daily, which is to say, it's an opinion piece, not claiming to be factual news reporting.  It's also unsigned, without byline. No actual journalist or even an opinion pundit exists who is willing to accept critiques over the content of the piece.  I consider it to be written in a heavily argumentative style by my standards, full of opinion-laden language like "fraudulent", "cooking the data," "hoax", and referring to scientists and mathematicians derisively as "wizards."

The actual people and publications quoted in the piece are:

-- A website called "Real Climate Science", which is actually the blog of a dude named Tony Heller; said blog does not offer any "about me" page or resume articulating Heller's needful qualifications to bandy complicated statistics on equal terms with the army of serious statisticians employed by NOAA

-- "climate analyst" Paul Homewood, aka another dude with a blog; his "about" page says "Bringing some sanity to the Climate Change debate" and there's no other readily-visible suggestion of why we should prioritize his number-crunching skills over people who do that for their lives' work

-- an editor for Breitbart London named James Delingpole, famous for writing a book called 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy -- definitely an unbiased fellow, eh? -- who delights in denying anthropogenic climate change while cheerfully exclaiming "I am not a scientist" and maintaining that he does not need to read any papers on the subject

That's it.  The most insanely complex body of numbers and data out there; a huge batch of models, dozens of complicated reasons why the numbers may have needed to be adjusted.  People who need multidisciplinary PhDs just to begin to understand the datasets, and how to manipulate them.  Am I qualified to assess those manipulations?  No.  But I am qualified, a little, to look at the sources who criticize the people who are doing the work.  And when those critics can't pass even the most basic red-face tests for credibility -- in credentials, in willingness to sign their names to their critiques, in ability or willingness to write those critiques in neutral and professional language -- then I see no reason to preference those critiques over the serious professionals doing the work.  People who do have the credentials, people who are wiling to sign their names to their work.  People who publish scientific papers, not "editorials" that claim to refute scientific papers.

Were all the numbers adjusted in the same direction?  There aren't enough years left in my life before I die for me to acquire the education I would need to answer that question for myself.  But with ten minutes of Googling I was able to satisfy myself that the editorial claiming they were so adjusted, was not a source I would advise any fair-minded person to trust.

Were all the adjustments, in whichever direction, justifiable?  Same answer.

But as a wise person once said, consider the source.

Does that mean "Trust the government?"  Oh, hell no!  But most of the important decisions in life involve choosing what to believe in the conflicting and complicated accounts we hear from competing unreliable narrators.  It's not a choice between "trust one and mistrust the other", it's a matter of "of all the evidence being paraded in front of me, where is the low-hanging fruit of obviously-unreliable stuff that I can use to know who I should definitely not be listening to?"

What we know without any reasonable doubt is that the Earth is warming and has been steadily warming for decades and that the rate of warming is accelerating.  

The topic of whether or not someone manipulated a bit of surface air temperature data for some reason is a complete red herring.  The average sea level rise satellite altimetry data is the only data that's needed to answer the question of whether or not the Earth is warming and it answers that question with a resounding and very clear yes.  And not only that, but it demonstrates that the rate is accelerating.  Over the long term air temperatures will tell the story, but short term they are very noisy as they can be influenced by many factors.  Just pay attention to the average global sea level data and you'll have this answer.  Some things are straightforward.  



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

I'll add that my wife and I enjoy watching videos from Suspicious Observers on Youtube as well as their site https://suspicious0bservers.org/ We are also aware that there is a number of in my opinion, really far out there thinkers following this site, that's fine too, no judgement from us.  The point of our watching is simply the wonderful charts and video he collects from around the world. Ben also has some impressive credentials Ben Davidson
We also love the way he sums up his daily videos with, "Eyes open, No Fear."   The videos of the Sun in various wavelengths are mesmerizing. The videos of lightning storms crossing the continents are incredible too.  
I see no reason to not think outside the box when it comes to astrophysics, simply because out there, where we've never set foot, it is all conjecture.
Brian

Brian Rodgers wrote:I'll add that my wife and I enjoy watching videos from Suspicious Observers on Youtube as well as their site https://suspicious0bservers.org/ We are also aware that there is a number of in my opinion, really far out there thinkers following this site, that's fine too, no judgement from us.  The point of our watching is simply the wonderful charts and video he collects from around the world. Ben also has some impressive credentials Ben Davidson
We also love the way he sums up his daily videos with, "Eyes open, No Fear."   The videos of the Sun in various wavelengths are mesmerizing. The videos of lightning storms crossing the continents are incredible too.  
I see no reason to not think outside the box when it comes to astrophysics, simply because out there, where we've never set foot, it is all conjecture.
Brian

He posted an interesting study this morning that may potentially turn the standard model of vulcanism on its head:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/189371/volcanoes-mush-reservoirs-rather-than-molten/

As I mentioned a few days ago, these crystals are often piezoelectric in nature and are the prime suspect in the link between GSM and volcanic activity.