Sunspots, some claim, are the cause of the earth’s climatic changes, not the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that humans pour into the air every day. What is the evidence for this claim?
When I was at university in Manchester I walked up John Dalton Street from time to time. I also past a statue of John Dalton outside the Town Hall and had friends who lived in Dalton Hall residence. I never then knew that John Dalton, who died 123 years ago, was one of England’s leader thinkers who was the first to speculate about differences between various atoms was their masses, create a table of atomic weights (which followed directly from his speculation), and wrote about colour blindness. If Dalton had been in Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh or London he would have been greatly honoured; presumably the existence of one of the world’s leader thinkers in commercial Manchester was overlooked by the then great and the good.
Dalton was very interested in the weather and recorded observations of weather virtually every day of his life.
His observations showed a period of lower than normal solar activity – very few sunspots – that coincided with lower than normal temperatures between 1790 and 1830. 1816 was called the year without a summer.
Later an astronomer, Edward Maunder, studied old data covering the period between 1645 and 1715 and sought to link the colder than average temperatures then with lack of sun spot activity. In both the period that Dalton noted and the period that Maunder found the average temperature was two degrees Celsius lower.
In addition Gustav Spörer recorded similar low temperatures and low sunspot activity between 1460 and 1550.
Two degrees is a very large lowering of average temperature, and the three periods are now called “the Dalton Minimum”, “the Maunder Minimum” and “the Spörer Minimum”.
The Maunder Minimum coincided with “the little Ice Age” when, as far as we can gather, Europe and North America suffered from bitterly cold winters. This set people wondering whether there was a connection between colder than normal weather and lack of sunspot activity and if so whether increased sun spot activity leads to hotter than average weather. By studying the production of Carbon-14 in radiocarbon dating, and by measuring the production of beryllium -10 (which is affected by sunspots) scientists conclude that there have been 18 periods during the past 8,000 years which were times of low sunspot activity. Altogether the sun seems to spend a quarter of its time with few sunspots.
What seems to happen during these “minima” is that when there are no sunspots there is a decrease in ultraviolet light falling on the earth, which decreases the concentration of ozone. This affects the quality of the light reaching the surface and so the theory goes, causing the climate to change. Of course changes in insolation (the amount of light being received) occur for other reasons unassociated with sunspots. For example, the earth will get more insolation as it moves closer to the sun and less as it moves away from the sun on its slightly irregular orbits. The sun seems to marginally vary in size, which also affects things.
Many scientists have believed that sunspot activity and climate change were in a direct casual relationship. The sun is a climate “forcing” agent but in the main greenhouse gases are human created forcing agents.
There are patterns in sunspot activity that link up to patterns in local weather, for some of the time and in some places. These patterns are probably not enough of a fit to be able to prove that sunspots activity causes higher temperatures, although it is possible to show some correlation that provides grounds for further study. So far, most predictions of climate and weather based on sunspot activity have proved to be wrong.
Human induced global warming is a theory, albeit a highly persuasive theory. Sunspot induced global warming is also a theory but seems to have too many inconsistencies and not enough correlations to have significant credibility.
The climate is, as I keep reminding myself, something of immense scientific complexity wand to which logically everything from humans to the sun or from the formation of the planet to the growing things that live and die on it must affect one way or the other. It is entirely possible that sunspots may be a factor in climate change and if they are they are a factor that we cannot control and that cannot be said of human greenhouse gas emissions
Filed under: carbon dioxide, carbon emissions, climate change, global warming | Tagged: Edward Maunder, Gustav Sporer, john dalton. manchester, sun spots, sunspots, the little ice age, the sun as a climate forcing
its warming not worming
I have read further into this subject albeit at an amature basis but what we would like to know is,
If all this is a natural cycle, what happens when we upset the balance b y knocking out all the forests which are supposed to absorb Co2, but add more Co2 than is being reabsorbed by nature.
Also where does the un-natural Co2 that we are adding go to if there are less and less natural SYNCS.
If the sun is in its dormant stage and we are supposed to be worming up still, where is the heat coming from ??, surely we must be having an effect, as the ice melts and the oceans grow, how much can we cope with before growing food in the hotter climates gets harder to acheive, where will all the extra food come from when the population grows.
I believe that many of the answers have already been ansewered b ut we still ignore what is coming,best do what every you are capable of, ignore the achademics who want you to be like them and feed your family with your hands on skills as we are doing.
Exploitation in any form is slavery in my book, making people work and give away things for the good of a few and making others work for nothing will only end up in disaster for the whole.
Its down to the them and us syndrome, once the few have the majority the man y who have nothing will take it all back and the whole processs starts all over again.
Once the oil is out of the equasion, religon will aagin try to make up for things and we are again back in a holy war where all side think they are right and we again waste man y innocent lives because of what people think, are we to be in constant resolution with everything that is natural.