When the Sun Loses Its Flare

We’ve seen how some recent temperatures in Greenland and Alaska are warmer than the freezing temperatures in our Midwest and Eastern Seaboard. Hot air pushing cold air south. The polar vortex, if you will. We know what is causing earth-directed temperature change – fossil fuels creating a greenhouse effect, trapping and heating the atmosphere beneath where the sun’s rays cook those gasses. There’s virtually no dissent on this phenomenon from any serious scientist, and the climate change results are evidenced in everything from regional realities ranging from unending drought, more wildfires, melting glaciers and ice packs, rising oceans and storm surges, to migrating insects carrying new forms of disease, more intense mega-storms, etc.  What’s worse, these events seem to be moving upon us even more rapidly than even some of the most pessimistic climatologists had predicted.

That’s what we are doing to our own planet, but way out there… at the source of our life’s heat – the Sun – are there additional phenomena that might be creating a different scenario that might create parallel and perhaps slightly countervailing cooling trends? Perhaps, but if this is indeed what may be happening, be advised that this is not a permanent temperature shift but a temporary effect.

This all has to do with the relative activity on the Sun’s surface, solar storms, which can disrupt electronic communications when they reach a high level of intensity… but which can have even greater impact when they diminish: “The sun goes through cycles that last roughly 11 years, marked by the ebb and flow of sunspots on its surface. At peak sunspot activity, the so-called solar maximum, the sun sports lots of sunspots and is steadily unleashing solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Since our current solar cycle, Number 24, kicked off in 2008, the number of sunspots observed has been half of what heliophysicists expected.

“‘I’ve never seen anything quite like this,’ Dr. Richard Harrison, head of space physics at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England, told the BBC. ‘If you want to go back to see when the sun was this inactive in terms of the minimum we’ve just had and the peak that we have now, you’ve got to go back about 100 years.’…

“‘The sun is most definitely not 'asleep,'’ [according to] Dr. C. Alex Young, solar astrophysicist and associate science director in the Heliophysics Science Division of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center… In fact, on January 7th, 2014, NASA observed a massive solar flare burst from a sunspot group measured to be ‘some seven Earth's across.’

“But a relatively quiet sun could cause problems. Some scientists say that this period of weak solar activity may mirror what happened before the so-called Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715 -- a period named after solar astronomers Annie and E. Walter Maunder, who studied sunspots and helped identify the sun's strange activity in the latter part of the 17th Century. That time period saw only 30 sunspots (one one-thousandth of what would be expected) and coincided with a ‘Little Ice Age’ in Europe, during which the Thames River and the Baltic Sea froze over.” Huffington Post, January 24^th. But the 17^th century also got a little cooling help from some pretty big volcanic eruptions that cast some pretty large cooling ash-shadows over parts of the earth.

So could this potential mini-Ice Age be enough, at least while the reduced solar activity continues, to counter our growing greenhouse effect? “Maybe, but it wouldn't do much, and not for very long. Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research used a computer model to predict the effect of a future ‘grand solar minimum’ on Earth's climate from 2020 to 2070. The model suggested the minimum might temporarily slow down the warming process by 20-30 percent. But within a few decades afterward, the temperatures would go right back to where they would have been anyway.” Huffington Post.

Beggars can’t be choosers, and I guess we would take what we can get, but no one really knows for sure how long the reduction in solar surface activity would endure or even if this activity has really begun. It would be profoundly stupid to assume we are off the hook on the damage we have done and continue to do to our own planet.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the one true thing is that rarely does nature produce a simple, linear change to our environment… complexity and unpredictable variables will always challenge the accuracy of our best assumptions and calculations.