You are about to hear the cry, almost reminiscent of Chicken Little’s, but one centered on the minimal “solar activity” that appears to panic so many: “The Sun doesn’t have many sunspots nowadays. We’re going to enter another ‘ice age’ like the one that plagued the people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Everyone be very afraid. The winter storms are coming, and they will be unprecedented.”
That is, “unprecedented” if one doesn’t consider the precedents.*
“No sunspots. Didn’t that happen in the same year that Big Ben, the famous clock, also stopped running? 1976, no clock, no spots I think. And wasn’t the winter of 1976-1977 a really bad one for northeastern USA? That winter and the winter of 1916-1917 comprise arguably the two worst winters of the twentieth century. What if we’re entering a period like the Maunder minimum and the Little Ice Age?”**
What if we do enter an era that parallels that of the Little Ice Age? Or, a better question: What are YOU going to do about it? Really, what can you do about the Sun or about volcanic activity that blocks incoming solar radiation? Tell me. I’m all ears.
The Sun is almost a million miles in diameter and about a million times the volume of Earth. In other words, kids, It’s really big—pay attention over there in the corner: I’m talking to you, Greta. It’s also very far away, so far that when it sends photons our way, they take more than eight minutes to reach us. The Sun we see is the Sun of the past. But that past stretches only those eight minutes. That we have discerned patterns in its activity is remarkable, but we have identified those patterns for only the briefest part of its approximately five-billion-year history. True, the Sun has been steady enough over the past 3.5 billion years for life to form, but we know little of its past fluctuations except by proxy science. Our knowledge of sunspots goes back only as far as Galileo’s telescopic observations.*** Four centuries is just 0.00000009 of the Sun’s lifetime and a time clumped at this end of its existence; it’s not a sampling of a five-billion-year history.****
But those in-the-know think they know that the Sun is entering a quiescent period, and that could mean a brief respite from global warming. In fact, pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere might help to lessen any effects of a predicted Little Ice Age or even of a potentially coming cold decade. Now I can hear the newscasters exclaiming, “Well, if it hadn’t been for the burning of fossil fuels, we’d all be freezing right now.” And I can hear those who are freezing and paying big heating bills, even those enamored of global warming, say, “Quick, everyone, burn something.” Such is the nature of human nature. In comfort, we all seem to have morals; we’re all altruistic and ethical. We all care about Mother Earth. In discomfort? Not so much. Lump of coal, anyone? Oh! That’s right; it’s not easy to find.*****
Strange how humans have such short memories: The moment dictates the logic. And the logic dictates the ethics. The moment dictates the attitude, the philosophy, the politics, and the beliefs. And this seems especially true when the matter is too complex for any one layperson to take in. Told that we’re doomed to suffer irreversible warming in just under a decade from now, we’re currently told that the Sun’s inactivity might cast us into a prolonged winter, crop failures, and the need for burning more fossil fuels just to keep warm. What’s a layperson to think? What’s a climate zealot to do? Shiver in cold and wear a sweater as Jimmy Carter advised, or, shoot, just temporarily give in and burn some stuff?
In fact, most of us don’t really “think.” We react to rumor and innuendo. We follow as we are told to follow, not as a mere “Nation of Sheep,” but as individuals incapable of sifting through the data on a complex Solar System and a planet that has undergone excessive warming and cooling. Solar Minimums? They come and go. Occasional droughts, cold spells, and heat waves, also. Coming and going. That’s the way of the world. Could an increase in carbon stave off a new ice age? It might. Then what? When the Sun becomes active again, we’ll have all that carbon in our air, and we’ll swing to higher temperatures, making us wish for the next Solar Minimum or distant super volcanic eruption.
Sure, we can stop using fossil fuels, build nuclear reactors with fail-safe protections, use less energy individually, buy a solar panel or two, and turn as green as we can, but the Sun will do what it always does. Sometimes it’s active; other times, inactive. And those occasional big eruptions that spew ash and sulfur into the stratosphere to block incoming radiation will occur as they occur, hopefully not during a Solar Minimum to exacerbate the cold.
What are the global warming proselytizers going to do? Simple me: I need advice, and, apparently, I need it soon. A quiescent Sun hovers over us. The number of sunspots has fallen. We look up at an unblemished disk of light. Should I be worried? Someone in-the-know, tell me what to do.
*Wagner, James A. Nov. 1977. The Severe Winter of 1976-1977: Precursors and Precedents. Long Range Prediction Group of the National Meteorological Center, National Weather Service, NOAA, Washington, D.C. http://nwafiles.nwas.org/digest/papers/1977/Vol02No4/1977v002no04-Wagner.pdf
Accessed January 16, 2020.
** https://www.britannica.com/science/Maunder-minimum
***After initially looking through his telescope to observe the setting Sun, Galileo began indirect observations. His blindness occurred decades later, much later in life (in his 70s), so we can’t attribute it to those observations.
****https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity
*****THE REAL ETHICAL, OR ECO-ETHICAL, TEST: When those who currently advocate the cessation of all fossil fuel use are freezing, will they still insist on not using fossil fuels? The proof, as they say, might lie in the frozen pudding.
That is, “unprecedented” if one doesn’t consider the precedents.*
“No sunspots. Didn’t that happen in the same year that Big Ben, the famous clock, also stopped running? 1976, no clock, no spots I think. And wasn’t the winter of 1976-1977 a really bad one for northeastern USA? That winter and the winter of 1916-1917 comprise arguably the two worst winters of the twentieth century. What if we’re entering a period like the Maunder minimum and the Little Ice Age?”**
What if we do enter an era that parallels that of the Little Ice Age? Or, a better question: What are YOU going to do about it? Really, what can you do about the Sun or about volcanic activity that blocks incoming solar radiation? Tell me. I’m all ears.
The Sun is almost a million miles in diameter and about a million times the volume of Earth. In other words, kids, It’s really big—pay attention over there in the corner: I’m talking to you, Greta. It’s also very far away, so far that when it sends photons our way, they take more than eight minutes to reach us. The Sun we see is the Sun of the past. But that past stretches only those eight minutes. That we have discerned patterns in its activity is remarkable, but we have identified those patterns for only the briefest part of its approximately five-billion-year history. True, the Sun has been steady enough over the past 3.5 billion years for life to form, but we know little of its past fluctuations except by proxy science. Our knowledge of sunspots goes back only as far as Galileo’s telescopic observations.*** Four centuries is just 0.00000009 of the Sun’s lifetime and a time clumped at this end of its existence; it’s not a sampling of a five-billion-year history.****
But those in-the-know think they know that the Sun is entering a quiescent period, and that could mean a brief respite from global warming. In fact, pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere might help to lessen any effects of a predicted Little Ice Age or even of a potentially coming cold decade. Now I can hear the newscasters exclaiming, “Well, if it hadn’t been for the burning of fossil fuels, we’d all be freezing right now.” And I can hear those who are freezing and paying big heating bills, even those enamored of global warming, say, “Quick, everyone, burn something.” Such is the nature of human nature. In comfort, we all seem to have morals; we’re all altruistic and ethical. We all care about Mother Earth. In discomfort? Not so much. Lump of coal, anyone? Oh! That’s right; it’s not easy to find.*****
Strange how humans have such short memories: The moment dictates the logic. And the logic dictates the ethics. The moment dictates the attitude, the philosophy, the politics, and the beliefs. And this seems especially true when the matter is too complex for any one layperson to take in. Told that we’re doomed to suffer irreversible warming in just under a decade from now, we’re currently told that the Sun’s inactivity might cast us into a prolonged winter, crop failures, and the need for burning more fossil fuels just to keep warm. What’s a layperson to think? What’s a climate zealot to do? Shiver in cold and wear a sweater as Jimmy Carter advised, or, shoot, just temporarily give in and burn some stuff?
In fact, most of us don’t really “think.” We react to rumor and innuendo. We follow as we are told to follow, not as a mere “Nation of Sheep,” but as individuals incapable of sifting through the data on a complex Solar System and a planet that has undergone excessive warming and cooling. Solar Minimums? They come and go. Occasional droughts, cold spells, and heat waves, also. Coming and going. That’s the way of the world. Could an increase in carbon stave off a new ice age? It might. Then what? When the Sun becomes active again, we’ll have all that carbon in our air, and we’ll swing to higher temperatures, making us wish for the next Solar Minimum or distant super volcanic eruption.
Sure, we can stop using fossil fuels, build nuclear reactors with fail-safe protections, use less energy individually, buy a solar panel or two, and turn as green as we can, but the Sun will do what it always does. Sometimes it’s active; other times, inactive. And those occasional big eruptions that spew ash and sulfur into the stratosphere to block incoming radiation will occur as they occur, hopefully not during a Solar Minimum to exacerbate the cold.
What are the global warming proselytizers going to do? Simple me: I need advice, and, apparently, I need it soon. A quiescent Sun hovers over us. The number of sunspots has fallen. We look up at an unblemished disk of light. Should I be worried? Someone in-the-know, tell me what to do.
*Wagner, James A. Nov. 1977. The Severe Winter of 1976-1977: Precursors and Precedents. Long Range Prediction Group of the National Meteorological Center, National Weather Service, NOAA, Washington, D.C. http://nwafiles.nwas.org/digest/papers/1977/Vol02No4/1977v002no04-Wagner.pdf
Accessed January 16, 2020.
** https://www.britannica.com/science/Maunder-minimum
***After initially looking through his telescope to observe the setting Sun, Galileo began indirect observations. His blindness occurred decades later, much later in life (in his 70s), so we can’t attribute it to those observations.
****https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity
*****THE REAL ETHICAL, OR ECO-ETHICAL, TEST: When those who currently advocate the cessation of all fossil fuel use are freezing, will they still insist on not using fossil fuels? The proof, as they say, might lie in the frozen pudding.
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