Something's Happening to the Sun Right Now, Here's What It Means for Earth
Scientists say Earth's atmosphere is about to get hit by some record cold – but it's not because of anything caused by humans. It's because of a lack of sunspots which means a major decrease in ultraviolet waves coming in our direction.
Dr. Tony Philipps of SpaceWeatherArchive.com says there have been practically no sunspots in 2018, and that's causing earth's upper atmosphere to cool down and even shrink. He cites some experts from NASA.
"We see a cooling trend," says Martin Mlynczak of NASA's Langley Research Center. "High above Earth's surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold."
https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2018 ... t-it-means
Space Weather Impacts On Climate
...The duration of solar minimum may also have an impact on Earth's climate. During solar minimum there is a maximum in the amount of Cosmic rays, high energy particles whose source is outside our Solar system, reaching earth. There is a theory that cosmic rays can create nucleation sites in the atmosphere which seed cloud formation and create cloudier conditions. If this were true, then there would be a significant impact on climate, which would be modulated by the 11-year solar cycle.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/impacts/space ... ts-climate
And yet, record high temperatures set month on month, year on year. Those considering the maunder minimum hypothesis might wonder where that stands next to this gem from the BBC via Quaternary Science Reviews:
America colonisation ‘cooled Earth's climate’
Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth's climate.
That's the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.
The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.
This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.
It's a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the "Little Ice Age" - a time when winters in Europe would see the Thames in London regularly freeze over.
"The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO₂ and global surface air temperatures," Alexander Koch and colleagues write in their paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Which is also an interesting theory. I couldn't help notice the above piece by BBC (and a number of other news agencies but not all) quoted Prof Mark Maslin as having made this rather intriguing formulation:
There is a marked cooling around that time (1500s/1600s) which is called the Little Ice Age, and what's interesting is that we can see natural processes giving a little bit of cooling, but actually to get the full cooling - double the natural processes - you have to have this genocide-generated drop in CO₂.
The paper itself (PDF of the full paper available at the link) suggests the maunder minimum can't account for the extent of the cooling.
For TSI theSporer Minimum (1416e1537 CE) and the Maunder Minimum(1645e1715 CE) are commonly suggested to explain the cool pe-riods during LIA conditions seen in Europe, but these events leave agap between the mid-1500s to mid-1600s, and so are not the causeof the increased land carbon stocks or the decline in temperatureduring this period
Despite what should be a relatively cool period we're experiencing a steady rise in temperature. We might conclude that preserving all remaining forest and reforestation at a frantic rate is our single best option for carbon sequestration and thereby survival, in a situation which even genocide can't affect. As Guy McPherson has pointed out, even if you removed every single human being on the planet, in the short term this would make the situation far worse, for a number of reasons. But, apparently deforestation continues to remove an area the size of Belgium annually and is currently accelerating in the Amazon region of Brazil among other places.
Considering the gargantuan scale of global fossil subsidies, trillions annually, currently we have the resources to pay for preservation and reforestation, but a relative minority have channeled our attention, talents and resources elsewhere. In any case, as the above suggests, it's probably far worse than we think.