Why would that be significant? Well, it would allow for a full 4PI (360×360°) view of the sun. The animated movie of the sun on STEREO’s Website currently has a gap in the coverage of the sun. The spacecraft are in a heliocentric orbit drifting away from the Earth, one leading and one lagging. This diagram shows the current position of spacecraft A (ahead) and B (behind). The scale is in astronomical units, the average distance between the earth and sun.
Sun-monitoring instrumentation on spacecraft like SOHO and STEREO have gone a long way in discovering what makes the sun behave in mysterious ways. Also, the data coming back (when not intentionally distorted by the IPCC, the CRU or NASA’s James Hansen) can be used to chart the relationship between solar activity and global climate.
NOTE: This is the second posting of this article (the original article posted June 16, 2010) because the actual opposition will take place this weekend on Sunday, February 6, 2011. I updated the position graphic for Ahead and Behind and added a NASA STEREO Teaser Video.
Nothing like a little graphic evidence to show where the popular spot is in the Ford exhibit at the 2011 Detroit Auto Show. The media proclaimed the show was all about saving the planet with electric and gas-efficient vehicles to be the show’s main theme. You can see for yourself how the attendees voted with their feet. Top: Ford Trucks and SUV exhibit - bottom: Ford green vehicles exhibit.
Regardless of what you think of global warming, the point is that politicians are ignoring inevitable, short-term threats — a flood in California, a hurricane hitting NYC, an earthquake in the Midwest, multiple genocidal dictators in Africa, etc. — while spending an inordinate amount of resources and dialogue on the long-term implications of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Greg wrote this at the bottom of a Planet Gore post about how the Australians may have failed to protect against their recent flooding disasters as a consequence of Aussie Greenbats predicting drought and ignoring the flood potential. The crazy bastards built desalinization plants rather than dams!
The latest sunspot (number 1130) formed suddenly over the past two days. The image at the right shows the two day period in time lapse. You can see the spot forming in the top hemisphere just above the solar equator. You can see the full sized video here.
This winter, according to several AGW skeptic blogs and websites, promises to be quite cold. Our experience in Southern California over the last fifteen days is reported to be the record coldest for this period - and it’s not even winter yet.
I guess the lackluster return of solar activity in the solar cycle has contributed to the cold weather. We have written several articles over the past few years that show how the Sun affects global climate. Two important ones are:
During our return trip to California over the weekend, we passed this billboard on Interstate 10 near Quartzsite, AZ. The sign admonishes readers to “DO THE MATH” with regard to greenhouse gasses. I checked out the website www.psnorac.com and navigated to the Greenhouse Gasses write-up. In the lengthy treatise, the author breaks down the numbers of the composition of the atmosphere and in layman’s terms, explains the extremely small part of the atmosphere that can be considered as greenhouse gasses.
Image: billboard - click to enlarge
We did some research and found some graphics from the National Center for Policy Analysis and posted them in February of 2008. If you read the greenhouse write-up on psnorac.com, you will be able to visualize the numbers in the graphics in our post from 2008. You can download the National Center for Policy Analysis pamphlet (PDF), “A Global Warming Primer,” at this link. There is a lot of other information in the pamphlet that relate to the AGW issue.
Anybody who has taken a college physics course or studied thermodynamics knows there are no free sources of energy. Of course, actual science, these days is seldom taught anywhere but in the secondary schools. “Scientific indoctrination” is the crap that the teacher’s unions are pushing in the primary K-12 system - global climate is mankind’s fault, yada yada . . .
Alternatives to fossil fuels will take decades to develop and deploy to the point that we can abandon burning coal and oil for energy. The reality may be that worldwide, that may never happen. Hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear are generally out of the reach of third world nations from both fiscal and technology standpoints.
Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso posted an article at CO2 Science that analyzed a recent paper by Goncalves da Silva, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the State University of Campinas (Brazil). They conclude that the good professor sees the flaws in the free energy model:
So what does the professor finally conclude? He finds that “the new technology may actually be an energy sink, instead of an energy source, relative to the global total primary energy supply for many years or decades, depending on its intrinsic energy costs and deployment path, even though stated aims for its gross energy output are achieved [italics added].” Consequently, he says that “to achieve terawatts output from renewable sources, in order to displace massive quantities of fossil energies, will be a slow process, extending over many decades,” and that we should “not place undue hope in new energy technologies to save the world from fossil energies until well after many decades of deployment.” Or, we would add, if ever!
A couple of days ago, I received feedback from a reader who wanted to use our “Correlation Between Solar Activity and Global Temperature” animated graphic in his classes on Meteorology. “Professor Bob” who teaches at a community college in Virginia Beach, VA, is a rare find in academia these days. He shares our skepticism of the whole “Climate Change” hype. How refreshing is that?
The graphic, embedded at the right, originally appeared in a post we wrote back in August of 2006, “Correlating Solar Activity to Global Climate.” The post dealt with observations of sunspot activity and global temperature from 1600 to 1998 and correlated the two together. The graphic is an animated visual summary of the correlation between solar activity and global temperature.
Since the Professor wanted to include the graphic in a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation, I did some research on linking Flash™ to the presentation. I found some pretty good support from Microsoft on how to link to the graphic. I tried it here, saw that it worked, and sent the information to Bob. He emailed me this morning to say he had succeeded in getting the link to work at his end.
The whole climate scam, of course, is aimed at higher taxes on anything that emits CO2. That’s why Al Gore, most Democrats and the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the U.K. have been lying about the temperature figures ever since they started to decline after 1998. We intend to continue debunking the scam as long as we’re able.
Congratulations to Professor Bob for getting the thing working, and just as importantly, for passing the information along to his Meteorology Students.
Just wait for all the Chicken Little types to try and blame this obviously solar-related phenomenon on Anthropogenic CO2 production. From NASA Science:
A Puzzling Collapse of Earth’s Upper Atmosphere
July 15, 2010: NASA-funded researchers are monitoring a big event in our planet’s atmosphere. High above Earth’s surface where the atmosphere meets space, a rarefied layer of gas called “the thermosphere” recently collapsed and now is rebounding again.
“This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years,” says John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19th issue of the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). “It’s a Space Age record.”
Image: Atmospheric Density over time.
The collapse happened during the deep solar minimum of 2008-2009—a fact which comes as little surprise to researchers. The thermosphere always cools and contracts when solar activity is low. In this case, however, the magnitude of the collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain.
“Something is going on that we do not understand,” says Emmert.
Why would that be significant? Well, it would allow for a full 4PI (360×360°) view of the sun. The animated movie of the sun on STEREO’s Website currently has a gap in the coverage of the sun. The spacecraft are in a heliocentric orbit drifting away from the Earth, one leading and one lagging. This diagram shows the current position of spacecraft A (ahead) and B (behind). The scale is in astronomical units, the average distance between the earth and sun.
Sun-monitoring instrumentation on spacecraft like SOHO and STEREO have gone a long way in discovering what makes the sun behave in mysterious ways. Also, the data coming back (when not intentionally distorted by the IPCC, the CRU or NASA’s James Hansen) can be used to chart the relationship between solar activity and global climate.
Maybe not.
