Is the Sun Missing Its Spots?

[groovedaddy]

The Sun is still blank (mostly). Ever since Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, a German astronomer, first noted in 1843 that sunspots burgeon and wane over a roughly 11-year cycle, scientists have carefully watched the Sun’s activity. In the latest lull, the Sun should have reached its calmest, least pockmarked state last fall.

Indeed, last year marked the blankest year of the Sun in the last half-century — 266 days with not a single sunspot visible from Earth. Then, in the first four months of 2009, the Sun became even more blank, the pace of sunspots slowing more.

“It’s been as dead as a doornail,” David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said a couple of months ago.

The Sun perked up in June and July, with a sizeable clump of 20 sunspots earlier this month.

Now it is blank again, consistent with expectations that this solar cycle will be smaller and calmer, and the maximum of activity, expected to arrive in May 2013 will not be all that maximum.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/science/space/21sunspot.html?th&emc=th

[maxsolomon]

1. i'm fairly certain there's nothing we can do about it

so i hope it's not a big issue!

[Warpy]

2. A protracted period of low solar activity called the Maunder Minimum

coincided with the last Little Ice Age.

It could be important. It could be slowing warming, buying us a little time to get our shit together.

[timeforpeace]

3. The sun has an influence on global warming?

[MercutioATC]

6. It's a lie. Only hairspray has an influence on global warming.

It's amazing what some propagandists will stoop to.

[trotsky]

8. Of course it does, and it's a pathetic right-wing lie...

to suggest that somehow climatologists ignore solar input from the equations. I assume you're smarter than the average right-winger, since you managed to sign on to DU.

[Warpy]

9. The Maunder Minimum-Little Ice Age might have been pure

coincidence and it might not have been. My best guess is the latter.

[tabatha]

13. Without the sun, there would be no global warming - of any kind.

[Davis_X_Machina]

4. No sunspots means poor shortwave propagation...

...and no fun for ham radio ops. :-(

[sfwriter]

5. How the heck do we know that?

What terrestrial phenomenon documents sunspots?

I'm off to google...

[sfwriter]

7. Ahh... Observational data!

We've got verified observations of sunspots going back 400 years. Awesome.

[Warpy]

10. Thanks for bothering to look it up

instead of demanding to be spoon fed.

I really, really appreciate that.

[Occulus]

14. Now THAT'S interesting

400 years? I had no idea.

How did they manage this 400 years ago?

[Birthmark]

11. It won't buy us any time.

It will merely make the period without spots a bit more comfortable than it would otherwise have been. The CO2 we're pumping out will still trap the same amount of heat with or without sunspots.

[NickB79]

12. And when the spots return, don't leave Grandma in the car.

It won't be pretty.