Grand Solar Minimum is coming. And..?

our son really is a breathtaking miracle of nature essentially it's a massive nuclear fusion reactor every single second of every single day it converts about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium and every single second of every single day that fusion reaction results in about 4 million tons of matter being converted to energy you could fit a million earths inside it and it's got about 330,000 times the mass of the planet we live on in fact it's so massive that it actually makes up about ninety-nine point eight six percent of all the mass that exists in our solar system it's about 4.6 billion years old right now which is about halfway through its life cycle it hasn't changed dramatically in about four billion years and it's on course to say pretty much stable for another five billion or so it is of course by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth but every 11 years or so it goes through a cycle of activity that includes what science refers to as a solar minimum and a solar maximum some people regard these cycles as the most significant influence on changes in Earth's climate and right now the Sun is approaching one of its minimum periods of activity in fact this one is expected to be so quiet but it may fall into a special category called grande solar minimum so is it time for us to stop talking about global warming and start talking about global cooling instead hello and welcome to just everything so what's all this about grand solar minimums then well ever since Galileo first got the hang of a newfangled contraption called a telescope back in the early 17th century scientists have been observing little black spots that seem to come and go on the sun's surface in 1775 a guy called Christian Horeb Oh wrote it appears that after the course of a certain number of years the appearance of the Sun repeats itself with respect to the number and size of the spots we now know that those cycles repeat themselves about once every 11 years or so in the 19th century another scientists by the name of Rudolf Wolff tracked all these observations right back to 1745 and put them together in a numbering system that's still known today as the Wolfe index the first cycle in water index occurred between 1755 and 1766 so in the time-honored way that these meticulous science types always seem to work Wolfe called this cycle cycle number one unsurprisingly science was obsessed with discovering what caused these periodic black spots and whether they were of any consequence to the sun's output in 1908 a group led by George Ellery Hale managed to show that the sunspots were strongly magnetized and that was apparently a fairly big deal in the astronomical world because it was the first time anyone had detected any kind of magnetism outside of our own planets field modern science tells us that the Sun is in fact a massive globe of extremely hot ionized gas called plasma and that it's the flow of this electrically charged gas that causes the movement of the sun's magnetic field which in turn results in these solar cycles and which also governs the number of sunspots as this slightly insane NASA animation shows us you can see how the purple and green lines representing the opposite poles of the magnetic field are constantly shifting over the 4-year period that this animation covers and every 11 years or so the sun's magnetic field completely flips so the North Pole becomes the south Pole and the South Pole becomes the North Pole here's a slightly clearer representation of the last full solar cycle cycle number 23 this one started with the solar minimum in 1996 you can see there's very little sunspot activity at all at that point and as the cycle moves towards the solar maximum in 2001 things clearly get a lot busier before dying back down to the end of the cycle and another solar minimum in 2006 this is an image of sunspots taken by NASA on July the 19th 2000 towards the maximum of the last cycle and there's quite a few spots across the surface this is the same image in the ultraviolet light range showing the corresponding increase in solar activity at those spots compare that to this image taken in March 2009 around the time of the last solar minimum and you can see that the sun's surface is literally spotless with the corresponding ultraviolet image showing a very quiet Sun indeed right now in 2019 we've pretty much coming to the end of cycle number 24 and we're approaching another solar minimum here's some commentary on solar cycle number 25 from Wikipedia a preliminary consensus of the solar cycle 25 prediction panel was made in early 2019 the panel which was organized by NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center NASA and the International solar energy society concluded that solar cycle 25 will be very similar to solar cycle 24 they anticipate that the solar cycle minimum before cycle 25 will be long and deep just as the minimum that preceded cycle 24 so the obvious question is how big an influence to these solar cycles have on the climate of our planet and what a grand solar minimum cause major cooling on the planet and bring about the onset of a mini ice age as some folks seem to be suggesting well to get an answer on that one we need to take a quick look at something called irradiance here's a quick rundown on radiation units from a presentation published by Blaise Norton which I'll link in the description box below the basic unit of radiant energy is the Joule radiant flux is how much energy is provided over time with the time usually measured in seconds so for example one Joule per second and one Joule per second is one watt you may remember from school that the what is a unit of power so power is how much energy any given thing can give to any other given thing over a given period of time you're getting this so then we come to radiant flux density which is better known as irradiance and irradiance is the amount of energy over a given period of time over a given area usually measured in square meters so those units come out as joules per second per square meter otherwise known as watts per square meter so when scientists measure the amount of energy from the Sun hitting the surface of our planet which they call solar irradiance they measure it in watts per square meters there's a great NASA article on solar radiance which again I'll link in the description box below these two charts from that article show how the actual sunspots from solar cycles between 1975 and 2015 corresponded with total solar irradiance and you can clearly see that the total solar irradiance goes up and down in lockstep with the number of sunspots but as with all charts and graphs it's pretty important to understand the scale on each axis if you check out the left-hand side of the top chart you can see that it tells us that sure enough it's measuring solar irradiance in watts per square meter exactly as we've just established but look at the actual numbers the range bounded by the top and bottom horizontal dotted blue lines goes from about thirteen hundred and sixty point four up to around thirteen hundred and sixty one point eight which is a variance of one point four watts per square meter now here's another tricky bit to do with something called radiative forcing Wikipedia explains that radiative forcing can be used to estimate a change in surface temperature arising from that forcing for solar irradiance the radiative forcing is the average amount of solar energy absorbed per square meter of the Earth's area because the earth is a sphere the area exposed to the Sun is only a quarter of the total surface area of the earth so the total input per unit area is only one-quarter the change in solar intensity and because of the Earth's reflectivity or albedo a little bit more of that energy has to be factored out the equation Wikipedia tells us it's actually a multiple of nought point seven so one point four divided by 4 is not 0.35 and naught point three five times point seven is naught point two four five so on the right-hand side of the chart it tells us that the variance in solar forcing over the period is naught point two five watts per square meter so let's just have a think about that for a second nor point two five watts per square meter as a proportion of 1361 watts per square meter works out at about zero point zero one eight percent this chart was produced as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sr5 report in 2013 it shows the effect of all the main radiative forcing factors that our atmosphere experiences the horizontal bars represent the effect that each factor is predicted to have relative to 1750 levels once again measured in watts per square meter right at the top we've got good old co2 by far the most significant of all the factors causing as much as two watts per square meter of extra warming predicted with a very high level of confidence as the far right-hand column indicates by the way you can also see that some of our human or anthropogenic activities caused emissions that actually have a cooling effect on our atmosphere things like black carbon and sulfates and then way down at the bottom of the chart we get two natural radiative forcing factors which is basically the Sun at an overall additional forcing over the timescale of the chart of no more than 0.1 watts per square meter it barely registers and just to hammer home the point about human greenhouse gas emissions the three red bars at the bottom show how anthropogenic radiative forcing has increased from 1950 to 2011 but nevertheless there are those who insist that solar activity does exert some kind of disproportionate and scientifically unexplainable extra influence on the climate of our planet a chart that's often produced to suggest a large cooling effect of a grande solar minimum is this one showing the solar cycles going right back to 1600 between 1645 and 1715 there was an event called the maunder minimum the maunder minimum was a prolonged period when very few sunspots were observed it corresponds with a period of lower winter temperatures in Europe and North America and as a result it's sometimes cited as being the cause of what's known as the Little Ice Age but according to paleo climate reconstruction the onset of the Little Ice Age occurred between 1560 and 1600 at least 50 years before the beginning of the maunder minimum winter temperatures didn't go down significantly more when the maunder minimum did kick in and actually the summer temperatures throughout the maunder minimum were very similar to summer temperatures in subsequent years in fact according to this 2012 paper by Miller at AU the best current hypothesis is that the Little Ice Age most probably came about largely as a result of volcanic activity this report from carbon brief tells us at first glance solar forcing seems to make intuitive sense the Sun is a massive nuclear fusion reactor and million times larger than Earth it is responsible for almost all the energy reaching our planet and in the past few decades scientists have learned that solar activity vary significantly over time indeed changes in the distribution of sunlight reaching the earth clearly change the temperature dramatically on a daily and annual timescale however since 1970 global temperatures have shot up by almost nine point seven degrees Celsius while the amount of solar energy reaching the earth has actually declined similarly the upper atmosphere is cooling while the lower atmosphere warms a clear fingerprint of warming from greenhouse gases rather than the Sun this chart based on a paper by George Filner and Stefan Rahmstorf published in geophysical research letters in 20 ten shows how our planets temperature would most likely be affected by a grand solar minimum as severe as the maunder minimum the red line shows predicted temperature change for the current level of solar activity and the blue line shows the predicted temperature change if solar activity went all the way down to the level of the maunder minimum the black line shows observed temperatures from the NASA GIS s data set through 2010 the authors found that the average global surface temperature will be diminished by no more than 0.3 degrees Celsius even at the very lowest solar activity so even the grandest of grand solar minimums comes nowhere close to compensating for the warming that humans co2 and other greenhouse gas emissions will cause and you'll find the link to the paper in the description box below if you want to have a look at their full commentary it's fair to say that there's a growing level of fear and uncertainty about the weather patterns our planet seems to have been experiencing in recent times major cold snaps and record heat waves all over the planet devastating forest fires not just in California but all the way up into the Arctic Circle extended droughts in many parts of the world often followed by extreme flooding in the same areas giving people very little chance to recover from one event to the next as the cereal crop farmers of the United States know only too well this year it's understandably tempting to blame these chaotic weather patterns on the Sun the great thing about blaming the Sun is that we can delude ourselves that climate change has nothing to do with human beings that our climate has always changed that it's all just down to nature and so we don't need to accept any culpability for what's happening or take any extra responsibility for our own actions but the reality is that for several decades now climate scientists have been warning is that precisely these sorts of extreme weather events would occur if we didn't make wholesale reductions in our greenhouse gas emissions the increase in these types of weather events is entirely predictable and explainable within the context of human-induced global warming and the change that that warming is causing to our climate basic physics in chemistry show us that it's carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and not the Sun that are the main drivers have changed to our atmospheric temperatures and those temperatures are increasing at a rate that's so fast it's completely unprecedented in our planet's history and we also know that it's our own human activity that's producing massive quantities of these greenhouse gases as a result of the way we burn fossil fuels to power our modern lifestyles and the way we're reducing forests to make way for unsustainable levels of single crop agriculture and massive intensive livestock farming our planet's atmosphere will continue to warm throughout the course of this century and beyond and it's got very little to do with whereabouts we are in a solar cycle grand or otherwise blaming the Sun is a cop-out we've caused climate change and we all need to change our lifestyles radically if we're to stand any chance at all of fixing the problem that's it for this week please do give us a like on a show if you found 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Views: 702,403

Rating: 3.8932941 out of 5

Keywords: Grand Solar Minimum, Solar Cycles, Sunspots, Global Warming, Global Cooling, Ice Age, Mini Ice Age, Climate Change, Climate Crisis, Act Now, Climate Emergency

Id: BhNfOZ6YLbc

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 04 2019