Sun is the Weakest in 200 Years
The Australian, which has the same owner as Wall Street journal, reports -
Sun hits weakest cycle in ‘200 years’
“I would say it is the weakest in 200 years,” said David Hathaway, head of the solar physics group at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Researchers are puzzled. They can’t tell if the lull is temporary or the onset of a decades-long decline, which might ease global warming a bit by altering the sun’s brightness or the wavelengths of its light.
“There is no scientist alive who has seen a solar cycle as weak as this one,” said Andrs Munoz-Jaramillo, who studies the solar-magnetic cycle at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
Wall street journal carries the same story, but the title appears to be ‘too strong’ for American people :)
The good news is that solar activity has no bearing on the temperature of the earth :). How can that be? Surely we jest ! Here is a chart showing 400 years of variations in solar activity.
The low around 1650 coincides with the climactic minima of little ice age, when the sea between Sweden and Denmark froze allowing the Swedish king to attack Copenhaven by walking on the frozen sea. Here is a picture of frozen Thames from 1677. Sun matters to the real world dwellers, even though that yellow ball is not part of any contemporary climate models.
