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| Sunspots on the solar surface, September 2011. (Courtesy: NASA/SDO/HMI) |
With respect to climate change, the activity of sunspots has been a red herring to deflect from the actual data that points in our direction. I saw that there were 11 comments, most of the troll variety; most likely without a background in STEM, Environmental Engineering or Heliophysics. The disdain for expertise expressed on a platform that they likely could never design is simultaneously amusing and saddening. It's like having a "better opinion" you can deliver a baby over a gynecologist.
A recalibration of data describing the number of sunspots and groups of sunspots on the surface of the Sun shows that there is no significant long-term upward trend in solar activity since 1700, contrary to what was previously thought. Indeed, the corrected numbers now point towards a consistent history of solar activity over the past few centuries, according to an international team of researchers. Its results suggest that rising global temperatures since the industrial revolution cannot be attributed to increased solar activity. The analysis, its results and its implications for climate research were discussed today at a press briefing at the IAU XXIX General Assembly currently taking place in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Measuring the sunspot number – or Wolf number – is one of the longest running scientific experiments in the world today, and provides crucial information to those studying the solar dynamo, space weather and climate change. Scientists have been observing and documenting sunspots – cool, dark regions of strong magnetism on the solar surface – for more than 400 years, ever since Galileo first pointed his telescope at the Sun in 1610. Scientists have also known about the solar cycle – an approximately 11-year period during which the Sun's magnetic activity oscillates from low to high strength, and then back again – since the mid-18th century, and they have been able to reconstruct solar cycles back to the beginning of the 17th century based on historic observations of sunspot numbers.
Physics World:
New sunspot analysis shows rising global temperatures not linked to solar activity
Tushna Commissariat
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