The Sun Is....... Keep And Eye On Its Current Behavior.

http://spaceweather.com/

 

BIG ACTIVITY ON THE SUN: A gigantic filament of plasma is dancing along the northwestern edge of the sun, rising more than 150,000 km above the solar surface. How large is that? It's fully 1/10th of the sun's diameter and almost a dozen times taller than our entire planet.

This is called a "hedgerow prominence." Hot glowing plasma inside the structure is held aloft by unstable magnetic fields. If the magnetic support collapses, plasma can fall back to the solar surface, exploding in a Hyder flare--a type of solar flare that can occur with no underlying sunspot.

 

The Hyder mechanism has come into question. Some people (notably Zirin) have questioned whether infall occurs, stating that the magnetic reconfiguration must always produce ejection. The respective roles of flares and CMEs in solar active processes has also been hotly debated, and this has implications for the exact mechanism of Hyder flares. We certainly have enough observational evidence to show that Hyder flares can be associated with both CMEs and energetic particle production. For the moment, the question of Hyder flare production mechanism appears unresolved, and will probably be sidelined until the more significant (and undoubtedly related) issue of CME - flare production mechanism is sorted out.

The bottom line is that at this stage in solar physics we do not really know what produces a flare nor what produces a CME. There are competing theories, but all tend to have deficiencies with respect to matching the observational evidence. We certainly believe that they all depend on the reconfiguration of magnetic fields as their primary energy source, but in the final analysis, we really only believe this because we can conceive of no other solar energy source of sufficient magnitude.

Partly extracted from: https://www.sws.bom.gov.au/Educational/2/4/1

 

Coronal mass ejections CMEs are caused when the plasma, that is basically what the sun is made of, boils so violently the little bits of it are thrown off the surface of the sun. If it is traveling fast enough to achieve escape velocity it head out into the solar system.

The sun heats up and then cools down in a predictable 11 year cycle. When it is up the number of sunspots increases immensely and some of them are violent enough to cause a CME. There are several classes of these CMEs with the X Class being the ones that we need to be concerned about.

There was a period called the Maunder Minimum when the normal cycle seemed to just stop. They don't know why but is caused a period of cold weather they call the Little Ice Age. As you can see on the chart below the cycle are mostly regular even though the number of sunspots at each peak varies. The bottom is usually basically zero.

The current situation is interesting in that it is happening at a time when activity is at a minimum in the cycle. None the less the chances of this creating an X class CME is extremity minimal in the area of .o1% and then the chances of that CME hitting us head on is way out there.

Back in the late 80s or early 90s we had some seriously strong CMEs and they caused a little trouble in Canada. The best part of them was that it caused the Aurora Borealis to be visible all the way into South Texas and I got to see it.

 

That chart seems to show that all the so called "global warming" is most likely due to increased solar activity.

 

It seems to be sloping off a little now. The fact is that at this time we don't have enough long term observations to really see the possible cycles or if there really even are long term predictable cycles. The Maunder Minimum back in the late 1600s is still unexplained. As much as everyone frets about the global warming thing, having snow in the summer would be even worse. No summer means crop failure and mass starvation in third world countries and global unrest.

I suspect that for the foreseeable future predicting the weather on the sun will be a lot like predicting it on Earth and not an exact science past the obvious cycles like the seasons here and the 11 year cycles on the sun.

 

Is there a correlation between solar activity and temperature excursions on the Earth?

 

THAT is a question that is under debate. On one hand you have some people saying that the cows farting is driving up our temperature. If that is true then I can't see how a change in the available energy coming off the sun couldn't have some effect. In general this is a subject that people don't seem to be able to deal with in a purely logical fashion.

 

I don't know what to believe because I don't have any evidence. Even if there is a measurable statistical correlation between solar anomalies (flares or sunspots) and temperature excursions on Earth, it still isn't "proof". (There is a statistical correlation between the lower usage of soda pop-tops and automobile fatalities; there are fewer pop-tops and fewer fatalities than there were twenty years ago, but that doesn't mean that pop-tops cause auto wrecks!)

I suppose you could say that the increased CO2 from cow-farts could have the same effect on temperature as excessive CO2 from internal-combustion engines (which is pretty widely accepted), the bovine-butt hypothesis seems kind of a stinky stretch to me.

 

They say that the dinosaurs were on the way out even before the big rock finished them off. Their situation was much like our s in that their ecology was thinning out as in the sense that there were fewer and fewer species as things seemed to be streamlining. If cow farts are killing us now can you imagine what those huge sauropod fart factories were doing to the world???

The thing about trying to figure out the Global Warming thing...or most anything these days...is trying to dig through all the information and sort out what is real science and what is basically propaganda. Too much of what we think is science is information that is paid for by specific groups where the answer was assumed and the information is only the things that support that assumption while anything that doesn't is either thrown out or hidden.

Too often what you see is like the testimony of professional "witnesses" that are used in courts. They are paid to say something and it is presented as expert testimony. They might indeed be "experts" but a "Doctor" that hasn't seen a patient of any kind in years and has not ever actually seen the person that they are talking about can legally say anything as long as the information that was offered to them is carefully chosen.

Then there is the problem of the language used. You can tell the truth but still not really be informing someone. A good example is the fact that the government is not doing enough to protect the American people from the most deadly chemical compound that kills more people every year then any other. Dihytrogen Oxide is deadly and they are doing nothing about it.

 

Yes, the Earth's temperature changes in unison with fluctuations of solar activities:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/solact.html

There are many other variables involved too.

 

There is so much conflicting information that I'm not sure that there is a possibility of anyone being able to sort through it all and come up with any definitive answer.

Following is a Quote from the above location. this gives an opposing view from "science" based people about Global Warming being caused by human activities. The CO2 people refute everything that the above sight offers.

Science that is based on political and financial interests rather than an open minded search of the facts is no better than the opinion of an idiot.

Skeptical Views of Global Warming
The view of most climate scientists is that rising CO2 in the atmosphere, primarily from human activity, is driving the current increase in global temperature. A recent summary of the case for CO2 as the main radiative forcing for the human influence on global warming is Collins, et al. An active internet discussion site for climate scientists and others is Real Climate.

But climate modeling is very complex, the stakes are very high, and there are numerous special interests. This situation is tailor-made for controversy. The following are some of the types of objections that skeptics of CO2-driven global warming raise:

• The CO2 is not sufficient to drive the currently observed warming.
• The atmospheric CO2 level has been up to 10 times higher in the past. Why weren't there catastrophic consequences then?
• Much of this century's temperature rise was in early years when industrial emissions were small, and there was a temperature decrease during the postwar economic boom.
• Ice core records show CO2 rises lagging temperature rises rather than driving them.
• Surface warming is more than atmospheric warming, in contrast to CO2-driven models.
• The global temperature of t he past century correlates more strongly with solar activity than with CO2.
• The sunspot activity of our Sun and the associated magnetic fields divert some of the cosmic rays that nucleate clouds on the Earth.

What's the truth??? I honestly don't know. I don't trust either side without certain reservations.