Vic Socotra

27 June 2009

Sun Spots

(Climate History)

‘The surprising result of these long-range predictions is a
rapid decline in solar activity, starting with cycle #24. If
this trend continues, we may see the Sun heading
towards a Maunder-type of solar activity minimum - an
extensive period of reduced levels of solar activity.’
- K.H.Schatten and W.K.Tobiska, 34th Solar Physics Division Meeting,
June 2003, American Astronomical Society

I am dancing with sun spots this morning, or rather the lack of them, and of course the clock and the Congress.

I have someplace else to be, more than an hour away by petro-powered transportation, and I need to get rolling before the rest of NoVa starts burning their carbon and clogging the roads.

Our elected buffoons in the House rushed through a 1,025 page bill before departing for their 4th of July break. I doubt that many members have read the entire thing, any more than I have. The general understanding is that, should the Senate concur, we will have a law that will “curb the heat-trapping gases scientists have linked to climate change.”

The Times left out a key word in that sentence- they do that a lot- which is the important qualifier “some.”

See, at the heart of this is belief. We have to believe that it was not warmer or cooler than it is now for perfectly natural reasons. The Little Ice Age of the 16th Century is inconvenient.

The President has declared the debate on the facts to be over, and the matter settled. Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere will cause warming of the earth’s temperature, and a whole bunch of nasty things will then occur.

I am a reasonable man, in my way, and find our profligate use of the planetary resources to be inelegant at best, certainly unsustainable with current technology, and possibly hazardous to our health.

The problem is the evidence of my senses. I understand matters of faith, even if I have little of it. Since this has been a cool Spring, following a cooler winter, it would seem that there may be something else going on.

A friend is in the business of predicting the likelihood of things that may come to pass. The point is to enable his decisionmakers to make plans to cope with the future as it is likely to be. Mr. Gore, the distinguished former almost President, has been dining out for years on his vision of the Apocalypse to come.

He is no scientist, of course, but his portion of the Nobel Prize comes from publicizing the views of those who are well-enough credentialed to be taken seriously by the prim Swedes who award these things.

My friend was charged with making an objective and actionable assessment of what is going to befall us. He was troubled, since in the opinion of several people is that what appears likely to happen is that things are going to get cold.

In the course of wading through mountains of paper to divine a consensus, my friend found the work of Mr. David Archibald. He is one of the many deniers of the revealed climatic truth. He takes the view that the Earth’s climate is strongly influenced by solar activity.

His approach is suspiciously reasonable. He claims that most rural temperature records in the United States were set in the 1930s and 1940s; he asserts that Greenland had its highest recorded temperatures eighty years ago and has been cooler since. He has the temerity to suggest that the . The hottest year to date in the United States was 1936.

He goes on to claim that the modes temperature decline from the late 1950s to the mid-70s was due to a weak solar cycle- the 20th that scientists have observed- after a strong solar cycle 19.

I don’t know what this all means, since there is a vast body of information to digest. Does the sun in fact reverse magnetic polarity with each solar cycle? Do sunspots of the new cycle start forming before the old cycle has concluded? Is the average length of a solar cycle is 10.7 years? And if so, what does it mean that we are at nearly twelve years now before the start of a new cycle and still counting?

Based on these assertions, Archibald claims that there will be a temperature decline as steep as that of the 1970s cooling scare, but will go on much longer.

This is not a good news theory, by the way, since there are more mouths to feed on mother earth, and cooler temperatures will reduce the ability to produce crops in the higher latitudes.

Mr. Archibald has a name for the true believers of man-made global climate change- he calls them proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming. This is now a matter of religious fervor. Archibald agrees that CO2 in the atmosphere has an effect, but he asks those who point to dying coal reefs and yell “Carbon” to explain how they first grew in the Devonian Epoch when atmospheric carbon dioxide was ten times the level it is today.

I don’t know about that, either. There is so much that we have to take on faith. I suspect that none of us, Mr .Gore or Mr. Archibald, have a complete understanding on what is happening to us, and whether or not we can do anything about it.

I think Mr. Archibald has something very important to say, and I did enough cursory research to discover that he is not a solar scientist, nor a climatologist, and in fact is a known geologist.

The true believers are all over him about that; peer review and that sort of thing, but I find it a compelling argument that something as big as mother Gaia would need something equally large- or much larger- to force the sort of dramatic change the hockey-stick graphs predict.

I am willing to consider Sol the architect of that change. After all, when one considers the geologic record of really huge changes, I am inclined to agree with the contention that sometimes stuff happens and we don't really understand why.

At the heart of the House Climate Bill is a cap-and-trade system modeled on what the Europeans have done. Limits are established on overall emissions of heat-trapping gases, utilities, manufacturers and other emitters of the gases are permitted to trade pollution quotas among themselves. The cap on emissions will grow tighter over the years, pushing up the price of remaining quotas. The theory is that cost will drive industry to find cleaner ways of making energy.

I imagine that is true, though that efficiency will have to be financed by our pocketbooks, the same way universal health care and the mortgage bubble are going to be solved. Carbon will be another of the Great Levelers we are so excited about these days.

My pal wrote me and said that “If reducing our dependence on fossil fuels were the real goal, then a far more effectual remedy would be to cut away the legal impedimenta that have throttled the development of the nuclear power industry. Build new pebble bed reactors like the Chinese. Allow small communities to buy the new Toshiba micro-reactors. They're sufficient to power about a thousand homes for 20 years.”

I am pretty sure there is nothing about that in the Bill. I sure would like to have a pebble reactor to heat and cool Big Pink. I could go back to taking long hot showers ather than shivering in the dark. There is plenty of room for one in the basement, but of course that would run up against the true believers on the evils of nuclear power.

What seems clear is that I am going to be poorer regardless of what course we follow, and if it is going to be cooler, I will have to stock up on sweaters.

The only upside I can see is that If all this fear weans us off the product of the Mercedes Mullahs, well, so much the better.

I do fear these true believers, though. There are so many of them. Robert Frost had it right in his poem “Fire and Ice:”

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

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