Is the Sun Betraying the Catastrophic AGW Hypothesis?

The sun undergoes a solar cycle of sunspot activity of about 11 years.  The comparative intensity of cycles varies and the sunspot minimum between cycles may vary in number of sunspots and in the time it takes for sunspots to start reappearing.  Usually, the sunspot minimum lasts about 1 year.  Sunspots are cool spots on the sun's surface, but more sunspots means that the sun has thrown off more energy.  Thus, more sunspots result in more radiation being received by the Earth.  Sunspot activity has been lower than usual for some time now.

Sunspots are generated by magnetic loops that form deep inside the sun and migrate outward through the surface in a burst of energy.  This leaves the cool spot on the surface called a sunspot.  Sunspot activity is affected by two large conveyor belts of gas that cycle through the sun's interior and out through its surface carrying material and magnetic fields.  This cycle has an average period of 40 years.  David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, recently made incorrect predictions that the sun would return to normal activity.  Now he is reporting that the conveyor belt flow across the sun's surface has been speeding up since 2004.  Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson have determined that the internal flows of matter and magnetic fields have slowed down greatly.  The slow internal speeds and the fast exterior speeds are not understood by the solar models used by Hathaway to make his predictions that the sun would soon return to vigorous activity.

Sunspot activity slowed rapidly in late 2007 as the sun went into its solar minimum between active cycles.  2008 was expected to be a year of low sunspot activity, but it was free of sunspots 73% of the time, which was the lowest level of activity observed since the 1913 minimum with 85% sunspot-free time.  Hathaway predicted that 2009 would be a very active sunspot year.  Nothing happened until December 2009, when a large group of sunspots emerged.  The new cycle has finally started, but with much less activity than expected.

William Livingston, of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, and Matt Penn have found that the average strength of the sunspot magnetic fields has decreased greatly since 1995.  That is the same year that significant global warming stopped according to Phil Jones, the disgraced former head of the Climate Research Group at the University of East Anglia and a long-time leader of the catastrophic AGW advocates.  Livingston claims that if the decrease in magnetic field strength in the sunspots continues, in five years those fields will not be strong enough to form sunspots at all!

Michael Lockwood, professor of space environmental physics at the University of Reading in England, has used the concentrations of isotopes of elements in ice cores and tree rings to find periods of similar solar inactivity over the last few thousand years.  He found 24 such events.  In two of these cases, the sunspot activity was nearly nil for decades.  In only one case did the sunspot activity come back to record levels.  In most cases, the sunspot activity remained low.  This implies that the chances are high that the high level of sunspot activity that characterized most of the 1900s is over.  That was also the period over which most of the warming claimed by the AGW alarmists occurred.

Lockwood also says that the unusually cold winter in Europe in 2009 - 2010 was likely due to the solar inactivity.  He bases this on records going back to 1650.  In 2008, Judith Lean of the Naval Research Laboratory published a paper showing that high solar activity has a disproportionate warming effect upon northern Europe.  I would expect both of these findings to be because the climate of northern Europe is highly dependent upon the Gulf Stream, whose temperature is dependent upon solar warming of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.

If the sunspot magnetic fields continue to decrease in strength, sunspots may not be able to form by 2015 and we may be in for something like the Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715, during which sunspots nearly disappeared.  The effect in northern Europe was colder than usual winters and an average annual temperature drop of about 1 to 2C.  The Maunder Minimum caused one of the worst segments of the Little Ice Age.  Life in that time became notably more difficult.

These two articles from the Washington Post to which I have linked were written by Stuart Clark, who has a Ph. D. in astrophysics and wrote the book The Sun Kings.  These articles were first published in The New Scientist, where he frequently writes.  It is refreshing to find articles honestly presented in the Washington Post which question the idea that man's emissions of CO2 are about to boil the planet.