In the first post of this series this blog asked Are We Really Sure How Stars Decline?In that post it was pointed out how important it is, in terms of The Tenets of Ecocosmology, to know solar science, and know it well.
The obvious reason for that is because our future as a planetary society in the long run is utterly dependent on the way the Sun behaves.
The dogma of science is quite assertive and impatience with questions about its authority, even though scientists are constantly being surprised by new discoveries, such as huge waves on the Sun.
The recent decade saw scientific expressions of certainty as to how the Sun would enter an active period soon, after having been relatively quite for a period of time.
Now, all of a sudden, a flip flop is taking place and scientists are now saying it looks like the Sun will be going quiet for a prolonged period instead.
The question that arises, in the context of the climate of this planet, is how will that impact global warming:
(Scientific American, David Biello). The political animals who also espouse dogma, and who have in general been in denial about global climate change, are likely to seize upon this new scientific "position" to defend the status quo.
How much light the sun emits affects the Earth's weather and climate. And sunspots — dark dots on the face of the great fusion reactor in the sky — do alter the orb's output. So when solar scientists said last week that sunspot cycles might be going into hibernation, the impact on our planet's climate became a hot topic.
Previous prolonged weakenings in the solar cycle may have launched mini-Ice Ages. An example is the so-called Maunder Minimum in the 1600s and 1700s when the Thames River routinely froze, something that never happens today.
So if we're to face a temporarily cooler sun, maybe all those greenhouse gases we've been putting into the atmosphere will keep us toasty?
A cooler sun might mean a drop in global average temperatures of at most 0.3 degrees Celsius. But the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere today will add 0.6 degrees Celsius to global average temperatures by the end of the century. And more, since greenhouse gas emissions show no signs of diminishing. So the slightly cooler sun won't counteract a much hotter earth.
As time goes on, this blog will research the issue and present the results to Ecocosmology Blog readers for their perusal.
But one thing is for sure concerning the Earth environment being impacted by the Sun in this decade, it is absolutely minuscule compared to the damage that human civilization is doing.
