While Waiting For Evening

I currently am at my parents' house, who are sufficiently plugged in that I can do some work remotely and read blogs.

While trying to find out about the latest instance of a college student fabricating an incident in which they were violently attacked for their conservative beliefs, I shuttled over to the First Things blog, where I read this little mal mot from Thomas Sieger Derr, who apparently is professor of environmental ethics at Smith College ,

P.S. #2, on reading statistics with a viewpoint: The World Meteorological Organization reports that 2007 was one of the ten hottest years on record, most of those ten years being in the last decade. But it also seems that 2007 is on track to be the coldest year since 1998, the year of the large El Niño surge. And those who watch the sun’s behavior report a quiescent period with no sun spots, possibly presaging the return of a cooler earth – even, heaven forbid, a period like the “little ice age” of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Naturally, no mention of this happened at Bali.

Examining the relationship between the Sun and climate is a very important part of the work done by one of my research groups. And I'm one of the three people in the group who do work on the Sun and past climate. What those who watch the Sun's behavior know is that we are near the trough of the ~11 year solar cycle (the 11 year solar cycle is a name for convenience...it varies between 9 and 13 years). Looking at this handy-dandy record of the last 16 years from the Space Weather Prediction Center , we note that solar activity is about the same level as it was in the autumn of 1996, which was nearly exactly eleven years ago. What an amazing coincidence? The Little Ice Age (strictly should be called the Maunder Minimum), it's true, was a cold period with little solar activity. So little solar activity that northern European scientists were not familiar with the aurora borealis until the late 18th century. I'd wager someone has seen the aurora borealis in southern Norway recently.

Oddly enough, the next solar maximum is scheduled for 2012-2013 or so, the same year that permanent sea ice is currently forecast to vanish from the North Pole. For your further edification, some people have been trying to figure out how well the impact of the 11-year solar cycle is simulated in climate models .