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Jan Wyllie

Forget Mother Nature: this is a world of our making - 08 June 2011 - New Scientist - 1 views

www.newscientist.com/...-is-a-world-of-our-making.html

pollution biodiversity risks science emergence

shared by Jan Wyllie on 10 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The global patterns of the Holocene have receded and their return is no longer possible, sustainable or even desirable. It is no longer Mother Nature who will care for us, but us who must care for her.
  • The first step will be in our own minds. The Holocene is gone. In the Anthropocene we are the creators, engineers and permanent global stewards of a sustainable human nature.
D'coda Dcoda

Sun's Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity [15Jun11] - 0 views

www.space.com/olar-activity-solar-cycle.html

science cosmology sun

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 14 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Sun's Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity
  • Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years. The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.
  • The results of the new studies were announced today (June 14) at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. "The solar cycle may be going into a hiatus," Frank Hill, associate director of the National Solar Observatory's Solar Synoptic Network, said in a news briefing today (June 14).
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The studies looked at a missing jet stream in the solar interior, fading sunspots on the sun's visible surface, and changes in the corona and near the poles. [Photos: Sunspots on Earth's Star]
  • "This is highly unusual and unexpected," Hill said. "But the fact that three completely different views of the sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation."
Jan Wyllie

Full Meltdown: Fukushima Called the 'Biggest Industrial Catastrophe in the History of M... - 1 views

www.alternet.org/..._in_the_history_of_mankind%27_

capability practice science biodiversity pollution emergence record risks

shared by Jan Wyllie on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Jan Wyllie on 18 Jun 11
     
    A new rendition of Hofstadter's Law about how things take longer than expected ... it's always worse than expected, even when you expect the worse.
D'coda Dcoda

Sunspot Drop Won't Cause Global Cooling [16Jun11] - 0 views

www.wired.com/...solar-minimum-climate

climate

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 17 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • News that solar activity might fizzle for a few decades has prompted talk of a new “Little Ice Age,” even a quick fix for global warming. But that’s just not going to happen.
  • The cooling impact of the last prolonged solar lull “was probably only a couple tenths of a degree Celsius,” said climatologist Michael Mann of Penn State University. “It’s a tiny blip on the radar screen if you’re looking at the driving factors behind climate change.”
  • The cooling impact of the last prolonged solar lull “was probably only a couple tenths of a degree Celsius,” said climatologist Michael Mann of Penn State University. “It’s a tiny blip on the radar screen if you’re looking at the driving factors behind climate change.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The possibility of imminent solar dormancy was raised by reports from the ongoing American Astronomical Society meeting of fading sunspots and dips in the sun’s magnetic patterns. Those are considered portents of solar inactivity, suggesting that the next solar minimum — a natural downturn in activity — would be especially pronounced, perhaps lasting for decades.
  • When that last happened, between the mid-17th and early 18th centuries, northern Europe experienced a period of unusually cold weather. Known as the Maunder Minimum, or more conversationally as the Little Ice Age, it’s a period historicized by accounts of ice skating on the Thames and seasonal inns built on Baltic Sea ice.
  • In fact, the meaning of the latest sunspot reports is still being debated, as Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth has chronicled. But even if they really do portend a decades-long solar lull, studies already point to a minimal effect on climate
  • Most Little Ice Age cooling appears to have been the result of coincidentally high volcanic activity that cloaked Earth in sunlight-blocking soot. As for the sun, a study published in 2001 in Science found that reduced solar activity produced a cooling effect of about 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit. In other estimates, the cooling is even more insignificant.
  • More recently, in a 2010 Geophysical Research Letters study, Georg Fuelner and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research asked the question directly: What would happen if Earth experienced another 70-year-long solar minimum?
  • The answer can be seen in the image at the top of this post, which estimates the temperature difference between a solar minimum future under “middle-of-the-road” climate scenarios and the Maunder Minimum. In a nutshell: It’s going to be much, much hotter in the future, solar minimum or not.
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