8 thoughts on “A New Grand Minimum?”

  1. And climate change on Mars and Jupiter? Elon can’t get Teslas to Mars fast enough apparently….

    1. Zimmerman posted an article about how quickly Jupiter’s storms change due to the solar wind. It seems like we may want to take a closer look at how the Sun can affect the Earth.

  2. Speaking of climate, what do y’all think of this?

    ‘NASA says that CO2 is a coolant not a warming gas. One part of NASA is now in conflict with its climatologists after new NASA measurements prove that carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in Earth’s atmosphere. NASA’s Langley Research Center has collated data proving that “greenhouse gases” actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun. Carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO) are two substances playing a key role in the energy balance of air above our planet’s surface tending to cool not heat.’

    https://coldclimatechange.com/carbon-dioxide-is-a-cooling-gas-according-to-nasa/?

    1. A year or so back Judith Curry linked a very interesting graduate thesis that said CO2 should cool Antarctica. His reasoning and modeling was that Antarctica gets almost no direct solar heating, so what warmth it does have comes from high-altitude tropical air (which is actually extremely cold) that moves south and descends over the even colder continent. As it descends it is adiabatically warmed, and then it blows across the surface as it returns north to complete the loop, much like any convection driven circulation.

      The CO2 factors in during the high-altitude southward journey, where the more CO2 the air has, the more heat it can freely radiate back into space. Since there’s not much sunlight for much of the journey, the CO2 has a net cooling affect on the air mass, and thus on Antarctica, which may explain why core samples tend to show that Antarctica acts opposite of expectations.

    2. Hrm… The Principia Scientifica’s NASA links in the article hit 404’s, so I dug a bit deeper. Anthony Watts said he was sad to have to weigh in on the story, but he did, saying they’re a sketchy organization who have misconstrued what the NASA Langley SABER research said in their 2012 press release.

    3. This is presumably how they’re planning to pivot to claiming that the cold weather coming up is caused by ‘Global Warming’ and we need to stop using fossil fuels to warm the planet.

      Because we’ve always been at war with the Ice Age, comrades! Saboteurs have put up claims that CO2 would warm the planet and not cool it! They must be torn down immediately!

  3. Exciting times?

    It does illustrate how little we collectively know about the Sun and how it affects the climate. Who can say what will happen? Certainly not the solar scientists who don’t have a record of accuracy. Back when I suggested Zimmerman include the previous predictions on his chart, it was because he kept reporting that the monthly sun spot predictions were changing and that the old predictions were being scrubbed from NASA’s website.

    Rather than making predictions, they were making postdictions by changing their “prediction” as observations showed they were wrong but without informing the audience they were wrong. They did this while also portraying things as, “Here are this months sun spot numbers. Look how close they are to our predictions.” IIRC, Zimmerman couldn’t determine this was from bad faith but he wasn’t very charitable regardless of the motivation. It was very suspicious.

    Zimmerman suggests there could be a grand minimum but he always points out no one knows for sure what will happen. Even if the solar scientists end up being right this time, it doesn’t mean they know why or could do it again. They didn’t predict the double peak of the last cycle and there isn’t a large enough data set to show statistical accuracy over noise or dumb luck.

    1. Succinctly: “We don’t know what we don’t know…”

      Years ago I was talking to someone that was getting ready to start his post-graduate studies in Meteorology. I told him that it was going to be an eventful time in his field and that he should be very, very careful because of the politicization of the field — before wishing him the best of luck.

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