Now that 20 years of intense solar flare activity has subsided will we now go into a period of global cooling?

Question

And please, no more refrences to algores propoganda movie.

It was shown to be fabricated, get over it.

Answer 1

No.  The peer reviewed data shows that solar activity is only a minor factor in global warming (about 10%).

No references to Gore here.  How about the Solar Center at Stanford University, with references to the peer reviewed literature?

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-...

Peer reviewed data showing the sun is about 10%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Clima...

And this source hardly likes Gore, either:

"While evidence suggests fluctuations in solar activity can affect climate on Earth, and that it has done so in the past, the majority of climate scientists and astrophysicists agree that the sun is not to blame for the current and historically sudden uptick in global temperatures on Earth, which seems to be mostly a mess created by our own species."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,2583...

The idea that climatologists ignore the massive solar database, or that they don't include the sun in their analyses is nonsense.

Answer 2

Solar flare activity is linked to the solar cycle of sunspot generation, which flares up every 11 years (or 22 years if you count every second cycle, which is bigger).  If in fact they have died down for now, you can expect more at the time of the next peak.

Also, I would not say that there has been a definite link shown between flare activity and global temperature.  A person might just want to intuitively make that link, but flares are not bursts of light as much as they are eruptions of solar gases, much of which falls back to the surface of the sun, that does not appreciably increase the actual luminosity of the sun.  The effects we'll notice on earth are more incoming solar wind particles and therefore more auroras, more electromagnetic disturbance, and more drag on LEO satellites.

More than that, to make a prediction of global temperature changes based just on what you state here, our temperatures should only have been climbing for the past 20 years.  The trend we've seen seems to be part of a process that has been going on quite a while before that.  Therefore, there's more to the picture than flares, and so we cannot predict cooling when flares die down.

Answer 3

The past 20 years have not seen unusual solar flare activity, and anyway solar flares a very minor contributor to the Earth's energy input.

How much warming do we need to see to convince you?  2006 was the warmest year ever, even warmer than 1998.

Answer 4

Yes according to NASA,(lol .... and a concensus of scientists), but mostly scientific data. We have already started to cool of somewhat. However a couple of Volcanic eruptions and we might be in for some major cooling.

Do not be ALARMED, we will be OK, its completely NATURAL.

LOL! they still refrence Al gores movie. Thats a Laugh!

Answer 5

Yes it is possible . I have Sean some correlation to the weather of the sun . It also effects the size of the holes in our ozone layer . The holes always happen near the poles as that is what attracts the ionized solar winds .

Answer 6

If the theory of sun spot cycles holds true, then we are heading towards global cooling.

A growing body of “empirical” evidence suggests that solar activity, its amplifiers such as cosmic ray flux and the resulting feedbacks such as increased atmospheric water vapor and decreased albedo are responsible for as much as 95% of 20th century warming. Critics of sun spot activity only measure the increases in solar energy and discount the theory.

A recent paper by Dr. Jan Veizer of Ottawa, Canada, based on dozens of studies and his own research of 40 years, concluded that solar activity has been the “climate driver” for billions of years. While the climate can be affected by the many factors , it is the sun and its effects that have caused changes in climate for 4 billion years. Dr Veizer first set out to prove that CO2 was historically what caused changes in climate, but noted, “Personally, this last decade has been a trying period because of the years of internal struggle between what I wanted to believe and where the empirical record and its logic were leading me.”