Main source of Global Warming shocks scientists with “impossible” surprises
The New Scientist reports that we know surprisingly little about the main source of Global Warming, the Sun. A Japanese space vehicle, the Hinode, is sending back dramatic video of the Sun’s chromosphere, thought to be calm but in reality an area of unexpected, intense energy.
“Everything we thought we knew about X-ray images of the Sun is now out of date,” says Leon Golub from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. “We’ve seen many new and unexpected things. For that reason alone, the mission is already a success.”…
Hinode has sent back startling images of the Sun’s outer limb. Where astronomers expected to see a calm region called the chromosphere, they saw a seething mass of swaying spikes…”These structures are 8000 kilometres long and some extend twice that high,” says SOT science team member Alan Title from Lockheed Martin Advance Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, US. “Their speed is such that if you sat on the end of one, which I don’t recommend, you could travel from Washington, DC, to San Francisco in about four minutes. These things are really moving.”
Another surprise sighting is that of giant magnetic field loops crashing down onto the Sun’s surface as if they were collapsing from exhaustion, a finding that Golub describes as “impossible”. Previously, scientists thought they should emerge from the Sun and continue blowing out into space. “Almost every day, we look at the data and we say – what the heck was that?”…
Astronomers do not yet know what to make of the surprises, but they hope Hinode will help solve many big puzzles. One is that the temperature of the Sun’s tenuous outermost atmosphere, or corona, is far hotter than the layers underneath, which are nearer its energy-generating core. Scientists believe that tangled magnetic fields must somehow dump energy in the corona. “Theorists suggested that twisted, tangled magnetic fields might exist…“
The Sun is now, and always has been, the main source of Global Warming on earth. The application of Occam’s razor to our current situation has always suggested we look early and often to the Sun for information on related phenomena — instead of looking to a C student with a Venture Capital fund, or to the miniscule difference between 300 and 380 ppm of CO2.
Now we are learning that the Sun itself is full of surprises thought “impossible” only last year. It would be nice to think that these and future discoveries might change matters, but they probably won’t.
March 23rd, 2007 at 10:20 pm
There is another satellite called STEREO that will help the NASA people gauge how much energy to thre Earth is getting from the sun. I was under the impression that they had a good idea how much energy was being output by the sun but it turns out that they don’t.
The greatest emitter of heat in the solar system is an unknown and they’re telling us that we have sole responsibility for warming. They might calm down and find out instead of going off half cocked.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:58 am
If our knowledge of the Sun is as incomplete as you suggest, how can you be so sure it is the “Main source of Global Warming”?
March 27th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Are you really that confused about the way science works as to think that climatologists have not considered the sun as a source of warming. Or do you just think that climatology is just part of some vast socialist conspiracy? Over the last three decades measurements of solar radiation indicate a slight decline, but temperatures have increased. So it ain’t the sun: radiation down, temps up. In fact, increased greenhouse gases are impacting the greenhouse effect. Even multi-national corporations like DuPont have come around to the evidence-based position.
http://www2.dupont.com/Media_Center/en_US/position_statements/global_climate.html
Science is capable of making important discoveries and policy should be guided by those findings. Why are conservatives so eager to waive the anti-science banner?
April 6th, 2007 at 2:54 am
The global warming chest beaters like most narrow minded people fail to realize the possibility of a very real and simple explanation for global warming. If the Gore-ites get off their own agendae and view the facts, maybe just maybe they may find the truth… most proably though they will wonder off to some other cause celib.
During the previous ice ages how much co2 was being emmitted by the population? Think we all know the answer…