The Heliosphere and Solar Cycle 24

I have, from time to time, been posting on the apparent quiet of the sun. I should make clear why. I am in no way convinced by the collection of 'consensus' and lobby-driven groupthink we have all experienced in the past fifteen years when it comes to global warming. I know very able chemists who inform me that the suggested process by which carbon dioxide becomes a greenhouse gas is not in conformity with any idea of atmospheric science they have.

I can see that climate does vary and change over sweeps of time. Explanations based around the cosmic wind, cloud cover, thermohaline currents, or even the solar system's passage through the galactic plane and the possible presence of dark matter seem to be valid. I can't tell. I'm not a scientist. I note, however, how hysterical the proponents of carbon-related global warming shut people down who raise the issue.

Such behaviour raises my suspicion, because I do know about how herds develop and how bad ideas are hardened into consensus amongst people. That the sun should be intimately related to global warming and cooling seems obvious to me, but then, obvious fallacies have often appealed to the non scientific mind. It isn't that long ago that people thought that the sun was pushed by a dung beetle since both produced life after rolling a ball through the day.

I can see, though, how responsible scientists are now referring to claims of arctic sea ice shrinkage as 'pseudoscience'. I don't want vast amounts of tax money being poured out on this boondoggle, but too many people are now so righteously convinced that they won't open their minds.

Now, however, the recent news that sunspots have not been forming on the sun for some time, and that according to some, we are in for global cooling, has taken a little bit of a sinister turn. Today's Daily Telegraph notes that the protective 'sphere' around the sun, by which they mean the way the solar winds interact with cosmic radiation, is shrinking.

This shrinkage in the heliosphere potentially suggests not just global cooling, but a great deal more radiation, and electrical interference reaching down to the surface of the earth.

NASA confirms the story, as I noted a while ago. As I understand it, solar cycle 24 may simply be delayed, and it might be expected that when it starts these trends will reverse. We are very close to an official declaration, however, that solar cycle 24 is very badly delayed and may not be going to lead to a more active sun.

The last time that the absence of sunspots to this extent was recorded was at the outset of the 'Maunder minimum' little ice age which has been associated with population collapse, the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the emergence of rat-borne disease as food stocks fell and rats came in from the cold. Before that, scientific speculation has dwelt upon the climate changes that may have helped bring down the western Roman Empire and led up to the plague of Justinian between 476 and 560.

The last time that the heliosphere was this low was fifty years ago--towards the end of a period of winters marked by those from the late nineteen forties to the mid-sixties.

I have a tendency to identify gloom. It's partly a consequence of my background, partly my personality and partly that I keep fixing on things that could go wrong. The logic of the present situation, however, is that, as I have been saying for nearly two years on this blog (and I apologise) that we face resource wars, climate change, arcs of instability along the energy and water routes of the earth, demographic pressures, oil and food troubles, and a long, deep recession. That perfect storm seems to be coming true. That light from a sun that has caught a bad cold should fall down upon it seems, frankly, too much to take.

The picture at the top of this post is of Christ as Sol Invictus, and can be found in the Vatican Necropolis. It is not Dionysiac (sorry to any J.G.Frazier fans) but instead related to John 15:1.