Thursday, May 01, 2008
Natural Variations II [Edward John Craig]
The other big inconvenient truth is the quiet sun — which, as you can see, sports a few blemishes, but nary a sunspot.
Sunspots are magnetic storms on the sun’s surface that are used as a proxy-measure for the Sun’s interplanetary magnetic field. As Henrik Svensmark and Fred Singer argue, the Sun’s magnetic field effects cloud formation in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The more magnetically active the sun is, the fewer cosmic rays reach our upper atmosphere. When cosmic rays do reach the Earth, they react with atmospheric gases to free nuclei that help seed cloud formation, cooling the Earth’s surface.
No sunspots = more clouds = lower temperatures.
05/01 09:40 AM
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