- 2833 - SUNSPOTS - and the California forest fires. Observers study the Sun closely, so we can better understand the life and activity of our star. Humans have observed sunspots, dark blotches that arise from strong magnetic activity, for more than 1,000 years, and tracked them in detail since the invention of the telescope, for the past 400.
--------------------------- 2833 - - SUNSPOTS - and the California forest fires.
- Surveying sunspots is the most basic of ways we study how solar activity rises and falls over time, and it's the basis of how we track the solar cycle. That lucky ol’ Sun got nothing to do but to roam around heaven all day while here on Earth the forests burn.
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- Sunspots correspond with the Sun's natural 11-year cycle, in which the Sun shifts from relatively calm to stormy. At its most active, called solar maximum, the Sun is freckled with sunspots and its magnetic poles reverse.
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- On Earth, that would be like if the North and South Poles flip-flopped every decade. During solar minimum, sunspots are few and far between.
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- Understanding the Sun's behavior is an important part of life in our solar system. The Sun's powerful outbursts can disturb the satellites and communications signals traveling around Earth.
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- As of 2020, the Sun has begun to shake off the sleep of minimum, which occurred in December 2019. Solar “Cycle 25” is underway.
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- Instead of sunspots, dark coronal holes cloud the Sun's poles at minimum. Sunspots arise from clusters of intense magnetic energy. Buoyed by their magnetic force, they rise through churning solar material like a grain of rice in a boiling pot.
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- Sunspots appear darker because they're cooler than their surroundings; the magnetic knot at their core keeps energy from radiating out past the Sun's surface.
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- When enough magnetic energy builds over the sunspot, a powerful eruption can burst free, spewing light and solar matter. If they happen to be facing Earth, these solar storms can disrupt satellites, astronauts, and communications signals like radio or GPS. Earth's upper atmosphere might expand in response eroding satellites' lifetimes.
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- Although changes on the Sun aren't usually visible to us without the help of scientific instruments, they impact the space around Earth and other planets.
- Deep inside the Sun, electrified gases flow in currents that generate the Sun's magnetic field, which fuels its mighty outbursts. During solar minimum, the Sun's magnetic field is relaxed. At the height of the solar cycle, it's a tangled mess of magnetic field lines. Understanding this flow, called the dynamo, is key in the effort to predict what the Sun will do next.
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- To complicate things, solar cycles often overlap. As one cycle transitions to the next, both old and new sunspots emerge on the Sun at once. Sunspots often appear in groups, which are like magnets, each with a positive and negative end.
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- As the Sun's magnetic field slowly flips, so does the polarity of sunspot groups. Where one cycle's sunspots drift across the Sun with their positive end in the lead, the next cycle's spots walk negative foot first. On top of that, sunspots in the Sun's two hemispheres also have opposite orientations.
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- Besides sunspots, other indicators can signal when the Sun is reaching its low. If the Sun's magnetic field were a jigsaw puzzle, one piece is still missing, the magnetic field at the poles. Although scientists can't measure the polar magnetic field as accurately as other parts of the Sun, estimates provide clues.
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- In previous cycles, scientists have noticed the strength of the polar magnetic field during solar minimum hints at the intensity of the next maximum. When the poles are weak, the next maximum is weak, and vice versa.
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- The past few cycles, the strength of the magnetic field at the Sun's poles has steadily declined; so too has the sunspot number. Now, the poles are roughly as strong as they were at the same point in the last cycle, Cycle 24.
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- Another indicator of solar cycle progress comes from outside the solar system. Cosmic rays are high-energy particle fragments, the rubble from exploded stars in distant galaxies. During solar maximum, the Sun's strong magnetic field envelops our solar system in a magnetic cocoon that is difficult for cosmic rays to infiltrate.
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- In off-peak years, the number of cosmic rays in the solar system climbs as more and more make it past the quiet Sun. By tracking cosmic rays both in space and on the ground, scientists have yet another measure of the solar cycle.
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- One area of solar study, helioseismology, involves scientists collecting sound waves from inside the Sun, as a way of probing the elusive dynamo. During solar minimum, they don't have to worry about sound waves bouncing off the sunspots and active regions characteristic of solar maximum. When sunspots disappear from view, scientists have a chance to fine-tune their models without all the solar drama.
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- Solar Cycle 25 has begun. Analysis and predictions about the new solar cycle and how the coming upswing in space weather will impact our lives and technology on Earth, as well as astronauts in space.
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- Because our Sun is so variable, it can take months after the fact to declare this event. Scientists use sunspots to track solar cycle progress; the dark blotches on the Sun are associated with solar activity, often as the origins for giant explosions, such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections, which can spew light, energy, and solar material into space.
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- With solar minimum behind us, scientists expect the Sun's activity to ramp up toward the next predicted maximum in July 2025. Solar Cycle 25 is anticipated to be as strong as the last solar cycle, which was a below-average cycle, but not without risk.
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Could space weather be driving the wildfires that are ravaging California, Oregon and Washington? Is the Sun really the problem? Or, are we the problem? Or, both?
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- President Trump asserts that Western states haven’t done enough logging and brush clearance, allowing fuels to build up in forests. “When trees fall down after a short period of time, about 18 months, they become very dry. They become really like a matchstick … there’s no more water pouring through and they become very, very dry, they just explode,” Trump stated in California on Sept. 14, 2020
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- California Governor Gavin Newsom points to climate change as the main cause of these massive conflagrations. “This is a climate damn emergency,” Newsom warned as he surveyed damage on September 11 from one of over 20 major wildfires that have scorched the state since mid-August.
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- Climate change and forest management practices both have contributed to today’s fire conditions, and reducing wildfire risks requires addressing both issues. As of mid-September, fast-moving wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington have burned an area the size of New Jersey.
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- Natural fire is an important part of the ecology of Western forests. Many of the conifers, or cone-bearing trees, that thrive in this region require fire to release their seeds. Other trees rely on fire to clear away underbrush and dense canopies to make room for new growth.
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- Native Americans regularly set fires to shape game migrations, facilitate hunting or encourage the growth of edible plants. Today many native and indigenous communities still manage their lands with fire.
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- Experts broadly agree now that decades of environmentalists fire suppression actually made the risk of forest fires worse. This policy increased fuel loads in the nation’s forests that under different circumstances would have been thinned by flames.
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- It took time for fuel loads in Western forests to rise to dangerous levels, largely because suppression policy coincided with rapid expansion of the logging industry. In the late 1970s logging began to decline in the West.
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- An increasingly litigious environmental movement that became adept at using federal environmental laws to restrict logging. Conservation groups worked to get the northern spotted owl listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, a strategy that ultimately led to timber harvesting bans on several million acres of forestland on the Pacific Coast.
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- Northern spotted owls live in large mature forests in the Pacific Northwest. They are listed as threatened as a result of habitat loss, caused partly by logging. Many environmental advocates feared that even noncommercial forest management actions, such as clearing brush, thinning undergrowth and removing dead trees, could reopen the door to commercial logging. So in the mid-1990s, conservation organizations began challenging routine forest management activities.
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- Between 1989 and 2008, environmental groups filed 1,125 cases against the U.S. Forest Service seeking to limit logging or management activities, and won or settled 520 of those cases. As a result, the agency was unable to conduct management activities that might have lessened the danger of fire.
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- As U.S. forests were becoming more likely to burn, the world’s climate was changing in ways that increase the likelihood of fires. While the entire world has warmed as a result of increased carbon emissions, the Pacific Coast has seen some of the most dramatic temperature increases. The region has warmed 2 degrees F since 1900, and the past several summers in the region have been some of the hottest on record.
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- These hot temperatures have been accompanied by severe droughts. While precipitation has increased in many parts of the U.S. in recent decades, average annual rainfall in Western states has been steadily declining since 1950, particularly in California.
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- Combined with increased fuel loads in the nation’s forests, these hot, dry summers have created perfect conditions for forest fires. Forests clogged with dense undergrowth and dead trees are primed to burst into flames at the smallest spark.
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- Brown smoke spreads over the Pacific from U.S. west coast. Winds carry smoke from wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington west over the Pacific on September 10, blanketing nearly a million square miles.
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- While the Forest Service’s overall budget has remained relatively static for the past two decades, a growing portion of its funding must now be committed to fighting fires, leaving less money for tree thinning and underbrush clearing. Wildfire control increased from 16% of the agency’s appropriated budget in 1995 to over 50% in 2015.
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- California legislators have preferred to spend our money on solar panels and wind turbines. It is money sent to China for the turbines and sent to China, and Japan for solar cells. Environmentalists have been ruining California for 30 years in the name of converting our electrical energy sources to become environmentally friendly.
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- Management policies have created tinderboxes in Western forests, and climate change has made it much more likely that those tinderboxes will erupt into destructive fires. A third factor is that development has expanded into once-wild areas, putting more people and property in harm’s way.
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- Improving forest management to make these lands less primed to burn. Reducing carbon emissions. The only way to moderate climate conditions that make fires larger and more likely.
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- Understanding how the sun cycles and rising temperatures play a role is important. But that we can not control much. What we can control is getter forest and living development management in and around are valuable forests under much safer conditions.
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- That lucky ol’ Sun got nothing to do but to roam around heaven all day.
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----------------------------- Other reviews available on this subject:
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- 1414 Global warming is real but so is political misrepresentation of science. Is Global Warming real? Yes it is real. It has occurred and reoccurred over 1000’s of years. Just as the ice ages are real. Is Global Warming recently caused by human technology and activity?
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- Yes, to some degree but likely overwhelmed by other activities continually occurring in nature. Just as sunspots change the Sun’s intensity. An El Nino’s in the ocean changes the climate in the Northern Hemisphere.
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- Is the extremist’s actions to mandate changes in human activity doing things right? No, it is not. It is likely having the opposite effect which takes longer to undo. Take forest fires for example.
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- 1862 - GLOBAL WARMING - geology. This Review list 14 more titles of reviews available on this subject. Let me know if you want me to send you any one of these.
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- November 16, 2017 my grandson’s Berkeley term paper on “ The effect of CO2 on global biodiversity” 6 pages.
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- September 17, 2020 2833
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--------------------------- September 17, 2020 --------------------------------------
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