Interestingly this happens every 11 years and also their is a longer cycle called the Hale cycle which is double the length at 22 years. It flips from a mostly dipole where the poles match the orientation of earth to a reverse and much more irregular magenetic orientation. I didn't see anything about how this really affects Earth directly other than what I knew previously about sun spots make Coronal Mass Ejections sometimes towards Earth. Think we had a few things happen recently due to those but nothing too crazy.
The point of the show is to bring science to common people. Many of the startalk episodes he brings on pop culture icons or sports commentators. They dumb down the content substantially, but my mom and my grandma really liked those types of episodes so it must work.
Because there are a lot of people who like that idiot, and as an educational science show, their goal is to educate that idiot and people who like that idiot so they can all be a little less idiotic.
My understanding is that the Hale cycle is just a complete "360° flip" of 2 "180° flips". I.e. the 11 year cycle is essentially going from "mostly dipole" (but say with north magnetic direction going one way) to irregular and then back to mostly dipole, but this time with magnetic north pointing in the opposite direction. The next 11 year cycle gets magnetic north pointing back "up" again.
The CLOUD experiment found that sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and ammonia combine in the upper atmosphere to form particles that seed clouds, driven by chemicals and human activities, without mentioning the Sun's magnetic pole reversal.
While certainly solar activity affects the atmosphere broadly, such as ozone levels influenced by UV radiation and solar particles, the CLOUD study writeup here doesn’t show a direct impact on the specific aerosol-forming reactions.
So, while solar activity influences some chemistry such as ozone formation, it’s unclear if it affects the reactions described by CLOUD.
I am no expert, but I am skeptical because the paper results looks way too perfect to be true.
Then instead of doing statistical analysis with things like p-values or probabilities, they make wildly out of scope assertions like this:
> "Considering all pandemics with obtained extremum points, we can conclude that sunspot extrema coincide with the pandemics’ first appearance probably because of mutation on virus DNA or generation of a new virus."
They are claiming both sunspot minima and maxima, not just one or the other (which seems more intuitive?) somehow cause pandemics due to virus DNA mutations, even for pandemics that were caused by bacteria.
I am all for using statistics and data science for discovery of new phenomena, but I suspect this one is total bunk.
Forbush effect, in geophysics, an occasional decrease in the intensity of cosmic rays as observed on Earth, attributed to magnetic effects produced by solar flares, which are disturbances on the Sun
There are so many visible red flags in this one and my priors are sturdy enough that I think it's safe to call it nonsense with barely a skim. This seems like somebody that came to a spurious conclusion and then decided to write a paper justifying it by spamming statistical techniques until something fit.
That seems kind of extreme. While I wouldn't take this paper as proof that the sun is causing pandemics, the correlation is an interesting bit of trivia.
"Interesting" is subjective, but "trivia" is just information that is insignificant or of little use. Here are some other correlations you might find more interesting that are just as trivial as the one linking solar activity to pandemics:
When compared to the average person, people who prefer Miss Piggy over Kermit are more than twice as likely to have tattoos.
As the number of computer programmers in Kansas decline so do US burglary rates
Global average temperatures are correlated with the how many pirates there are
No, correlation alone is not interesting at all. If you were right we should be studying how the reduction in piracy over the last few centuries is strongly correlated with the increase in global warming. Pure nonsense.
Correlation is always interesting, and until you study it, you can’t even prove that it’s “correlation alone” and nothing else. Yes correlation is not always causation. But, correlation often opens up an entry point for new research. Most of modern medicine is heavily dependent on correlation.
The discussion here is not whether correlation is causation, but rather correlation is interesting because it opens an opportunity for you to explore whether it is causation or not.
That coincidence plot in the paper is amazing. I wonder what the criteria was to include a pandemic episode.
In the last link I don’t see any correlation at all, these are are completely different time scales? And even if there was, it’s meaningless as you can probably find a dozen random graphs (price of milk, number of eggs laid per chicken, left-handed births or whatever) that happen to be a near-perfect match to solar cycles.
I think there is a more interesting (and longer scale) trend that is less talked about, that the last couple solar cycles have been overall less intense (less activity/spots at the maximums)-
I wish that chart went further back to see if there is a greater cycle at play. At a glance it looks like this cycle is a slight rebound over the last.
I recall back a few years reading some articles speaking about the sun entering in a Grand Solar Minimum cycle similar to the Maunder minimum, and that the result could be global cooling, etc.
Not sure if there's been additional research or conjecture since then.
The theory is that we're due for another ice age and that there's going to be a pole shift. Pumping CO2 into the atmosphere would then be the best thing to do to stave off this scenario.
This actually sound very reasonable. About the only time people can agree is when there's a danger. Nothing unites people more than a common enemy (or, in this case, a phenomena).
But I think GPs point was that if it starts getting colder we go back to carelessly pumping CO2 into atmosphere, but for now we should go with the mainstream science and keep on reducing that.
Maybe in the movies, sure. The majority of the population is already carelessly pumping CO2 into the atmosphere even when most agree emissions should be reduced.
From what I understand, according to the best estimates this is already happening and we should have seen global cooling for a long time now if it wasn’t for greenhouse gas emissions
.. which means that the level of emissions we have right now is far, far beyond what’s necessary for avoiding global cooling.
This should be obvious if you look at best estimates of the rate of cooling/warming in the past. The warming we see now is happening much faster than anything seen before so it’s absolutely not a good thing in any conceivable way
> "Pumping CO2 into the atmosphere would then be the best thing to do to stave off this scenario."
which makes for a very convenient distraction/talking point of climate-focused science deniers. I am no expert, but every time I have checked into one of those supposed impending Grand Solar Minimum predictions (that will cause some sort of climate crisis), it has been pure pseudo-science with no legitimate or rational theoretical basis.
An Ice Age doesn't lead to "mild" temperature drops. It's catastrophically cold for centuries. Civilization is unlikely to survive it, and we don't have records of any that have save the Neanderthals, who lived in small groups.
We're in an ice age now. Humans have always lived in an Ice Age. It's called the Quaternary glaciation and it's been filled with individual glacial periods.
You might want to read up on terminology.
Physics, thermodynamics, informs us that the glaciers aren't coming back while the insulation in the atmosphere is high and still increasing.
> To geologists, an ice age is defined by the presence of large amounts of land-based ice.
That's pedantic.
> Physics, thermodynamics, informs us that the glaciers aren't coming back while the insulation in the atmosphere is high and still increasing.
Meh. The running hypothesis on the "other side" is that we're going to have a pole shift and grand solar minimum at the same time. Now, as you can see, I haven't really done the prerequisite reading. I have, however, read about all the stupidity surrounding "global warming" and how it was totally going to end the planet in 2000 and 1980 and 2024 and whenever, every year's the last one so that people that don't have anyone's best interests at heart can get more leverage off this supposedly inevitable-and-totally-close scenario. Meanwhile, the "fringe" has decidedly stuck to one thing, and has repeatedly criticized the very real corruption of (climate) science by monetary interests (and now national / global policy decisions) and popular opinion. This only makes me NOT want to spend my free time untangling "conclusive" climate decisions backed by ""science"" and who-knows-what leverage by a slimy bureaucrat.
I, as an individual, don't have a horse in this race. I don't believe in either one because my carbon emissions can be eclipsed by a volcano or a plane in a few hours. It's completely useless to expect me to not buy a car or to watch my energy consumption when it's not going to make a dent anyway.
> Meh. The running hypothesis on the "other side" is that we're going to have a pole shift and grand solar minimum at the same time.
The "other side" in this instance is fossil fuel funded think tanks promoting bonkers denialism ala the same institutes and their pro tobacco work in the decades earlier.
What "pole shift"? Magnetic pole on earth or the sun? The Earth magnetic pole flipping this century or the next is improbable at best and the solar pole flip happens every 22 years or so, neither that nor a grand solar minimum has anything to do with the glaciers on earth.
> I haven't really done the prerequisite reading
You might like to start with Syukuro Manabe's 1967 Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity - it was 15 years old when I first read it in an applied mathematics class prior to a career in geophysical exploration for minerals and energy clients.
It's 57 years old but still an absolute stonker of a paper, rightly considered the single most influential paper in climate research. (and only 19 pages).
> I have, however, read about all the stupidity surrounding "global warming" and how it was totally going to end the planet in 2000 and 1980 and 2024
Ignore that, that's not science that's media spin, half coming from people that really struggle to convey what a slow rolling train wreck climate change will be and desperate to urge people to take steps before it's too late, the other half coming from groups paid to up the FUD and hype in order to dilute the threat which has clearly woirked in many cases (you seem to be a fine example).
> This only makes me NOT want to spend my free time untangling "conclusive" climate decisions backed by ""science""
It's not much harder than understanding the heat equations.
> I, as an individual, don't have a horse in this race.
Exactly. Like many you're likely old, will be dead before this is a big issue, have no children, don't care about them if you did, and can't be arsed consuming less or making an effort. It's completely understandable.
> I don't believe in either one because my carbon emissions can be eclipsed by a volcano or a plane in a few hours.
Collectively though, it's the sum total of human emissions that are the problem, with a small percentage being the biggest problem and being reluctant to set an example.
> It's completely useless to expect me to not buy a car or to watch my energy consumption when it's not going to make a dent anyway.
Indeed, just rearrange your deck chair and listen to the band playing onwards.
Of course if you are in your 20s (as your HN profile claims) then you might want to do something that has an impact on the world about you and the people you know .. other than rolling coal and buying a lambo or whatever.
Climate is always changing. Earth itself and the sun caused many extreme conditions on earth. Humans can do it now as well. But nothing compared to natural causes. Nevertheless we humans should have full control of our atmosphere at one point.
Those ~100k year cycles in earth orbit and spin are not related to the present discussion of sunspot cycles and solar activity.
And (while not clear in this case) usually when someone claims that a "pole shift" will happen, they are usually referring to the crackpot claim that the planet will suddenly do something like maybe flip over or wobble violently causing the end of civilization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_shift_hypothe...
Well if that were true it would be the opposite of inconvenient. It would be like a truth that’s, I dunno, what’s a good word for something that isn’t inconvenient?
I'm convinced in a few hundred/thousand years scientists are going to be urging politicians to figure out how to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere due to cooling from cyclic perturbations of Earth's orbit. Too bad I won't be around to enjoy the irony.
I don't think it would be any more ironic than a house using the heater in the winter and ac in the summer
Also, acidification is another problem of co2. Honestly you might rather release methane or refrigerant if your goal was only to heat/insulate the atmosphere with minimal changes to chemistry, but I'm not a chemist etc
Also never forget the great oxygenation event and the azola cooling the planet to the point of mass extinction and snowball earth
Is it ironic? Right now it's getting too hot so we want fewer greenhouse gasses, in the future it might be cold and we want more. I think it's less ironic and more just the intentional infant science of planet-scale climate engineering
Regardless of the cause of climate change, on any time scale (even if it is a 100% natural cycle and human effects are zilch in the grand scheme), pollution is icky and hey, I'm walking^W living over here.
With respect, they said pollution is the icky part. I’m not aware of any major industries that are responsible for an appreciable amount of CO2 emissions and no other pollutants/icky stuff, but I’d love to be proven wrong about that.
Given the orbital perturbations are on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, no.
(That said, if we make it past the next century, we're probably going to be disassembling entire planets with von Neumann replicators rather than concerning ourselves with something as small as a mere atmosphere).
'those scientists' were from Sweden responding to protests over the increasing costs of food due to famine. When looked at from the lens of maximizing calories per dollar, it makes a lot more sense.
Makes sense. In a similar vein, once fast food places started stating calories per item... It actually helped me maximize calories per dollar and eat more calories, which seems opposite of the original goal of helping people limit their calories. Who is going to fast food to keep calories low?
> . Who is going to fast food to keep calories low?
I'd guess that there are more people use that information to select lower calorie food than people who make their menu selections based on the maximum number of calories per dollar, although I'd bet both those groups are a tiny fraction compared to the number of people who just order whatever they're in the mood for/tastes best to them and knowing how many calories are in that meal doesn't influence their behavior/choices at that moment but may still inform their choices later on
So going off of the previous HN thread, I thought we were due for a Carrington event a month ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40321821). Will this next bout of astronomical magnetic phenomena pose a threat to technological civilization as we know it?
Perhaps. The Carrington event was 2-4 times as strong as the one last month, but on the other hand it also looks like most of the electrical systems are a lot more resilient than they used to be.
When we had the CME headed towards Earth recently, I was pretty amazed at the sheer number of highly-upvoted HN comments whose authors seemed to believe that the power grid, copper phone lines, and communications satellites were all about to be wiped out.
Fortunately, most engineers in all of the fields above are well aware of the Carrington Event. And while it's not beyond possibility that there might be some corner cases if (when?) another one happens, we know how to design these systems to keep another one from causing any major outages or damage.
In fairness, quite a lot of governments are visibly very bad at getting quality infrastructure built, themselves or privately, especially infrastructure that only matters after they left office.
The visibility may be unrepresentative, newspapers always amplify what's bad rather than what's good.
I am curious about how would the general public be made aware of another Carrington-class storm. NOAA rated May 2024 storm as G5, which is the highest rating for a geomagnetic storm regarding its effect on the public.
Just need Bruckheimer + Bay and/or Emmerich to make a couple of disaster movies about the concept to incept it into the public's mind. Hopefully that will then provide NOAA the popular support to do what they need to do.
I'm having trouble parsing tfa; does this mean the sun is at "solar maximum" now, and does this also mean we may be in for some more frequent and intense auroras?
On a solar scale though earth goes through a full orbit in just a year, Mars two years.
It is interesting that Jupiter has an 11 year orbit and that kind of matches the flip, might just be coincidence but that mass has a huge tug though. Sun is only 1000 times the mass of Jupiter, if you think of it like a "failed star" it's kinda like a pseudo binary? Eh I am grasping at straws.
"Although Jupiter would need to be about 75 times more massive to fuse hydrogen and become a star,[66] its diameter is sufficient as the smallest red dwarf may be only slightly larger in radius than Saturn."
It got as big as it could be, though.
"Theoretical models indicate that if Jupiter had over 40% more mass, the interior would be so compressed that its volume would decrease despite the increasing amount of matter. For smaller changes in its mass, the radius would not change appreciably.[63] As a result, Jupiter is thought to have about as large a diameter as a planet of its composition and evolutionary history can achieve.[64] The process of further shrinkage with increasing mass would continue until appreciable stellar ignition was achieved"
I think the point is that it's pretty darn close to the very fuzzy limit of when something can be a star vs. when it can't. If it were off in space on its own, rather than orbiting our star, it might be a contentious classification
No - the definition of a star isn't fuzzy at all. It's defined by hydrogen fusion - if it's doing that (or did in the past), it's a star, or if it isn't then it's not. Jupiter fails this by a factor of 75.
Brown dwarfs (which fuse deuterium but not regular hydrogen, starting at about 13x Jupiter's mass) were thought to be in a fuzzy area, but then their own category was created for them.
> One side effect of the magnetic field shift is slight but primarily beneficial: It can help shield Earth from galactic cosmic rays — high-energy subatomic particles that travel at near light speed and can damage spacecraft and harm orbiting astronauts who are outside Earth's protective atmosphere.
Buried three sentences from the end of the article, after a wall of ads and filler (I'm impatient).
Why? Is it because the poles are aligned with earths, complimenting our own magnetic field?
It appears the magnetic poles are in continuous rotation [1], that sometimes aligns to the rotational poles and sometimes doesn't, with a "flip" event being the binary classification from the slow and smooth traversal over the equator. I feel silly, but I always assumed it was from some more fairly sharp step in the rate of change!
There is an animation further down that shows the magnetic field generated by the sun when it is a dipole. Apparently the 3-d wave like pattern better shields from cosmic rays originating outside the solar system.
I recall a few years ago a what seemed to be ground-breaking white paper from I think a Russian scientist, who argued (and convincingly) that there are two cycles at work, one deep in the Sun, the other shallow. The co-incidence of these two cycles both being at maximum, or both being at minimum, explaining the extremes of solar activity.
That sounds like Gnevishev, M. N.; Ohl, A. I. (1948). "On the 22-year cycle of solar activity" which first appeared in the Russian journal Astronomicheskii Zhurnal 76 years past.
Very interesting! but not that - it was much more recent, few years ago. What I'm thinking of was not writing about a 22 year cycle; it was arguing for two independent cycles, one deep in the solar atmosphere, one toward the surface.
Sure, you more than likely did read a more recent paper.
That said, the earlier paper was about two cycles, the already known 11 year cycle and seperate observations that only occurred every two 11 year cycles.
There's a chance the two papers are related via a common coupled driver, or not.
We know so much and yet so little. The writing is in the article stating how mathematically they have no model, therefore they cannot truly understand it yet (researchers/academics).
This is true for climate change and it's own challenges along with many other applications of similar nature where models are incomplete or entirely missing large portions of data needed to further true understanding of a given process.
As is common in physics, a subject can be extremely well studied, theories can be produced, models can be created that predict future behaviour incredibly precisely, but because we can’t poke it hard enough or with enough precision the exact underlying mechanism remains unconfirmed.
Which made me think. I would expect other stars to do this. Would magnetic polarity be detectable at interstellar distances? could novel astronomy* be done on stars this way?
* Does the magnetic flip period tell us anything about the star that would otherwise be hard to figure out.
Earth's magnetic field rotates in irregular intervals. The terrifying part is, the time it takes to complete the rotation, the different intermediate magnetic poles cancel each other out, and we are left with a much smaller magnetic field overall. As low as 10% of what earth has today.
Astrum's channel on youtube has several pictures and complete analysis[1]. (I have downloaded the whole channel on my computer, that's the filename.)
[1] How The Earth Got Its Magnetic Field (And Why It Might Not Protect Us Much Longer)
As the sea floor plates that are being created in the mid ocean ridges cool the magnetic orientation is recorded in the alignment of particles in the newly frozen rock.
We can see alternating bands of polarity in the rock that show what the orientation was over geological time. The bands that spread outward from the ridges are separated by millions of years and provide a clear picture of sea floor spreading, and continental drift.
In that SF story, I would be far more interested in the tech, that allows human life (or anything we bring) to withstand that slightly bigger problem called heat and radiation.
I'm playing with slight variations of this prompt on GPTs:
"Write a short (300--600 word) story about how human explorers on the Sun would address the challenges of navigation, orientation, and timekeeping (including the challenges of starfinding). Ignore obvious effects such as heat, gravity, and radiation."
Results are ... not excellent literature, but amusing all the same.
The Vikings supposedly had a "sunstone" (cordierite crystal) that could help find the Sun through clouds or fog. I did buy a piece and wasn't able to get any good results, but my life didn't depend on it.
It’s a polarizing filter. The atmosphere polarizes sunlight based on the angle the light enters. You can find the position of the sun above the horizon as the point where light is least horizontally polarized (a horizontal filter has the least difference between brightness through the filter and around it), and potentially find the position of the sun itself by the highest rate of change of polarization angle. This works remarkably well even on overcast days — try it with polarized sunglasses.
And would something like El Nino be included in this effect or is it separate?
Don't get me wrong - the earth has obviously been getting warmer for a long time now. But the narrative on the cause of recent high temps seems way over-simplified.
> help but feel like recent high temperatures are getting vastly oversimplified
I could see this if it was just a regular person that you know weighing in on climate change and temperatures, but there seems to be a pretty overwhelming global concensus of experts for maybe 50 years saying this. I'm sure timelines are wrong, studies are sometimes wrong, but I'm going to put my faith in the experts that recent high temperatures are the result of humans.
I'm also going to place a bet that this is only going to rise and get worse as we're offloading our own internal energy and capabilities to things like robots and AI, everything using extra energy to connect to the internet, non-replacable batteries, locked devices, fast fashion, and junk stores like Temu and Amazon.
I can buy a speaker from 1970 and it works. I won't be able to buy a speaker from 2020 and have it work 50 years from now. New tech has much better qualities than old tech but the tradeoff is comsumption increases as nothing is repairable.
Anything that monotonically goes up over the last 100yrs currently correlates with the earth's average temperature, unfortunately. A 11yrs cycle does not seem to fit that criterion.
This is the Sun's magnetic field. It reverses on 11 year cycle, the same cycle as sunspots. It has reversed multiple times during your lifetime.
The current cycle seems to be stronger than usual. And produce some strong solar flares recently. Those could cause problems for electrical grid. But there have been stronger cycles back in the 1950s.
Very interesting hypothesis. Anyone here with more expertise want to comment?
The summary is that the sun is actually metallic hydrogen, which forms a lattice similar to layers of graphite. This both explains the black-body radiation of the sun and provides a mechanism to explain sunspots and the solar maximum and pole flip: sunspots are non-hydrogen elements that are excluded from the metallic hydrogen lattice and push it upwards as they migrate to the surface and are ejected.
I do not personally possess the knowledge with which to evaluate this person's claims or belief. Therefore, I have to index on other information to evaluate the plausibility of the claims.
In this case, the other information is 1) proven credentials in the subject matter and 2) general acceptance of his theories by a community with more credentials. He lacks the former and the latter, so I'm disinclined to give his theories much attention.
Plenty of so-called outsiders have made amazing discoveries before, or at least hypothesized what would eventually be an amazing discovery. Maybe that's the case here. Yet skepticism seems warranted without that being considered an ad hominem attack.
I think those facts about the authors credentials are pretty relevant, especially to this audience that's probably not filled with astrophysics literate individuals.
He was booted out of his university, he has never published an astrophysical paper in a peer-reviewed journal, he buys ad space in newspapers to publicize his "theories", his ideas either make no testable predictions or make incorrect predictions. He says the cosmic microwave background is caused by ocean waves. He thinks blackbody radiation stops working in outer space.
causality0 was making statements about his credentials and expertise, not his personal characteristics. I think ad hominem definitionally has to be irrelevant. “x knows nothing about topic y” is not ad hominem even if it is a false statement.
An ad hominem doesn't have to be irrelevant; it just means that the argument is about the person rather than the position. Attempting to dismiss an argument due to the person's credentials instead of their position is 100% an ad hominem.
But like contravariant said, that doesn't mean the argument is wrong—just that it's a weak argument.
People really ought to learn that pointing out a fallacy doesn't suddenly make it false. I mean I could point out that that is known as the fallacy fallacy, but then I'd be doing the same thing myself.
Really a fallacy represents a particular weak argument. The way to defeat them is not to name the correct fallacy but to point out the weakness.
If that doesn't work then you likely have the wrong fallacy, or the argument isn't fallacious to begin with.
From the wiki article:
"he maintains that satellite measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, believed by most astronomers to be an afterglow of the Big Bang, are actually observations of a glow from Earth's oceans."
I am no expert but that wacky idea can be ruled out with concepts in an introductory physics textbook just based on the fact that the cosmic microwave background is a few Kelvin blackbody spectrum whereas the ocean temperature is 273K or higher (which would have a very different "warmer" spectrum).
Metallic hydrogen only forms when hydrogen is stable molecules of H2. The Sun is way too hot to form metallic hydrogen. The Sun is completely ionized into plasma.
It isn't surprising that there is messy magnetic field when Sun is pure conductor.
Metallic hydrogen probably has something to do with magnetic field on Jupiter.
