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.
