Weird Science
link Rare Drop in Sunspot Activity Could Cause Little Ice Age – International Business Times.
I wonder how they know it’s ‘rare’? While advances in science and research have been marvelous over the past 100 years, some of the conclusions that are offered should prod some questions as to their validity. It’s not known for how long observing sun spot activity has been a scientific pursuit, at least for those who don’t wind up blind, but when they observe that sunspot activity is ‘rare’, we presume it means over the lifetime of the sun and not just of the person.
Of course we really don’t know the history of the sun to assign what actually constitutes rare. It’s been around for a few million years and man only invented telescopes a short while ago in relative terms. In fact, the activity may not be rare at all, it may just happen at night. But let’s assume that there’s legitimate reason to label this sunspot activity rare.
If that’s the case, we expect that there must be records kept over at least the past 3000 years which document the instances of sunspot activity. This in itself would be amazing since these days, we can’t even find a birth certificate issued 50 odd years ago. According to the article, some Chinese sun-gazers made note of this activity in 600 B.C. as did some German astronomers in the 1840’s. Anyone’s guess is good as to why they would do this. It’s a stretch to believe that people in those days recorded these kinds of ‘scientific’ observations as part of some official capacity. You’d have to convince me that governments had nothing better to do than to pay someone to look at the sun. More likely, they were eccentrics who pursued this stuff like someone cataloging types of cat hair. Nevertheless, the conclusion is that based on such historical records, sunspot activity is linked to temperature fluctuations here on earth. Unfortunately, according to the article, not enough to offset global warming.
I guess it all sounds plausible. As plausible as the doom the Mayans felt when they witnessed a rare eclipse back in the day, doubly so if you were a virgin. There’s an old anecdotal story about a scientist studying the relationship between removing the legs on a bug and its hearing. As the scientist removed each leg, he commanded the bug to move, which of course it did. Upon removing the last leg, the command to move elicited no movement from the bug. The conclusion was that when you remove legs from a bug, it goes deaf. I can’t help but think of this when articles like this claiming really questionable science comes to light. Call me a skeptic.