Historic aurora show

As the sun nears its peak in cycle 25, giant sunspots drive a major burst of auroral activity. “We have a very rare event on our hand,” Shawn Dahl, Service Coordinator of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Group, told reporters on Friday (May 10) just hours before the northern lights spectacle began.
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Many people around the world have just seen auroras for the first time in their lives. This includes residents of the Florida Keys, says Spaceweather.com.
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Seeing auroras in the Florida Keys is extraordinary, but the light show didn’t stop there. Sky watchers saw the sky turn red across the Carribean.
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“The last events on record when auroras were seen from Puerto Rico were in 1859 and 1921, so tonight was an historic event”, says Eddie Irizarry from the Sociedad de Astronomia del Caribe (Astronomical Society of the Caribbean).

Auroras also appeared in Mexico.

Source including aurora images here.
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Image: Auroral activity seen from North Wales (UK), 10 May 2024 [credit: M.Robinson]

How light can vaporize water without the need for heat – MIT research

The researchers say the effect can be substantial and call it ‘a major part of the picture’. Under the optimum conditions of color, angle, and polarization “the evaporation rate is four times the thermal limit.” It was reported last year but this paper was only accepted last month. That report said: ‘The phenomenon might play a role in the formation and evolution of fog and clouds, and thus would be important to incorporate into climate models to improve their accuracy, the researchers say.’ The best incident angle for the light is 45°, according to the pre-print.
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It’s the most fundamental of processes—the evaporation of water from the surfaces of oceans and lakes, the burning off of fog in the morning sun, and the drying of briny ponds that leaves solid salt behind, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, via Phys.org).

Evaporation is all around us, and humans have been observing it and making use of it for as long as we have existed.

And yet, it turns out, we’ve been missing a major part of the picture all along.

In a series of painstakingly precise experiments, a team of researchers at MIT has demonstrated that heat isn’t alone in causing water to evaporate.

World first UK prototype could pave the way for constant energy all the time – from space

Building the solar power ‘farm’ in space would take more than 60 rocket flights, possibly with SpaceX, and a team of robot builders. The power would be directed away from inhabited areas, probably offshore. Whether the finance numbers would add up is anyone’s guess, but it’s claimed to be a lot cheaper than nuclear power for example, with no waste product.
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A company hoping to launch the first solar farm into space has passed a critical milestone with a prototype on Earth, says Sky News.

Oxfordshire-based Space Solar plans to power more than a million homes by the 2030s with mile-wide complex of mirrors and solar panels orbiting 22,000 miles above the planet.

But its super-efficient design for harvesting constant sunlight – called CASSIOPeiA – requires the system to rotate towards the sun, whatever its position, while still sending power to a fixed receiver on the ground.

How China captured the sun – and cast a shadow over Europe

UK plans mean ‘we will be covering an area of countryside the size of Middlesex with Chinese solar panels’ by 2035, while China’s market share in the EU has reached 97%. Can energy/climate policymakers explain what is supposed to happen to all these millions of panels at replacement time?
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Europe’s ambitious plans to expand green energy generation with “Made in EU” solar panels face a distinctly cloudy future as the continent faces a massive glut of the devices, says The Telegraph (via Yahoo News).

Millions of solar panels are piling up in warehouses across the Continent because of a manufacturing battle in China, where cut-throat competition has driven the world’s biggest panel-makers to expand production far faster than they can be installed.

The supply glut has caused solar panel prices to halve.

Weird dent in Earth’s magnetic field is messing with auroras in the Southern Hemisphere

The South Atlantic Anomaly is an interesting phenomenon, which varies over time and may be related to a zone of unusually dense rock.
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A bizarre dent in Earth’s magnetic field above the southern Atlantic Ocean weakens the southern lights, new research finds.

The South Atlantic Anomaly is a large, oval-shaped region over South America and the southern Atlantic Ocean where Earth’s magnetic field is weakest, says Live Science.

The anomaly is already well known for allowing charged particles from the sun to dip close to Earth’s surface, exposing satellites orbiting above to high levels of ionizing radiation, according to NASA.

Nations fail to agree on solar geoengineering regulations

Who could consider themselves qualified to attempt to interfere with the sun’s rays? The African group of countries have an answer: no-one. Overreaction to some slight warming of the globe in the current era is the problem they should be looking at. History tells us such phases come and go, in the long term.
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Governments have failed to agree on how the United Nations should regulate controversial solar radiation management (SRM) techniques, which aim to lessen the effects of climate change by dimming the sunlight reaching Earth, says Climate Home.

At the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi this week, some governments led by the African Group of countries wanted to ban SRM, while others led by Switzerland had pushed to set up an expert panel to research the nascent approach.

As countries were unable to reach consensus at talks on Wednesday, the status quo will continue. SRM is currently legal in most nations.

Britain to harness power of Sahara solar farms using world’s biggest cable-laying ship

‘The project has already been declared one of “national significance” by Claire Coutinho, the Energy Secretary, who has also set a team of civil servants to work on it’, says the story. A claim of ‘near-constant’ electricity supply from one of the project team sounds a tad optimistic. Sandstorms are not unheard of in the Sahara region, for example. [Click on image to enlarge]
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A project to power Britain using solar farms thousands of miles away in the Sahara is moving a step closer to fruition as its backers prepare to commission the world’s biggest cable-laying ship, says The Telegraph.

The 700ft vessel will lay four parallel cables linking solar and wind farms spread across the desert in Morocco with a substation in Alverdiscott, a tiny village near the coast of north Devon.

Once completed, the scheme is expected to deliver about 3.6 gigawatts of electricity to the UK’s national grid – equating to about 8pc of total power demand.

‘Our old way of life will be gone forever’: The tenant farmers targeted by solar developers

Just 0.1% of farmland is currently taken by solar panels – similar to the area claimed by Christmas trees (says Sky). But if solar developers get their way, backed by climate-obsessed politicians, tenant farmers could be facing a fate like the notorious Highland clearances when crofters were forcibly evicted from their smallholdings to make way for sheep farming. Goodbye to the bother of rent collection, hello bigger profits.
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It’s a frosty morning on Kidsley Farm in Derbyshire, a rare thing in this unusually warm winter, says Sky News.

Andrew Dakin’s beef herd is housed in the old brick barns, their breath steaming in the chill air. Alongside scuttling chickens and tractors of varying vintages, this is the very image of a traditional farmyard.

But for how long? Andrew is a tenant farmer and his landlord, who owns the land, wants to turn his pasture into a solar farm.

Clouds disappear quickly during a solar eclipse, shows study – ‘a warning for climate engineering’

The research, titled ‘Clouds dissipate quickly during solar eclipses as the land surface cools’, suggests interfering with solar radiation to try and weaken natural warming would be even riskier than previously thought.
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Cumulus clouds over land start to disappear almost instantly during a partial solar eclipse, says Phys.org.

Until recently, satellite measurements during the eclipse resulted in dark spots in the cloud map, but researchers from TU Delft and KNMI were able to recover the satellite measurements by using a new method.

The results may have implications for proposed climate engineering ideas because disappearing clouds can partly oppose the cooling effect of artificial solar eclipses.

Climate Scientists Want Space Umbrellas The Size Of Argentina To Blot Out The Sun

Mr. Burns blocks the sun

Bad luck for solar panel owners and users, and anything relying on photosynthesis. But as such umbrellas would be far too heavy to move even if they could be made, probably nothing to worry about. Just another climate alarm concoction in search of funding.
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A team of climate scientists wants to launch enormous umbrellas into space to reduce the Earth’s exposure to the sun and fight climate change, The New York Times reported Friday (via Climate Change Dispatch).

The underlying idea is that large parasols could be positioned in space such that they marginally reduce the intensity of sunlight the Earth receives and thereby mitigate some global warming, the Times reported.

To block out enough radiation, a single sunshade would need to be approximately the size of Argentina — nearly one million square miles — and would weigh about 2.5 million tons, so scientists are looking to prove the idea could work by first producing a 100-square foot prototype with the help of $10 to $20 million of funding.

Solar protons rain down on Earth via the Parker spiral

Solar Protons Are Raining Down on Earth

Sometimes known as a Solar particle event:
These particles can penetrate the Earth’s magnetic field and cause partial ionization of the ionosphere. Energetic protons are a significant radiation hazard to spacecraft and astronauts.

Researchers use new 3D global climate model to test runaway greenhouse theory, with odd results

We quote the last part of this Phys.org article, headed: ‘A planet Earth in a fragile equilibrium.’ Somehow the model finds that once the oceans have eventually evaporated ‘we would even reach 273 bars of surface pressure and over 1,500°C’. This seems a bit unlikely on the face of it as it’s three times the surface pressure, and temperature [note the link between those two] of Venus despite being nearly 40% further away from the Sun. We note that it’s not unheard of for climate models to over-predict temperature effects.
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Talkshop note – the article earlier states:
One of the key points of the study describes the appearance of a very peculiar cloud pattern, increasing the runaway effect, and making the process irreversible. “From the start of the transition, we can observe some very dense clouds developing in the high atmosphere. Actually, the latter does not display anymore the temperature inversion characteristic of the Earth atmosphere and separating its two main layers: the troposphere and the stratosphere. The structure of the atmosphere is deeply altered,” says Chaverot.
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A planet Earth in a fragile equilibrium.

With their new climate models, the scientists have calculated that a very small increase of the solar irradiation—leading to an increase of the global Earth temperature, of only a few tens of degrees—would be enough to trigger this irreversible runaway process on Earth and make our planet as inhospitable as Venus.

The Sahara Desert used to be a green savannah : Research explains why – it’s a climate cycle

Sahara desert from space [image credit: NASA]

We’re informed that ‘scientists have identified more than 230 of these greenings occurring about every 21,000 years over the past eight million years.’ (Ice ages may account for the numerical shortfall). Climate models aren't able to simulate these greenings, or at least not their magnitude. The period they identify is the combined precession cycle, i.e. the beat period of the tropical and anomalistic orbits (years) of the Earth (when the difference between the number of each reaches 1). Inevitably it’s about the energy received from the Sun.
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Algeria’s Tassili N’Ajjer plateau is Africa’s largest national park, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

Among its vast sandstone formations is perhaps the world’s largest art museum. Over 15,000 etchings and paintings are exhibited there, some as much as 11,000 years old according to scientific dating techniques, representing a unique ethnological and climatological record of the region.

Curiously, however, these images do not depict the arid, barren landscape that is present in the Tassili N’Ajjer today.

The Sun’s Rampant Activity Is Likely to Peak Really, Really Soon: Study

Variation in solar activity during a recent sunspot cycle [credit: Wikipedia]

So soon there’s barely time to read the study, if the prediction is anywhere near correct. Solar cycle 25 has already defeated the majority of pundits anyway, by being considerably more active prior to its peak than the last one. However, at least one group of researchers has already forecast a peak around now (see this April 2023 Talkshop post). The latest (i.e. just revised) Hathaway/Upton forecast graphic is here. What the value is of SC predictions of such short duration, even if they turn out to be close to correct, is not entirely clear. It seems like placing a bet when the jockeys can already see the finish line.
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A new study has found that the impending peak in the Sun’s activity cycle will likely arrive significantly sooner than previously predicted, says Science Alert.

According to an analysis by astrophysicists Priyansh Jaswal, Chitradeep Saha, and Dibyendu Nandy at the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India, solar maximum is likely to hit in January 2024.

This is much, much sooner than the initial official prediction, which found solar maximum would take place in July 2025.

Antarctic ozone hole moving in mysterious ways, research suggests

Credit: earthhow.com

At least one expert was ‘not convinced’ by the study’s results. The theory that the ozone hole’s seasonal size was/is strongly related to human activity is left looking a bit threadbare, even if the study doesn’t exactly say that. But if the alleged cause has been mostly removed and the hole persists, to a significant extent at least, what other conclusion is there? ‘Rare events’ is one suggestion.
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The hole in the Antarctic ozone layer has been getting deeper in mid-spring over the last two decades, despite a global ban on chemicals that deplete Earth’s shield from deadly solar radiation, new research suggested Tuesday.

The ozone layer 11 to 40 kilometers (seven to 25 miles) above Earth’s surface filters out most of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, which can cause skin cancer and cataracts, says Phys.org..

From the mid-1970s, chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—once widely used in aerosols and refrigerators—were found to be reducing ozone levels, creating annual holes largely over the Antarctica region.

More cloud uncertainties: researching the effect of aerosol particles on clouds and the climate

Again it turns out that climate modellers don’t understand cloud effects too well. As this article bluntly puts it: ‘The interactions of atmospheric aerosols with solar radiation and clouds continue to be inadequately understood and are among the greatest uncertainties in the model description and forecasting of changes to the climate. One reason for this is the many unanswered questions about the hygroscopicity of aerosol particles.’ — Other reasons aren’t discussed here. Why do we keep reading about ‘state-of-the-art’ climate models when they clearly have a long way to go to merit such a description? Any forecasts they produce should be treated with great caution, to say the least.
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The extent to which aerosol particles affect the climate depends on how much water the particles can hold in the atmosphere, says Phys.org.

The capacity to hold water is referred to as hygroscopicity (K) and, in turn, depends on further factors—particularly the size and chemical composition of the particles, which can be extremely variable and complex.

Through extensive investigations, an international research team under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) was able to reduce the relationship between the chemical composition and the hygroscopicity of aerosol particles to a simple linear formula.

Strange anomaly in sun’s solar cycle discovered in centuries-old texts from Korea

Perhaps we should be looking out for an anomalously short solar cycle to provide support for predictions of an approaching return to
cooler planetary conditions? The aurora-based result doesn’t appear in the 2021 tree ring study reported here, which goes back as far as AD 969.
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The sun’s solar cycles were once around three years shorter than they are today, a new analysis of centuries-old Korean chronicles reveals.

This previously unknown anomaly occurred during a mysterious solar epoch known as the “Maunder Minimum,” more than 300 years ago, says LiveScience.

The sun is constantly in a state of flux. Our home star cycles through periods of increased activity, known as solar maximum, when solar storms become more frequent and powerful, as well as spells of reduced activity, known as solar minimum, when solar storms almost completely disappear.

The Sun’s Magnetic Poles are Vanishing (again)

The Sun’s Magnetic Poles are Vanishing

The Sun usually finds ways to keep the pundits guessing.

Has the Sun’s true role in global warming been miscalculated?

Nice day

Of course the IPCC’s preferred idea is that the Sun can be ignored as a variable in climate influence, and all attention should focus on minor trace gases (mainly CO2 at 0.04%) in the atmosphere. A recent study by Spencer & Christy weighed in on a related topic: Our new climate sensitivity paper has been published, which proposes that actual observations indicate significant IPCC over-estimation of (theoretical) non-solar climate factors.
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A new international study published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal, Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, by 20 climate researchers from 12 countries suggests that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) might have substantially underestimated the role of the Sun in global warming, says Ceres-Science.

The article began as a response to a 2022 commentary on an extensive review of the causes of climate change published in 2021.

The original review (Connolly and colleagues, 2021) had suggested that the IPCC reports had inadequately accounted for two major scientific concerns when they were evaluating the causes of global warming since the 1850s:

The global temperature estimates used in the IPCC reports are contaminated by urban warming biases.

The estimates of solar activity changes since the 1850s considered by the IPCC substantially downplayed a possible large role for the Sun.

On this basis, the 2021 review had concluded that it was not scientifically valid for the IPCC to rule out the possibility that global warming might be mostly natural.

To study atmosphere, NASA rockets will fly into October eclipse’s shadow

Annular eclipse [image credit: Smrgeog @ Wikipedia]

This is part 1 – part 2 is next April.
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A NASA sounding rocket mission will launch three rockets during the 2023 annular eclipse in October to study how the sudden drop in sunlight affects our upper atmosphere, says Phys.org.

On Oct. 14, 2023, viewers of an annular solar eclipse in the Americas will experience the sun dimming to 10% its normal brightness, leaving only a bright “ring of fire” of sunlight as the moon eclipses the sun.

Those in the vicinity of the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, however, might also notice sudden bright streaks across the sky: trails of scientific rockets, hurtling toward the eclipse’s shadow.

A NASA sounding rocket mission will launch three rockets to study how the sudden drop in sunlight affects our upper atmosphere.