
Is our Sun falling silent? - bananacurve
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25743806
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monochr
That's a terrible article. The little ice age had a large number of causes
most of which were local to Europe or at most the Northern Hemisphere.

The main point about the sun quieting down is that it makes inter planetary
travel survivable since the largest source of radiation in space close to
Earth is the Sun.

This could well be a godsend that lets us start manned missions to the planets
without having to wait 50 years for inventing new ways to keep people alive in
high radiation environments, e.g. either with increased biological cell repair
or physical/magnetic shields. The last time we left Earth's magnetic field we
got lucky and missed a flair that could have incapacitated/killed an Apollo
mission:

[http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2006/0...](http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2006/01sep_sentinels/)

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anon1385
Terrible article, as usual from the BBC when it comes to science.

There was a session at the last AGU meeting about the solar cycle which is
more informative:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIhBEF94YlM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIhBEF94YlM)

The discussion there contradicts the idea that scientists are suddenly
'baffled' by this. Some groups predicted the current low cycle based on the
polar magnetic fields, and it seems like they are being proven right. Also it
looks like there might be a ~100 year cycle but obviously we have to wait
quite a long time to really say anything certain about that. We have
measurements for solar cycles this low in the past, so we know it isn't
unprecedented. It just hasn't happened in our lifetimes.

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grkvlt
The article may be light on science, but it _does_ have a link to the review
paper by Mike Lockwood, "Solar Influence on Global and Regional Climates"
here:
[http://www.eiscat.rl.ac.uk/Members/mike/publications/pdfs/20...](http://www.eiscat.rl.ac.uk/Members/mike/publications/pdfs/2012/286_Lockwood_SurvGeophys2012.pdf)

This is a very good summary of current research, and it's excellent to see the
BBC giving easy direct access to primary sources in scientific reporting. The
Guardian is also good at providing links to source material, and this should
be the default for inline media. Too many journalists simply summarise press
releases from universities and give vague statements like 'in a recent paper,
scientists say ...' and so on.

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altrego99
Reminds me of Ring (Stephen Baxter), especially the AI construct Lieserl whose
job was to get inside the sun to figure out why it was cooling down.

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ajuc
Does this mean global warming will be slower than expected/not a problem at
all?

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ctdonath
Global cooling.

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etanazir
I guess we can green house gas like rockstars now.

