11-12-2015, 06:15 PM
tada,
"NASA observes "declining phase of the sun". Which means cooler weather??"
Possibly, but the true answer is no-one really knows. The cycle is a long one and year-to-year temperatures are much more likely due to short-term effects caused by our own atmosphere. The problem is that the technology used to study the sun these days has not been around for very long, so there's no real way to compare what's happening now to, e.g., what happened before the last Maunder Minimum. Sunspot counts are a way of looking into the past, and looking for correlations via ice-core data will help, but back then we had no way of measuring the sun's activity via x-rays, UV, or obviously, space probes, so the comparison lacks a lot of data.
"NASA observes "declining phase of the sun". Which means cooler weather??"
Possibly, but the true answer is no-one really knows. The cycle is a long one and year-to-year temperatures are much more likely due to short-term effects caused by our own atmosphere. The problem is that the technology used to study the sun these days has not been around for very long, so there's no real way to compare what's happening now to, e.g., what happened before the last Maunder Minimum. Sunspot counts are a way of looking into the past, and looking for correlations via ice-core data will help, but back then we had no way of measuring the sun's activity via x-rays, UV, or obviously, space probes, so the comparison lacks a lot of data.