Very Sensationalist Op!

De Jager uses a loose term 'dead' to denote the suns quiet period. He doesn't actually mean 'dead' though.

IRM

Ot's not dead, it's just having a small nap.


Just because it's having a quiet period, doesn't mean it's dead. Our observation of the sun probably doesn't even go back far enough to deam this as fact. I mean, there could be periods of thousands of years, where the sun is quiet. So how someone can pronouce the sun "dead" is beyond me, and completly unscientific.

The Sun has had 2 Billion years being unobserved in its lifetime, and still HAS another 2 Billion years of fuel reserves in its core to maintain its intensity, so how the lack of Sunspot activity can attribute to its demise (especially on a Human timescale of just a 11 year Sunspot cycle) is beyond me.

It's all cool - what we do is get some old Hollywood stars, I'm thinking Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood that huge black guy from the green Mile... A space ship and the biggest pair of defibrillator paddles ever conceived...


That article is just about how we are in a unusually quiet period - and as others have said we have only being observing the sun for a few hundred years, and with increasing sophistication we are just learning more and more... It's a bit like catching the same bus all week not knowing the bus schedule... And when Sunday comes around you assume there will be no more buses ever...

We're DOOOOMED, DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED I tell ya..


Oh, no we're not, its just another scientist giving us his OPINION, with obviously a different meaning for the word 'DEAD'.

Us laymen think the word 'DEAD' means 'NOT LIVING NO MORE' obviously in the scientific community it has another meaning. like 'asleep' or 'dormant or 'quiet'.

So that means my Grandfather who we buried 27 years ago is simply 'asleep' , or 'dormant', uh oh......

As IRM stated in the first reply, the scientist did not mean that the Sun is really dead, but merely less active according to current observations and expectations regarding Sunspot activity.

I only watched the movie and read the article on the klimatosoof.nl site but found it quite interesting. We will see if he's correct by 2020. At least he's willing to publicly speak his opinion on human related CO2 emission not being the primary cause of climate change. This is a good thing, as it opens up other posibilities to be more deeply explored than they currently are.

If the sun is proved to be the overwhelming influence on climate, the global warming fanatics will simply suggest that by using electricity and therefore lights, we are fooling the sun into thinking it does not need to work as hard, hence it is having a nap- mark my words, maybe Gore is on the case already

Yeah I know guys, but is the title of the original dutch artical. Not asleep, or dormant, but dead. Sensationlism? Maybe It's the words of prof De Jager, not mine. But we're all grown ups. If the sun would be really dead, we would be too. If i would have to translate the professors words to english I would say 'dead in relation to what we would expect.' +1 for Datawraith

Anyways, I think it's an important addition to all the climate discussion that is going on. Governments and climatologists are focussing on CO2 reduction (and related taxes) but I think they are forgetting the sun as important factor.

Man claims to know so much about the world, it's processes and the universe we live in, and of course we do. But infact we only just leave a litlle dent on the big plate of knowledge. The problem is that people who have heared the bell ringing use that little peace of knowledge to impose their will on others. But that's for a whole different discussion

Back on topic: what do you guys think this quite period means?

We will need to pump more carbon into the atmosphere to keep us from snowball earth!

brrr.

Originally posted by cappuccino
Back on topic: what do you guys think this quite period means?

It's just another curve ball from mother nature. It merely demonstrates that we don't know as much as we think we do. We are bound to see the unexpected ever so often.

IRM

Originally posted by Now_Then
It's all cool - what we do is get some old Hollywood stars, I'm thinking Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood that huge black guy from the green Mile... A space ship and the biggest pair of defibrillator paddles ever conceived...

Nope just Chuck Norris and his trusty roundhouse kick!!

Its just the sun going through cycles, and i prefer teh word to say the sun is asleep.

Do you consider that the sun too, could do what humans do, and have cycles.

The op, should change it to asleep.

I keep on saying the sun, saw gore get his nobel prize, for gw, and the sun said, fu and went to sleep.

I think we all have along way to go don't we.

[edit on 11/26/2009 by andy1033]

"The Sun is DEAD " ... What attention whore wrote that byline for the website I wonder?
The arrogance of these proffesors and so forth never fails to shock , appall and ammuse me. The idea that we could EVER know enough about the sun , to make such spurious claims, after mere centuaries of record keeping, when compared with its billions of years of life, is simply ridiculous.
Its no suprise to people who have been keeping up with the recent activity of the sun, that we may be approaching what is known as a deep solar minimum. This has been a likely scenario since well before summer, out there in the scientific press (for instance Focus magazine, published by the BBC). Its not a shock , its just a possibility . And yes, the dangers are everything from miniature ice ages , to terrible storms and nonsense of that degree. However, the sun is not dead, and having looked into this for several months I can say I have never heard any other scientificaly renowned publication which would even consider using the word dead to describe the sun .
The scientist featured will no doubt have recieved some perplexed and possibly derrogatory comment from his fellow scholars.

Come on you guys, give the guy a break. Comparatively speaking the sun is "Dead" and the thread title was appropriate.

It thankfully (or not) decided to take a break just in time to make Al Gore look like the fool that he is. It will prove once and for all that the Sun drives the weather on Earth. As I understand, even the so called "climatologists" failed to account for variations in the Sun's output when doing the now infamous global warming predictions.

Should it continue virtually spotless, as a Russian scientist recently said, you better buy blankets cause its gonna get COLD.

Ah, so what if the sun is dead, I never really liked the daytime much anyhow, I'm mostly nocturnal myself. So, what does this mean then, is my electric bill suppose to be going up or what? It would be nice to put that sun to rest, it would probably make the summers a lot less hot I would think. And that would fix that global warming thing that everyone is so worried about. Skin cancers rates would go down too. The suntan lotion manufacturers would probably go out of business, but there can't be that many of them to worry about. Oh, and those people that make those caps with sun visors on them, they'll just have to learn to make caps without visors from now on. Yeah, I guess I could live without the sun. To tell you the truth, I never even really felt like giving the sun a good looking over before. I guess I'm just not one of those sun worshipers. Good riddance I say. Switch it off.