Physics And The Art Of Sun Tea

Going to show my age here, but what the hell?

Remember going to the five-n-dime as a kid and buying those balsa wood airplanes?  The ones with the big rubber band that made the propeller spin.  After you destroyed the plane, you could use the rubber band to snap your brother on the rump.  OK, hold that thought.

Now, for those who think that the sun has no influence on Earth’s climate, which if you listen to NASA you might, let’s do a couple of experiments.

First, get a big glass jar with a lid and fill it with water.  You’ll want to start this in the morning.  Put a couple of those big tea bags inside and seal it.  Now, place it in a nice sunny spot while we go off on some adventures.

Next, we climb aboard the new LFS private jet.  You know, the new Airbus transparent plane that would make Wonder Woman green with envy.  Now that we’re at cruising altitude, you’ll notice that we occasionally run into some turbulence, where the plane bounces up and down.  That’s because, as the sun warms the surface of the Earth for 12 hours a day, the surface air warms and starts to rise.  As it does, it creates a vacuum that’s filled with cold air from higher altitudes sinking.  This creates a convection current.  That one we just flew through is only one of thousands all across the sun-facing side of the Earth.  Those currents, among other things, create wind, which we use to fly balsa wood airplanes and kites.

OK, now we’re landed in Chile, despite the dire warnings about volcanic ash.  I want you to run back to the toilet and flush.  That’s all, just flush.  Notice how that pretty blue liquid swirls around in a clockwise direction?  Great!  Now we’ll head back north.  Good, now here in Europe, where the entire EU is collapsing before our eyes, I want you to run back and flush again.  Notice how the blue stuff swirls in a counter-clockwise direction?  Excellent!

That’s called the Coriolis Effect.  It’s what causes ocean currents and north-south trains to wear one side of the tracks more than the other.  It drives cyclones and anti-cyclones alike.

So, now we come back to the house and check on the tea.  It’s not finished yet, but notice how the dark tea is sliding down one side of the jar, while the clear water is climbing up the other side.  And since we’re on the equator here at LFS world headquarters, go ahead and flush the toilet one more time.  Did you see that?  The water went straight down without swirling at all.

See?  This physics stuff is really fun, isn’t it?

Why all this running around and making tea?  Because, what happens is the sun warms both the air and the oceans, causing convection currents.  Then, the Coriolis effect creates streams like the Gulf Stream current in the North Atlantic and the jet stream in the upper atmosphere.  Those streams carry the sun’s energy, in the form of heat, and distribute it around the globe in a fairly even way, so that we all experience a pretty narrow range of temperatures across the face of the Earth.

The Gulf Stream swirls around the Gulf of Mexico, picking up the nice warm water, and then carries across the Atlantic, where it releases the heat when the current slams into the west coast of Europe.  Though it’s not a lot, it’s enough to keep the permafrost out of the Queen’s Wheaties.

Back to our rubber band airplane.  Go ahead, wind it up.  Watch the rubber band as you go.  It twists up more and more, getting tighter and tighter, then…POP!  It gets one of those big knots in it, then another and another.

The ends of the rubber band are the north and south poles of the sun.  As the sun spins, its magnetic field gets wound up tighter and tighter, until…POP!  A sunspot appears, then another and another.  This goes on for about 11 years until the magnetic field turns completely inside out, and the poles reverse, clearing all the stress in the system, until the next cycle begins.  Just like letting go of the propeller on our plane and letting the stored energy out of the rubber band.  After roughly 22 years, the poles have reversed twice, so that north is back at north again.

For the past 20 or 30 years, the sun has been wildly active, spewing out tons of plasma and radiation, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.  They carry huge amounts of energy at blinding speed out to the far reaches of the solar system.  As a consequence of this very active period, there has been global warming on virtually every planet in the solar system. 

The oxygen levels have jumped in Venus’ atmosphere.  Mars’ polar caps have been receding at an alarming rate.  Huge new storms have appeared on Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus.  Even Pluto’s rather thin atmosphere, which at this point in its orbit usually freezes and falls to the ground, is still hanging in there.

On Earth, we’ve noted some warmer general temperatures, some polar melting and more powerful and frequent storms.  Algore and the Alarmists have tried their damnedest to convince us that it’s our fault, so they could tax us for carbon, which they don’t seem to notice is what life itself is made on, at least on Earth.  Or maybe they did notice, and the whole point was to put a tax on the biosphere itself.  Also, 0.039% of our atmosphere is carbon dioxide, so a fraction of a percent here of there really doesn’t make a whole lot of difference.  Mars’ atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, and it’s damn cold.  So Algore can jump off a cliff.

Anyway, I digress…

The other day, NASA came out with an announcement that there are signs the sun’s magnetic poles may not turn inside out this time around.  In fact, the whole cycle may slip into neutral for a while, if all the data points are right.  In fact, there are three discreet signs that all point towards a less active period for the sun, and that’s not good.  “Scientists” are saying it could even be the beginning of another Maunder Minimum.

Between the years 1650 and 1700, the sun spot cycle (knots in the rubber band) came to a screaming halt.  What does this concern us?  Well, it seems that the Maunder, Sporer and Wolf minima have corresponded perfectly with a drop in the global average temperature.  Also, the recently passed active period, as well as past maxima have lined up perfectly with generally warmer phases in global temperatures.

At the time of the Maunder Minimum, there was a phenomenon known as The Little Ice Age, which came directly on the heels of the Medieval Warm Period.  In other words, an extended period of increased sunspots corresponded with warmer global temperatures, followed by a period of almost no sunspots, when Europe, Russia and North America experienced incredibly cold, long winters.

Many spots=palm trees in England and record harvests, no spots=famine and freezing to death

Algore can take a hike at this point.  We don’t need him any more.  This is a pattern that has repeated throughout the past 400 years that records can be correlated.

If we are heading into a period of reduced solar activity, then the amount of heating on Earth will lead to cooler air and oceans.  That, in turn, will slow down the convection and ocean currents, which will cause overall colder temperatures, reduced harvests and greater reliance on fuels, such as petroleum, to keep warm…at least until you die of starvation. 

It would also cause the El Niño/La Niña cycle, which is basically warm water sloshing back and forth between Asia and South America, to slow, and even stop.  This would cause devastating droughts in some areas, and equally nasty flooding in others.

If the sun does indeed quiet down, and especially if it reaches the extremes recorded during the Maunder Minimum, then we could be in deep trouble.

One of the biggest fallacies of the whole global warming farce was that we would all bake to death.  First of all, warmer temps would have caused more evaporation from the oceans and poles, which would have increased rainfall and the amount of fresh water available.  It would have also increased harvests and gone a long way to restoring rain forests.  All beneficial to life as we know it.  People don’t catch colds when it warm, right?

On the other hand, if we head into a mini ice age, food production will drop, overall humidity will decrease, more fresh water will get locked up as polar ice, and it will take vastly more energy to keep warm.

What are some of the proposed causes of the Mini Ice Age?

“Several causes have been proposed: cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation, an inherent variability in global climate, or decreases in the human population.” – Wikipedia, The Little Ice Age

Ocean currents, sunspots, volcanoes, and…decreased human population?!  You mean all this crazy talk about reducing the population could actually cause the world to freeze in the dark?  Hahahahaha!  What a bunch of loonies those warmists are.

Let’s try another thought experiment here.  Suppose we have the technology and research to lead us to believe that another mini ice age (or worse) is coming.  How would we react, given unlimited resources to make it happen?

First, we would need to store up supplies, like seed, food and other necessities.  Then, we would set out to lock up as much oil as we could get our hands on, even if it meant starting a half-dozen wars and crashing the economy in the process.  We would have to distract the masses by making them look in the wrong direction so they wouldn’t compete with our preparations, or panic in the streets.

“The Little Ice Age by anthropology professor Brian Fagan of the University of California at Santa Barbara, tells of the plight of European peasants during the 1300 to 1850 chill: famines, hypothermia, bread riots, and the rise of despotic leaders brutalizing an increasingly dispirited peasantry. In the late 17th century, writes Fagan, agriculture had dropped off so dramatically that "Alpine villagers lived on bread made from ground nutshells mixed with barley and oat flour." ^[33] Historian Wolfgang Behringer has linked intensive witch-hunting episodes in Europe to agricultural failures during the Little Ice Age.” – Wikipedia, Little Ice Age

Sound familiar?

On the other hand, the Medieval Warm Period went hand-in-hand with the Great Age of Exploration, the Renaissance and some of the most enlightened social and political thinking our civilization has every produced.

Little Ice Age=starvation/death/despotism, Medieval Warm Period=Renaissance/exploration/expansion

I’m just sayin’…

Wow!  That tea is hot, just from the sun’s rays!  Here, let me add a little sugar and some ice, and…VIOLA!  Some delicious physics!  Don’t worry, Algore and the Warmidiots tell us the sun has nothing to do with our climate, and by extension, our civilization.  So, just relax, drink your sun tea and rest assured that everything is j-u-s-t-f-i-n-e.

See you next time!  And don’t get sun burn!
----------
As an aside, if you want to study ocean currents, you need to drop markers of some sort into the water.  Color dye is one way, but is hard to see, when the background is completely black.  The best way is to use radioactive or chemical markers that can easily be traced, even by remote satellite.

What's this?!  Last year, BP dumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf Stream, and this year, Fukushima is dumping untold millions of gallons of radioactive water into one of the key northern Pacific currents.

Hmmm...now if you can dump these markers into the water and call them accidents, so that you can get around things like the EPA, wouldn't that be helpful?  And we can map these currents long-term to see how they are changing as the sun's output decreases.

Just a thought...