Physics Science Journal Online

Solar predictions bring heat and light

Over the last few years, the politics of climate change have been amply forged in the fires of a changeable Sun.

And the story is here again, in the form of research unveiled this week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Solar Physics Division in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

The solar science, described graphically in a Discover Magazine post - "an east/west river of gas" which "flows under the surface of the Sun" that can't be seen directly but which is inferred from "sound waves that travel from it to the surface" - is fascinating.

And what it suggests is that the Sun appears set to quieten further over the next solar cycle than it already has - with lower sunspot activity, and perhaps marginally lower energy output.

But as to the implications on Earth - well, for anyone who's followed this story for a while, they're very familiar, and the telling of them is laced with equally familiar political overtones.

The big question is this: if the predictions of an impending reduction in solar activity turn into reality, what would that mean for the global climate?

And that's why it becomes a political football - because if the answer is that it counteracts global warming, still more if it leads to global cooling, then moves away from fossil fuel use are at best unnecessary and at worst harmful.

The comparator here is the Maunder Minimum - a period of low solar activity running in the late 1600s and early 1700s - a "grand solar minimum" - which co-incided with a period of colder than usual temperatures - at least, in parts of Europe.

So you can probably name a few organisations likely to pounce on this latest work as evidence that another cool period is coming, and that society's logical response is to drill, baby, drill and burn, baby, burn like never before.

The Register doesn't disappoint, suggesting the solar cycle predictions will become "the science story of the century" and mean that the Earth is "heading into a mini Ice Age" - while the Daily Telegraph's James Delingpole treats it as fact - "It's official: a new Ice Age is on its way".

Since the beginning of the industrial era, by comparison, temperatures have risen by about 0.7C.

Joanna Haigh, a solar physicist at Imperial College London, has spent a fair bit of research time investigating mechanisms that could potentially amplify solar changes into meaningful temperature variations on human timescales on Earth.

Carnegie Mellon Obtains Access to All SIAM e-books! « Science ...

The University Libraries are very pleased to announce that access to the entire back file of SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) e-books has been acquired.  This gives the campus access to a broad swath of applied mathematics books that will be of interest to a large part of the campus.  The subjects include:

Applied Geometry; Applied Mathematics Education; Applied Probability; Astronomy, Planetary Sciences, and Optics; Atmospheric and Oceanographic Sciences; Biological Sciences; Chemical Kinetics; Communication Theory; Computational Mathematics; Computer Sciences; Control and Systems Theory; Data Mining and Information Retrieval; Discrete Mathematics and Graph Theory; Dynamical Systems; Economics and Finance; Electromagnetic Theory and Semiconductor and Circuit Analysis; Environmental Sciences; Fluid Mechanics; Functional Analysis; General Interest; Geophysical Sciences; Image Processing; Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory; Management Sciences and Operations Research; Materials Science; Math and Computation in Industrial Applications; Mathematical Physics; Mechanics of Solids; Nonlinear Waves and Coherent Structures; Numerical Analysis; Optimization Theory and Mathematical Programming; Ordinary Differential Equations; Partial Differential Equations; Real and Complex Analysis; Simulation and Modeling; Social Sciences; and Statistics

Arrangements are for unlimited use by the Carnegie Mellon community.  The e-books are hosted by the Scitation platform built by the American Institute of Physics which is familiar to the campus owing to hosting numerous science and engineering journals.  The e-books are divided into chapters that are offered in a high quality pdf format and can be used on campus or off-campus/wireless via the AnyConnect remote access tool.  Chapters can be printed or downloaded to e-readers and other mobile devices – they can be used on anything that will read a pdf file.  The e-books can be located in CAMEO – the online catalog at Carnegie Mellon or they can be browsed at:

http://epubs.siam.

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The Chemical news and journal of physical science

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The Chemical news and journal of physical science, A journal of practical chemistry in all its applications to pharmacy, arts, and manufacturers. American reprint