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It’s been a long debated issue that has been apparently based on flawed numbers and, now, the Sun is declared ‘not guilty’ of climate change and it’s deemed as falsely accused. It has been previously believed that solar activity has been on an upward path that effectively altered the state of our climate and caused global warming.
However, a new study has uncovered that the sun has recorded no such heightened activity within the past three hundred years, and the changes have been too insignificant to be blamed for the damage our planet is reportedly undergoing.
This might pose as a bit of a hitch for activists who loudly blamed sunspots caused by solar activity on climate change, and leaving humanity off the hook in the process. It seems that their arguments have taken a hit, with doubts raised about the fact the Sun has anything to do with it.
Researchers in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany have presented their findings, by discrediting former methods of counting sunspots as “fundamentally flawed”. The Group Sunspot Number (GSN) was introduced by Douglas Hoyt and Ken Schatten in 1998, and has since been used to count sunspots and gathered a history of their numbers along the centuries.
It was based on the assumption that not all sunspots can be recorded and captured by telescopes, which led to artificially low numbers, according to researchers. Especially since the numbers were quite different between the GSN and the Wolf Sunspot Number used around 1945 and prior to 1885.
Previous records had it that during the “Maunder Minimum” or “the little ice age” there was a very low count of sunspots, that caused the harsh winters. And it has also been speculated that our Earth may be heading in that direction again in 2030. However, they were both denied by the authors of the study.
So, the researchers introduced a new, more accurate method of counting sunspots, the Sunspot Number Version 2.0, which indicated that the solar activity had not increased within the past few centuries and had stayed almost stable by referring to earlier reports, with one notable exception.
They threw away the faulty assumptions that has been made while counting sunspots in the past, claiming that if sky watchers and astronomers did not mention sunspots while observing for other events in the past, did not mean that they were not there. Instead they have noted that the Sun has seen no exceptional activity since the 18th century.
These findings might result in a re-examination of the relationship between climate change and solar activity, possibly drawing more attention to gas emissions as the harsher cause of global warming.
Image source: wellthisiswhatithink.com
