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Friday, October 2, 2015

Is a mini ICE AGE on the way? Scientists warn the sun will 'go to sleep' in 2030 and could cause temperatures to plummet

New study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles
Says that between 2030 and 2040 solar cycles will cancel each other out
Could lead to 'Maunder minimum' effect that saw River Thames freeze over

The Earth could be headed for a 'mini ice age' researchers have warned.

A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles - and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out.

This, they say, will lead to a phenomenon known as the 'Maunder minimum' - which has previously been known as a mini ice age when it hit between 1646 and 1715, even causing London's River Thames to freeze over.

Scroll down for video

A silent sun: In 2011 this image was captured showing an almost clear sun - which experts say could happen for almost a decade from 2030.

THE SOLAR CYCLE

Conventional wisdom holds that solar activity swings back and forth like a simple pendulum.

At one end of the cycle, there is a quiet time with few sunspots and flares.

At the other end, solar max brings high sunspot numbers and frequent solar storms.

It's a regular rhythm that repeats every 11 years.

Reality is more complicated.

Astronomers have been counting sunspots for centuries, and they have seen that the solar cycle is not perfectly regular.

The new model of the Sun's solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun's 11-year heartbeat.

It draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone.

Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the 'mini ice age' that began in 1645, according to the results presented by Prof Valentina Zharkova at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.

The model predicts that the pair of waves become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022.

During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity.

'In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun,' said Zharkova.

'Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other.

'We predict that this will lead to the properties of a 'Maunder minimum''e waves are approximately in phase, they can show strong interaction, or resonance, and we have strong solar activity.

'When they are out of phase, we have solar minimums.

'When there is full phase separation, we have the conditions last seen during the Maunder minimum, 370 years ago.'

THE MAUNDER MINIMUM

The Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.

It caused London's River Thames to freeze over, and 'frost fairs' became popular.

This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the 'Little Ice Age' when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes.

There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past, Nasa says.

The connection between solar activity and terrestrial climate is an area of on-going research.

Some scientists hypothesize that the dense wood used in Stradivarius instruments was caused by slow tree growth during the cooler period.

Instrument maker Antonio Stradivari was born a year before the start of the Maunder Minimum.

Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time

It is 172 years since a scientist first spotted that the Sun's activity varies over a cycle lasting around 10 to 12 years.

But every cycle is a little different and none of the models of causes to date have fully explained fluctuations.

The Frozen Thames, 1677 - an oil painting by Abraham Hondius shows the old London Bridge during the Maunder Minimum

Many solar physicists have put the cause of the solar cycle down to a dynamo caused by convecting fluid deep within the Sun.

Now, Zharkova and her colleagues have found that adding a second dynamo, close to the surface, completes the picture with surprising accuracy.

'We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs, originating in two different layers in the Sun's interior,' she said.

'They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different, and they are offset in time.

'Over the cycle, the waves fluctuate between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Sun. Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97%,' said Zharkova.

Montage of images of solar activity between August 1991 and September 2001 taken by the Yohkoh Soft X-ray Telecope, showing variation in solar activity during a sunspot cycle.

Zharkova and her colleagues derived their model using a technique called 'principal component analysis' of the magnetic field observations from the Wilcox Solar Observatory in California.

They examined three solar cycles-worth of magnetic field activity, covering the period from 1976-2008.

In addition, they compared their predictions to average sunspot numbers, another strong marker of solar activity.

All the predictions and observations were closely matched.

Democrats Wake Up to How Bad a Liar Hillary Is

By John Fund

The biggest liability Hillary Clinton faces in getting the Democratic nomination may be that too many of her fellow Democrats don’t believe she is a good liar.

A new Fox News poll this week found that by 58 to 32 percent, Americans don’t think Hillary is telling the truth about her e-mail scandal. Surprisingly, 31 percent of Democrats and almost two-thirds of independents share that view. Perhaps most ominous for her is that 47 percent of Democrats (and 62 percent of all voters) “are worried that scandals would be a problem for a Clinton administration were she elected.”

RELATED: Hillary Clinton Spent Lots of Time ‘Not Thinking’ about Her Secret E-mail Server

Clinton loyalists are convinced that polls showing that majorities of voters find Hillary dishonest and untrustworthy will be irrelevant when it actually comes time to vote. One top Clintion adviser told Ron Fournier of the National Journal last spring: “Trust doesn’t matter.” Other aides point out that the day Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996 with 49 percent of the vote, a majority of Americans didn’t think he was honest or trustworthy — and that was before the Lewinsky scandal.

Democrats are starting to admit that the new scandals involving e-mails and the Clinton Foundation’s conflicts of interest are taking a worrying toll.Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware admitted to the PBS affiliate in his state this week that there has been “a real loss of support by of some of the folks who I had expected would be just diehard, enthusiastic Clinton fans, in part because it’s a reminder of the Clinton era, when there seemed to always be some scandal going on about something.” Coons also criticized Hillary’s attempts at explaining the scandals: “Her answers to it have been less open and artful than I’d expected they would be.”

#share#Many Democrats pine for the days when Bill Clinton could talk himself out of almost anything. Now Clinton biographer David Maraniss says it’s becoming obvious that while Bill is an “authentic phony,” the hapless Hillary is just a “phony phony.”

She certainly can’t keep her initial story on the e-mail scandal straight, not to mention her subsequent stories. This week, the Washington Post blew up her story that she turned over all the relevant e-mails she had in response to a routine request from the State Department that included other former secretaries of state. In reality, according to State Department officials, State “first contacted her in the summer of 2014, at least three months before the agency asked Clinton and three of her predecessors to provide their e-mails.” The request was “prompted entirely by the discovery that Clinton had exclusively used a private e-mail system” for all her government business.

When the Des Moines Register asked her this week about the obvious discrepancy, Hillary’s reply was: “I can’t answer that.” She also apparently has no answer to a Politico report this week that “previously undisclosed State Department e-mails related to Benghazi have surfaced in a federal court filing.” The e-mails were apparently withheld from the House Select Committee on Benghazi — in front of which Hillary Clinton will be testifying on October 22.

RELATED: Hillary Clinton Comes Clean

We already know that other Clinton statements — such as that no classified information passed through her insecure server — also aren’t true. Now it appears that the FBI has been able to recover at least some of the e-mails from her private server that were thought to have been destroyed — and that information is likely to eventually become public. The State Department has also admitted that e-mails from top Clinton aides Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Jake Sherman that were reluctantly turned over may “also contain classified information.”

No one knows exactly what could be at the bottom of the Clinton scandal — reckless endangerment of classified information, a web of intrigue linking Hillary Clinton with the vacuum-like fundraising of the Clinton Foundation, or Benghazi leadership failures — or if in the end nothing much will be pieced together. What is clear is that she was hiding something. As Tom Fitton of the watchdog group Judicial Watch, whose Freedom of Information Act lawsuits have pried many documents loose, told me: “Whatever was involved, the State Department and Hillary Clinton are going to extraordinary lengths to avoid them coming to light during a presidential campaign.”

RELATED: If Hillary’s Confidence Isn’t Cracking, It Should Be

Democrats should be worried about the last presidential candidate who desperately tried to conceal evidence before an election: Richard Nixon in 1972. Ray Locker, the Washington enterprise editor for USA Today, has written a new book called Nixon’s Gamble. He reports that Nixon routinely engaged in extra-constitutional actions to prevent leaks, in part to protect “himself from the exposure of his role in sabotaging the Paris Peace Talks” during the 1968 campaign. His obsessions “sowed the seeds of his own destruction by creating a climate of secrecy, paranoia, and reprisal.”

Republicans paid a stiff political price for swallowing doubts about Nixon and elevating him to the presidency. There was enough evidence for them to be deeply concerned about how he would perform in office. There is ample evidence for Democrats to worry about both Hillary’s electability in a general election and — should she win despite everything — what her return to the White House could mean for their party and the country.

— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for National Review Online.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424619/democrats-wake-how-bad-liar-hillary-john-fund

Thursday, October 1, 2015

It’s Not Carly Fiorina Who’s Wrong in the Planned Parenthood Fight

By Jonah Goldberg

“Anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’ This is about the character of our nation, and if we will not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us.” — Carly Fiorina, GOP presidential debate, September 16, 2015.

The videotape in question was put out by the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group that went undercover to record Planned Parenthood officials discussing the buying and selling of organs and tissue from aborted fetuses — some just shy of 20 weeks — to medical research companies.

Fiorina’s description of what takes place in the videos has come under withering attack. Sarah Kliff of Vox labels Fiorina’s version of the scene as “pure fiction.” PolitiFact says it is “mostly false.”

And they have a point. The exact scene, exactly as Fiorina describes it, is not on the videos. But anybody who has watched the videos would find Fiorina’s off-the-cuff account pretty accurate.

Most of the center’s videos involve hidden-camera conversations with current Planned Parenthood managers, as well as interviews with veterans of the abortion industry, discussing the selling of fetal body parts for research purposes. The video Fiorina probably had in mind included eyewitness descriptions accompanied by borrowed footage of a fetus dying in a metal bowl, its leg kicking, to illustrate the witness’s recollection of seeing precisely that in another case. That sort of juxtaposition might not fly on the nightly news, but it’s the sort of dramatic device used in documentaries all the time. It’s akin to a documentary maker interviewing a witness to Cecil the Lion getting shot, and using footage of another lion getting shot as an illustration. Fiorina’s critics want to claim that because she didn’t take into account these distinctions, she’s just making stuff up.

RELATED: Carly Fiorina Has Forced the Mainstream Media to Cover the Planned Parenthood Videos — Finally

To this end they’ve become Jesuitical nitpickers, muddying the water to conceal the fact that late-term abortions offend the conscience when discussed or displayed with anything like journalistic accuracy. That’s probably why we get so little of it. Many of the media outlets that even bother to cover the videos have referred to the transferring of “fetal tissue,” not “organs” — the correct term for livers, hearts and brains. (“Tissue” is less suggestive of a human being than, say, “heart.”)

We’re also often informed that the videos weren’t merely “edited” but “highly edited.” Left out of such caveats is that the news reports passing along these descriptions come via highly edited newspapers, radio, and TV programs.

#share#The larger problem is that people are talking past each other. Fiorina’s remarks — and these videos — are really aimed at the abortion industry and its Achilles’ heel, late-term abortions. None of these videos would strike a chord if the only images were of blastocysts.

Most Americans are morally appalled by late-term abortions. Planned Parenthood and its allies know this, which is why they refer to “uterine contents,” “clumps of cells,” “tissue” and even “goop,” when a more apt descriptor would be “fetus” or even “baby.”

In other words, the people horrified by these videos aren’t out of the mainstream — they are the mainstream. The people trying to dismiss the videos are the extremists, and the media give them cover.

For instance, Hillary Clinton, who once described the videos as “disturbing” — before Planned Parenthood yanked her leash — recited the usual talking points Sunday on Face the Nation about how the videos were “misleadingly edited.” It seems she’s more troubled by diabolical video editing than anything on the videos themselves.

Indeed, when host John Dickerson asked if she’d support any federal restrictions at “any stage of pregnancy” — conceivably right until the moment before birth — Clinton said she wouldn’t, because such abortions only take place for “medical necessity.”

That is a far greater distortion of the truth than anything Fiorina said. I won’t lose sleep waiting for the nitpickers to care.

— Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. He can be reached by e-mail atgoldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424472/carly-fiorina-planned-parenthood-video

To Prevent ‘Discrimination’ against Gays, the Left Would Destroy Religious Liberty

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/424525/print

By David French — September 23, 2015

This morning The Atlantic ran a long piece asking whether Christian adoption agencies should be “allowed to discriminate against gay parents.” The story is written in the classic liberal style, as the favored group recounts its experience with “discrimination,” and the demonized religious conservatives are left explaining why they hurt such good people. But look closely and you’ll notice a key fact: All of the gay families the author spoke to ultimately succeeded in adopting and/or fostering children.

The first couple mentioned in the story, Clint McCormack and Bryan Reamer, has “three foster children and 10 adopted children.” Then there are Tod and Tom McMillen-Oakley, “who have adopted two children, one through a private adoption and one from the state of Michigan.” Tod and Tom also tell of going to a “beach event” for “gay parents of adopted children” — an event where “the beach was lined with gay couples and their foster children.”

In other words, the “discriminatory” Christian agencies aren’t actually blocking gay adoptions. Gay couples looking to adopt or foster children just have to seek out one of the many secular organizations willing to serve them. Under current law in most states, Christian adoption agencies are able to place children — according to the dictates of their faith — with the mother/father families they favor, while gay couples are able to foster and adopt through other agencies. Where, exactly, is the oppression? Isn’t that exactly the kind of “win/win” solution that allows pluralistic democracies to survive and thrive?

If you look at the other notorious tales of Christian bigotry, the oppression is similarly hard to find. No gay couple in America has been denied a photographer, a florist, or a baker. In the handful of cases where Christian business owners declined to participate in same-sex weddings, plenty of other vendors were willing to step in. Kim Davis could not block a single gay person from getting married. Even at the height of her stand, frustrated gay couples could drive a short distance and get a marriage license from any neighboring county.

#share#Since no one is being denied a child, a marriage, or a product, the “injury” is typically some combination of hurt feelings and inconvenience. But to prevent a few tears, the Left is willing to force adoption agencies to close, financially ruin Christian business owners, and toss clerks in jail. And they’re willing to do so even when their own bigotry substantially hurts the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. In Michigan — a state highlighted in The Atlantic’s report — explicitly Christian agencies arrange a substantial percentage of the state’s adoptions:

Indeed, if faith-based adoption agencies in Michigan closed their doors, the state would have a problem. The state of Michigan doesn’t track which agencies are faith-based, but Bethany Christian Services and various subsets of Catholic Charities . . . together helped finalize 689 adoptions last year, about one-third of the total in the state, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Add other agencies with a religion in their title, whether it be Lutheran or Methodist, and faith-based agencies finalized 1,128 adoptions in Michigan, more than half of those completed last year.

But no matter. A few gay parents’ feelings are hurt, so the Left wants to present Christian adoption agencies with a stark choice: violate the teachings of your church or close your doors.

In reality, Christian requests for religious-liberty-based accommodations provide a pluralistic democracy with the only viable way to preserve long-held First Amendment freedoms while also protecting the newly discovered rights of LGBT Americans. Allowing Kim Davis to opt out of issuing licenses under her name does not deprive anyone of the right to marry. Respecting the rights of Christian adoption agencies doesn’t prevent gay adoption. And gay weddings still feature fabulous cakes even if a baker here and there doesn’t want to help celebrate the nuptials.

The prevalence of bumper-sticker declarations to the contrary, the secular Left is less interested in coexistence than in domination and exclusion. The model here is the legal, cultural, and political response to white supremacy. And the contemporary villains, instead of being murderous, cross-burning Klansmen, are America’s most generous citizens, people of faith who give both their time and their money to helping others.

It’s important to remember that the sexual revolution was born out of deep hostility to traditional religious faith — and that its primary aim was not the creation of “alternative” ways of thinking and living so much as the birth of a new orthodoxy to supplant the old one. For many on the left, winning new freedom is only half the battle. To them, there are no “win/win” solutions if Christian liberty is respected. There is only “win/lose”: They win, we lose, and we disappear. It is only then that gay couples will weep no more, and diversity will triumph the world over. As for those poor kids without homes? The state can handle them.

— David French is an attorney and a staff writer at National Review.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/424525/print

OBAMA’S U.N. MESSAGE — KICK ME, I WON’T FEEL A THING

OBAMA’S U.N. MESSAGE — KICK ME, I WON’T FEEL A THING

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN OBAMA FOREIGN POLICY, RUSSIA,UNITED NATIONS

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. . .What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?”

This passage from Ulysses captures the Obama presidency in the realm of foreign policy. History, the nightmare from which the president is trying to escape, has given him a “back kick” — in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Yemen for example — and he risks becoming a laughingstock as a result.

But there’s a twist. President Obama denies he has been kicked. His nightmare thus becomes ours.

Obama’s speech to the United Nations illustrates the problem. Elliott Abrams, describing the speech as “surreal,” writes that it “is filled with nice lines that unfortunately bear no relationship to his seven years of foreign policy — and in some cases, no relationship to reality.”

Abrams supports this claim by analyzing what Obama had to say about Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Cuba. The analysis is well worth reading.

I want to focus, though, on a portion of just one passage. Obama stated:

I stand before you today believing in my core that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion. We cannot look backwards. We live in an integrated world — one in which we all have a stake in each other’s success. . . .And if we cannot work together more effectively, we will all suffer the consequences. That is true for the United States, as well.

The disdain for history is evident and, in a sense, warranted. But it doesn’t follow from the fact that history has been unpleasant that we cannot (or should not) look back at it. History, has much to teach us.

One lesson is that Obama’s claim that “we cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion” is rubbish. The world not only can “return” to them, it has (and never stopped).

Another lesson is that conflict and coercion don’t necessarily cause “all” to “suffer” bad “consequences.” Often conflict and coercion produce winners and losers. The losers suffer, but the winners, though often paying some price, thrive for decades and sometimes centuries.

The fact that we “live in an integrated world” doesn’t alter this reality. If Obama knew anything about history, he would understand that integration isn’t new. Europe and large portions of Asia were integrated by trade and migration more than two thousand years ago. In important ways, today’s world, with its religious wars and mass movement of peoples, bears more resemblance to the ancient one than to yesterday’s world of seemingly solid nation states (which was also integrated).

Obama wasn’t offering a history lesson, though. The speech was an exercise in self-justification — an attempt to demonstrate that although he looks like a loser, he isn’t really one because the old world of losers and winners has been extinguished. This farcical claim will only enhance Obama’s status as a laughingstock.

But the speech had a serious side, I think. It seems to me that Obama was sending this message to Putin: Russia will suffer if you don’t cooperate with the U.S. In fact, Obama mentioned the sanctions against Russia and their consequences (“capital flight, a contracting economy, a fallen ruble, and the emigration of more educated Russians”) in his speech.

The message isn’t implausible. Russia reportedly is starting to run short on foreign currency reserves, thanks in part to sanctions. Russia also runs the risk of military overreach if it continues to become more involved in Syria. Its dirty little war in Ukraine enjoys only mixed support at home and polls show little appetite by Russians for large scale military involvement in Syria. (Just as we had Vietnam, Russia had Afghanistan).

But Putin is a skillful operator. He doesn’t need lessons from Obama.

Taking on ISIS to a serious degree would require a level of military engagement that might erode Putin’s domestic support. But it’s unlikely that Putin is serious about doing ISIS in (though I’m pretty sure he would like to). He just dangles this prospect, as Iran does, to tantalize Obama.

Putin’s goals, it seems to me, are (1) to work with Iran to help Assad maintain control over a portion of Syria, (2) cement relations with Iran, and (3) diminish U.S. influence in the region. He may well be able to accomplish these objectives without a level of military involvement that might hurt him at home.

As for Russia’s finances, they appear to be a looming problem. Ironically, however, Obama has undercut the Russia sanctions by lifting those on Iran. The Iran deal will boost the Russian economy by enabling Russians to sell all manner of weapons to the mullahs.

These sales alone won’t solve Russia’s economic problems. It needs a strong rebound of oil prices, which may or may not be in the cards.

But history suggests that “capital flight, a contracting economy, a fallen ruble, and the emigration of more educated Russians” won’t be sufficient to dissuade an autocrat like Putin from expanding Russia’s influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Obama’s options are to counteract the expansion or offer lectures while Russia gives him a “back kick.” Like so much of his conduct, Obama’s U.N. speech amounts to pasting a “kick me” sign on his backside.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/09/obamas-u-n-message-kick-me-i-wont-feel-a-thing.php

OUR UNPRECEDENTED IMMIGRATION EXPERIMENT

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN IMMIGRATION

The United States is taking in more immigrants than at any time in our history, while at the same time making little or no effort to assimilate them. No one can know what the consequences of this experiment will be. This chart, created by the Center for Immigration Studies from Census Bureau data, plots the number of immigrants living in the U.S. and their share of the population, from 1900 to 2014 and projected through 2060. As of last year, the U.S. was home to a record 42.4 million immigrants, legal and illegal, representing 13.3% of the nation’s population. Click to enlarge:

You can easily see how immigration has exploded since 1980. CIS adds observations on the data, including these:

* The new data indicate that growth in the immigrant population is accelerating. Between 2010 and 2012, growth averaged 430,000 people a year, but between 2012 and 2013 the immigrant population grew by 520,000; it grew by 1.04 million from 2013 to 2014.

* In addition to immigrants, there were 16.2 million U.S.-born minor (<18) children with at least one immigrant parent in 2014, for a total of 58.6 million immigrants and their children. Immigrants and their minor children now account for more than one in six U.S. residents.

* The sending regions with the largest numerical increases in the number of immigrants living in the United States since 2010 were East Asia (up 642,000), South Asia (up 594,000), Sub-Saharan Africa (up 282,000), the Middle East (up 277,000), the Caribbean (up 269,000), and Central America (up 268,000).

* Mexico had by far the largest immigrant population in the country, with 11.7 million legal and illegal Mexican immigrants living in the United States in 2014.

One of my frequent email correspondents keeps asking: when did we vote for this? The United States is being rapidly transformed, in ways that appear negative to most Americans–environmental degradation; increased burdens on schools, hospitals, and social services; low wage competition; and cultural fragmentation. So to repeat: when did we vote for this? It is no wonder that immigration is the number one issue of 2015, or that a clear majority if Americans are disgusted with a political class that no longer even pretends to represent their interests.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/09/our-unprecedented-immigration-experiment.php