Friday 29th of March 2024

compliments of the season...

2021

The economy is picking up, and hundreds of thousand of workers in those queues are now back in work.

However, there are plenty more that will continue to struggle.

It's feared that the legacy of the coronavirus recession may be fewer workers in ongoing full-time work, with the kind of security that makes buying a house, for example, achievable.

The jobless rate is not expected to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024.

We made it, or did we?

Roughly $1 trillion in government debt, some government bonds actually selling with negative interest rates attached, quantitative easing and mass sackings pushed Australia through its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Until a coronavirus vaccine becomes widely available across the globe, and here in Australia, businesses will be reluctant to do what policy makers desperate want to see: that is, hiring full-time workers.

In the meantime, it is encouraging see several respected surveys showing business conditions and consumer confidence improving significantly.

The year 2020 saw the unusual became usual and the extraordinary turn ordinary.

Many aspects of economics, business and finance were turned on their head, and policy settings may never be quite the same again.

We were though reminded about one thing that never changes: our propensity as a human race to overcome adversity — no matter the odds.

That will, hopefully, see us to a full coronavirus recovery.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-22/2020-economy-norms-shattered-by-coronavirus-covid-19/12981360

here comes the sun spots...

Every 11 years the Sun's magnetic cycle ramps up into overdrive. At the height of this cycle, known as solar maximum, the Sun's magnetic poles flip.  Along the way, changes in the Sun's magnetism produce a greater number of sunspots, more energy and cause solar eruptions of particles. Space scientists study these to see how they perturb Earth's magnetic fields and affect satellites circling around Earth, but that change of energy interests another set of researchers too – climate scientists. In an effort to understand what affects Earth's climate, scientists must correctly interpret just how changes on the Sun do and do not change what's happening on Earth.


 

What is the solar cycle and is it connected to Earth's climate?

The entire Sun from North Pole to South Pole is a giant magnet, but it's not a simple one. The Sun's magnetic fields are on the move, so that approximately every 11 years the entire field flips, and the north and south magnetic poles switch. Another 11 years and the poles switch back again. In between flips, the total radiation from the Sun – known as total solar irradiance – waxes and wanes in a semi-regular cycle by up to 0.15%. The short term changes in solar irradiance are not strong enough to have a long term influence on Earth's climate. Sustained changes in solar radiance – that is changes that occur over decades or centuries – could potentially have an effect on Earth's climate system, which is why such information is included, along with a variety of other natural and human-driven influences, in climate models.


 

How do we separate the effect of the solar cycle from other possible effects on Earth's climate?

Unfortunately, one can't simply take estimates of Earth's temperature and rainfall all over the globe and know how much of it is affected by changes in the Sun's total irradiance. Numerous natural and man-made occurrences – from periodic climate fluctuations like El Niño, emissions from volcanoes, and increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – affect temperatures and weather patterns too. Instead, scientists must use computer models or statistical analyses to attribute all the changes to all the different influences. In general, the bigger the effect, the easier it is to get a confident answer. Input into those calculations comes from the measured changes in irradiance from space using instruments like the Total and Spectral solar Irradiance Sensor - 1 (TSIS-1) instrument on the International Space Station.


 

Do scientists think that changes in solar irradiance due to the 11-year solar cycle could be strong enough to cause the current change being measured in Earth's climate?

In a word, no. Scientists agree that the solar cycle and its associated short-term changes in irradiance cannot be the main force driving the changes in Earth's climate we are currently seeing. For one thing, the Sun's energy output only changes by up to 0.15% over the course of the cycle, less than what would be needed to force the change in climate that we see. Also, scientists have not been able to find convincing evidence that the 11-yr cycle is mirrored in any aspects of the climate beyond the stratosphere – such as surface temperature, rainfall or wind patterns.


 

What about longer term changes? Do scientists think that changes in solar irradiance over centuries are strong enough to cause the current change being measured in Earth's climate?

While there have only been highly accurate, space-based measurements of solar irradiance since 1979, humans have been recording the solar cycle by monitoring the increase and decrease of magnetically active sunspots – which can be used to estimate longer term changes in solar irradiance – since the beginning of the 1600s.  Prior to that there are indirect measures of solar activity available from ice core and tree ring records. 

These longer-term records suggest that the cycle can vary dramatically from cycle to cycle. Indeed, from 1645 to 1715 – an era now known as the Maunder Minimum – there were almost no sunspots recorded.  Anomalies like this show that magnetic activity and energy output from the Sun can vary over decades, though the space-based observations of the last 35 years have seen little change from one cycle to the next in terms of total irradiance. Solar Cycle 24, which began in December 2008 and which is likely to end in 2020, was smaller in magnitude than the previous two.

Many estimates have been made of the effect that long-term trends in solar cycles could have on global climate. Computer models suggest, if the Sun's irradiance consistently increased or decreased for many decades that the average temperature on Earth would change as well. While the magnitude of those changes would likely be small – around a couple of tenths of degrees in the global mean, because solar irradiance changes slowly on decadal time scales – there is some evidence for solar-cycle related regional enhancements of the effects in the North Atlantic and surrounding regions.


 

So, could long-term changes in the Sun's energy output have caused the change in Earth's climate measured over the last 35 years?

By and large, the space-based observations of the last 35 years have not recorded substantial changes in energy output from the Sun.  Nonetheless, scientists include all the influences they can (including solar changes) when studying changes in climate. These estimates suggest that a small decrease in solar irradiance over the last 35 years would have caused a slight cooling of the climate over this time period – but only in the absence of other influences on Earth's climate.

The physics of the situation also doesn't back up the idea that changes in the Sun are a large force behind current climate change.  The Sun's irradiance has its greatest effect on Earth's upper atmosphere, while the lower atmosphere insulates Earth from the increased heat. If the Sun were driving Earth's warming, one would expect to see that upper atmosphere getting increasingly hot.  Instead, measurements show the lower atmosphere is getting hotter, while the upper atmosphere is getting cooler. Instead, this matches the fingerprint of changes driven by increases in carbon dioxide much more closely.


 

I've heard that the next solar maximum may not even happen and so our climate will get cooler.  Is that true?

The solar minimum before the beginning of Solar Cycle 24 lasted several years longer than expected before once again turning back toward increased sunspot activity in 2009. But even though we saw less activity in this recent cycle, we do not yet know how much activity the next one will bring. On occasion, researchers have made predictions that coming solar cycles may also exhibit extended periods of minimal activity. A prolonged period of low solar activity, over several decades, for example, would be what we term a Grand Minimum – something we haven’t seen since the early 1700s. The models for such predictions, however, are still not as robust as models for terrestrial weather and are not considered conclusive.  

If, however, we do go into a decades-long time of lower solar activity – relating to a period of lower solar irradiance – there is little evidence that it would cause a period of climate cooling. One of the main catalysts for believing that the solar cycle can be tied to cooling comes from the fact that the Maunder Minimum, a period of low magnetic activity on the Sun that stretched from 1645 to 1715, occurred in the middle of a period of colder climate in northern Europe known as the Little Ice Age, which stretched from 1550 to 1850. Scientists continue to research whether an extended solar minimum could affect the climate in this way – but there is little evidence that the Maunder Minimum sparked the Little Ice Age, or at least not entirely by itself. (For one thing, the Little Ice Age began before the Maunder Minimum.) Current theories on what caused the Little Ice Age include a variety of events that could have contributed, including increased volcanic activity and changes in ocean circulations.

Additionally, there are other examples throughout history when less activity on the Sun correlated to higher temperatures on Earth. So, an association between solar cycle and climate cooling is definitely not established.  

Lastly, if we are indeed headed for an extended solar minimum and if such a minimum indeed presages a slightly colder climate – both of which are unproven – this would not contradict the evidence that Earth's climate is warming due to human activity.  Cooling from the Sun would be unlikely to mitigate human-induced warming over the long term.

 

Read more:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/solar-events-news/Does-the-Solar-Cycle-Affect-Earths-Climate.html

 

another 2020 tragedy...

tragic