Earth’s
Mean Temperature Falling, Planetary Alignment Suspected As Driver Of The
11-Year Solar Cycle
By P Gosselin on 9. May 2020
The
global mean temperature in April 2020 was again significantly lower than in
February and March, at 0.38°C above the average from 1981 to 2010. The average
temperature increase on the globe from 1981 to February 2020 was 0.14°C per
decade. The further development promises to be interesting, especially since a
number of research
institutes expect a higher probability of a cooling La Nina in the
Pacific towards the end of the year. March’s
solar activity was very low with a sunspot number of 1.5.
Activity in April rose slightly to 5.4. The first sunspots of the new cycle are
showing.
What
causes the sun to have an 11-year cycle?
Since
the Dessau pharmacist Heinrich Samuel Schwabe discovered in 1843 that the sunspots of the sun
increase and decrease in an 11-year cycle, science has been puzzling over the
reason why this cycle lasts 11 years and why the solar magnetic field also
changes its polarity in this rhythm: the north pole becomes the south pole and
vice versa.
In
July last year, scientists at the Helmholtz Centre in Dresden Rossendorf made a
little-noticed but exciting discovery. Every 11.07 years, the planets
Venus, Earth and Jupiter are aligned quite precisely. At this point in time,
their gravitational force acts jointly in one direction on the Sun.
“The
agreement is amazingly accurate: we see a complete parallelism with the planets
over 90 cycles,” explains Frank Stefani, one of the authors of the
publication published
in Solar Physics. Just as the gravitational pull of the Moon causes the
tides on Earth, planets could move the hot plasma on the surface of the Sun.
But the effect of a simple gravitational force is too weak to significantly
disturb the flow in the Sun’s interior, so the temporal coincidence has long
been ignored."
