New Scientist: Sun’s cycle in weird super quiet low ; Telegraph: Giant solar storms coming soon, they say! Hmmm.
Reading sunspots may be about as accurate a way to gauge the future as reading palms – but smart and outwardly sensible people, including reporters, are doing it anyway.
The whole idea of an unfettered press is to provide diverse journalism without governmental or other filters to maintain adherence to authoritarian scripts. That’s good – especially in political news but not only there. So let’s ponder the practical yet arcane world of solar physics. Right now, media are all over the map on an essential unknowable – what the Sun will do next as a follow-up to its recent, historically low sunspot count.
Contrast these two stories in circulation:
- New Scientist – Stuart Clark: What’s wrong with the sun?” Clark gathers evidence and opinion that our star may well be headed for continued quiet on a scale not seen in living memory. Nothing hysterical in here, but what looks like solid reporting with many caveats. But the focus is on argument that solar output may well dip a bit, sunspots might go away soon and stay away for some time, the result slow global warming a bit, maybe cool off Europe particularly (as in the Maunder Minimum of centuries ago).
- Telegraph – Andrew Hough: NASA warns solar flares from ‘huge space storm’ will cause devastation ; In 2013, it says here, NASA scientists expect the sun to emerge from its deep slumber like a bolt of lightning and cause catastrophic damage for the world’s health, energy services, and national security unless precautions are taken. Even iPods might get blitzed into inapptitude, it seems. Not too much sourcing on this – it leans heavily on one researcher. The prediction is not a NASA agency declaration. The story somewhat irresponsibly throws around terms such as catastrophe without clearly and repeatedly saying the natural world won’t feel much – but a few aspects of modern society dependent on electronic devices, such as orbiting satellites and some communications systems, might get blacked out. That’s serious – but it’s not like it will end life as we know it.
Of the two, New Scientist clearly has a big edge in terms of broad reporting and use of caveats.While it speak ominously of strange events evident deep in the sun’s convecting layers and misbehaving streams of plasmatic currents, it is not predicting anything that merits a bunch of exclamation marks. It lays out a hypothesis. The Guardian’s is, by contrast, an apparently overcooked rendition of presentations in DC last week at something called the Space Weather Enterprise Forum. .One finds there are other samplings, particularly in the Brit press, similarly wide-eyed over a potential approaching solar catastrophe. They are tedious.
There are stories to be found of more sensible disposition, among them:
- Space.com – Denise Chow: Sun’s strange behavior baffles astronomers ; Chow dwells on the mystery seen in recent data. Her sources’ best bet: The coming cycle will be milder than usual. News delivered sans hyperventilation.
- Charlie Petit
