AaS! 210: How Does Space Affect the Climate?
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2023
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
What triggers ice ages and other climate events? How are sunspot cycles and orbital motions related to climate patterns? What does Jupiter have to do with all this? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In the year 1645, the sun shut off. |
| 0:14.2 | Not literally. |
| 0:15.6 | Of course, it was still shining, still rose in the east every morning, set in the |
| 0:19.6 | West every evening, still shone, bright, |
| 0:22.5 | and strong, but something was wrong. It would stay wrong for over half a century. The problem |
| 0:30.6 | was with the sunspots. Or rather, the lack thereof. This period coincided with the lowest |
| 0:37.3 | number of recorded sunspots |
| 0:39.4 | ever for decades before and for centuries since. We had just gotten the whole rigorous and |
| 0:46.2 | systematic measurement of sunspot activity for no particular reason. Game started, |
| 0:51.2 | and it really started with Galileo. Humanity has known about sunspots forever. |
| 0:56.9 | You can see them if the sun is very low in the horizon and partially obscured by fog or mist |
| 1:03.6 | or thin clouds. And if you squint hard enough, you can see sunspots. People have known about |
| 1:08.8 | sunspots, but it wasn't until the telescope and the |
| 1:12.1 | ability to point the telescope at the sun and then projected the image of the sun on a screen, |
| 1:17.5 | could you really get serious about sunspots? And Galileo really did observe sunspots a lot, |
| 1:23.7 | and then after him, people did a lot. People liked sunspots. And so at the time that this |
| 1:31.4 | occurred, this dip in sunspot activity, nobody knew anything was special or different because |
| 1:37.9 | they had just started measuring and counting sunspots and didn't have anything to compare it to. |
| 1:43.5 | It took a few more centuries for us to be able to look back at the time and realize that |
| 1:48.8 | something was wrong. |
| 1:50.8 | The first person to notice that something was wrong was German astronomer Gustav Spor, |
| 1:55.8 | who if you need to visualize him in your head, he had one of these fantastic chin strap-style |
... |
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