The bands will be alive!

Nick - Radio Ham (m0NjP)

Tin foil hat and coat for me

Planes dropping out of the air! TV and Radio scrambled! GPS not working! Don't you see? It's an invasion!

I would like to be the first to welcome our new overlords from Sol.

Surely someone must have dug out one of his nonsensical verses filled with vague metaphor, and interpreted it as being related to this solar activity cycle.

Come tin foil hat brigade, we're all waiting for more "proof" of Nostradamus's brilliance.....

right.. hold on...

so what you're saying is... some swirly sh*t is gonna happen on the sun and it might make electric gizmos go hay-wire? Funky light shoes too??

Damn, the sun is awesome.

Will we need to wear FULL foil suits? Or funky aluminium* clothes? Italian suits of a fine shimmering aluminium, cool.

(no firefox, it's not a spelling mistake, it DOES have two i's and yes I can write firefox, thats not a spelling mistake either, f' off, wheres the British dictionary, I'm sure I installed it once already?)

when whatever I am in charge of fails, it was nice an easy in the early 00's :)

But I would like to have my pizza done before 2011....

According to the long count calendar the solar maxima happens in 2012... Which by pure co-incidence is the same year they believed the world would come to an end... again...

I will start selling Tin Foil hats on ebay, branded with "I told you we're all gonna die" written on them from 2011, unfortunately no pre-orders will be taken.

Was that added by NOAA or El Reg? In other words, does NOAA think their audience are a bunch of gibbering idiots who can't read a chart, or do you?*

*Or perhaps both?

That intelligent people ( politicians and members of groanpeace / fiends of the earth excepted ) that anthropomorphic climate change does not exist , and in fact is a result of changes in solar radiation and takes place over a geologic time scale

Can anyone remember the spectacular display we had over the UK in the late 80's or early 90's? It lasted a couple of days and the emergency phone line were jammed with calls from people who thought the end was indeed nigh and God was about to descend from one of the glowing billowing clouds of solar particles. It was pretty incredible, and to see it again from the comfort of my own home instead of having to travel to the poles would make my life.

Bring out your dead!!!

Its no coincidence. We're doomed.

why's it called cycle 24?

presumably this has been happening forever, every 11 years?

or have we only been paying attention for the last 253 years?

or is it just sponsorship by the Fox network for Jack Bauer's next caper where the sun itself treatens american freedom by dropping planes out of skies and frying satellites and mobile phones and potentially millions of people are going to die unless he can put a stop to it

Either it'll be an excuse as to why the facilities are not finished in time (GPS equipped robo-diggers couldnt find their way) or if we are really lucky, it'll stuff the TV and then we are spared two weeks of this expensive wall to wall nonsense. (I know, I can just play my own DVDs, but think of the general good...).

What does the CoFSM think this all portends anyway?

2012, so that's 4 years to go.....

yay, I don't have to bother giving up smoking!

...that the climate change deniers can just shut their ignorant cake-holes?

The links with solar activity are built into the predictive and historical models and don't explain the current changes. Not even nearly. So shut up with the fear, uncertainty and doubt when I'm trying to get off home.

AC[1] - Do you really think 11 years is a geologic [sic] timescale?

AC[4] - Well said.

El Reg, any chance of adopting my "Anonymous Response Subscript Enhancement" so we tell all these Anonymous Cowards apart? You can have the first 3 months, royalty free...

... that some people on here have gone a bit mental? I've not met or heard anyone deny that the climate is changing... I have heard a lot of people question the mechanism that's causing it to change tho, which is a very healthy and scientific thing to do.

"Climate change denier" has an obvious and horrific connotations, and I'd be very very wary of any 'anonymous coward' that uses the phrase alongside the words 'fear, uncertainty and doubt.'

There's lots of evidence that current climate models vastly exaggerate the effect of CO2 on earths climate, just go and have a look. Google is your friend. There's also lots of evidence that the sun plays a large part in the warming/cooling cycles on the planet - not least that every other planet in the solar system is warming at similar rates to ours. I don't see anyone pumping CO2 into the atmosphere of mars, do you? Surely it's worth having a look and looking for evidence, rather than believing the mythical consensus.

We didn't even realise that plants released methane till November (http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/esthag/2008/42/i01/abs/es071224l.html)... be very wary of anyone that claims we know what's going on with the climate.

Many people dream of the maximum that happened around 1959. It has been downhill ever since. Maybe this time it will reach the high of the "good times".

P.S. When it DOES come, be sure to turn down the RF gain, the signal is much clearer.

WWV predictions N9 (we can only dream!)

I've discovered that the SUN is involved in some kind of CONSPIRACY mister president I.. hello?

...and so kicks off the latest installment of "cycle 24"

Ey, by the by... how come all that aurora stuff was visible in the UK but not in Ireland? Come back, ye evil despots, and turn off the georgian aurora blind that you left on in 1922... what's that? Can't be bothered?

oh well...

Or Steve, maybe you're a gibbering idiot and don't understand tounge-in-cheek humour?

Hello,

...- . .---- -... .-.. .-..

--. --- -.. ... .- ...- . - .... . --.- ..- . . -.

--... ...--

Solar variation theory is an accepted part of AGW models where it accounts for less than half of the global mean temperature increase over the past century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation#Solar_variation_theory has some useful references.

The ridiculously polarized debate on AGW among uninformed people is not productive. A scientists' task is to figure out the *relative contributions* of various factors to the observed GMT increase. Solar activity is a contribution that must be accounted for, *and so is human greenhouse gas emission*.

Cheer up Gordon, your fortunes may be on the up at last. The Blair sunspsot activity finally diee as the polarity reverses...

Good point, Dave!

For my fellow gibberers, tongue-in-cheek is a form of humour where the humourist purports to be entirely credible, except for a "tell" (originally actually putting one's tongue in one's cheek). Ideally, this tell is not immediately apparent, but becomes apparent once the joke is complete, or just before the audience is ready to react indignantly. It's a bit more strict than direct parody, in that parody is free to identify itself as such, whereas tongue-in-cheek works best if the audience doesn't realize that it's tongue-in-cheek until the joke is complete. It's also tough because if your audience isn't quite intelligent or perceptive enough, they may miss the tell.

One example might be posting an "indignant" reaction in a forum known for its indignant posters, with a flip footnote as the tell.

Can we get a gibbering idiot icon? Oh, there it is!*

*Okay, I see two of them, but can only pick one. Guess which is the other one!

Hooray! The bands will open, QRP Forever!! :+)

Wasn't the last one called Y2K?

*and so is human greenhouse gas emission*.

Yes it is, but not all greenhouse gases are CO2. Most of them are much better at being greenhouse gases than CO2. So can we stop talking about CO2 as if it is the worlds only f*!king problem? And if one person says "carbon footprint", i will find where you live and shove my carbon footprint right up your ass. Thanks.

So anyway, back to the sun thing. I'm guessing it'll help keep us IT guys in a job or just generally give us an excuse to do no work?

"The servers down! We need it fixed now!"

"Sorry, can't. The Magnetic waves from the sun are interfering with server and we just can't get it back up. We'll keep trying though........"

err.. didn't look like a flip footnote to me? Anyway it had a sad smiley! Mine had a happy smiley and was obviously just a friendly vehement insult *grin*