This is an official NCAR News Release (National Center for Atmospheric Research) Apparently, they have solar forecasting techniques down to a “science”, as boldly demonstrated in this press release. – Anthony
Scientists Issue Unprecedented Forecast of Next Sunspot Cycle
BOULDER—The next sunspot cycle will be 30-50% stronger than the last one and begin as much as a year late, according to a breakthrough forecast using a computer model of solar dynamics developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Predicting the Sun’s cycles accurately, years in advance, will help societies plan for active bouts of solar storms, which can slow satellite orbits, disrupt communications, and bring down power systems.
The scientists have confidence in the forecast because, in a series of test runs, the newly developed model simulated the strength of the past eight solar cycles with more than 98% accuracy. The forecasts are generated, in part, by tracking the subsurface movements of the sunspot remnants of the previous two solar cycles. The team is publishing its forecast in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
“Our model has demonstrated the necessary skill to be used as a forecasting tool,” says NCAR scientist Mausumi Dikpati, the leader of the forecast team at NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory that also includes Peter Gilman and Giuliana de Toma.
Understanding the cycles
The Sun goes through approximately 11-year cycles, from peak storm activity to quiet and back again. Solar scientists have tracked them for some time without being able to predict their relative intensity or timing.
NCAR scientists Mausumi Dikpati (left), Peter Gilman, and Giuliana de Toma examine results from a new computer model of solar dynamics. (Photo by Carlye Calvin, UCAR) |
Forecasting the cycle may help society anticipate solar storms, which can disrupt communications and power systems and affect the orbits of satellites. The storms are linked to twisted magnetic fields in the Sun that suddenly snap and release tremendous amounts of energy. They tend to occur near dark regions of concentrated magnetic fields, known as sunspots.
The NCAR team’s computer model, known as the Predictive Flux-transport Dynamo Model, draws on research by NCAR scientists indicating that the evolution of sunspots is caused by a current of plasma, or electrified gas, that circulates between the Sun’s equator and its poles over a period of 17 to 22 years. This current acts like a conveyor belt of sunspots.
The sunspot process begins with tightly concentrated magnetic field lines in the solar convection zone (the outermost layer of the Sun’s interior). The field lines rise to the surface at low latitudes and form bipolar sunspots, which are regions of concentrated magnetic fields. When these sunspots decay, they imprint the moving plasma with a type of magnetic signature. As the plasma nears the poles, it sinks about 200,000 kilometers (124,000 miles) back into the convection zone and starts returning toward the equator at a speed of about one meter (three feet) per second or slower. The increasingly concentrated fields become stretched and twisted by the internal rotation of the Sun as they near the equator, gradually becoming less stable than the surrounding plasma. This eventually causes coiled-up magnetic field lines to rise up, tear through the Sun’s surface, and create new sunspots.
The subsurface plasma flow used in the model has been verified with the relatively new technique of helioseismology, based on observations from both NSF– and NASA–supported instruments. This technique tracks sound waves reverberating inside the Sun to reveal details about the interior, much as a doctor might use an ultrasound to see inside a patient.
NCAR scientists have succeeded in simulating the intensity of the sunspot cycle by developing a new computer model of solar processes. This figure compares observations of the past 12 cycles (above) with model results that closely match the sunspot peaks (below). The intensity level is based on the amount of the Sun’s visible hemisphere with sunspot activity. The NCAR team predicts the next cycle will be 30-50% more intense than the current cycle. (Figure by Mausumi Dikpati, Peter Gilman, and Giuliana de Toma, NCAR.) |
Predicting Cycles 24 and 25
The Predictive Flux-transport Dynamo Model is enabling NCAR scientists to predict that the next solar cycle, known as Cycle 24, will produce sunspots across an area slightly larger than 2.5% of the visible surface of the Sun. The scientists expect the cycle to begin in late 2007 or early 2008, which is about 6 to 12 months later than a cycle would normally start. Cycle 24 is likely to reach its peak about 2012.
By analyzing recent solar cycles, the scientists also hope to forecast sunspot activity two solar cycles, or 22 years, into the future. The NCAR team is planning in the next year to issue a forecast of Cycle 25, which will peak in the early 2020s.
“This is a significant breakthrough with important applications, especially for satellite-dependent sectors of society,” explains NCAR scientist Peter Gilman.
The NCAR team received funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA’s Living with a Star program.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
The date of this NCAR News Release is March 6, 2006
Source: http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/sunspot.shtml
(hat tip to WUWT reader Paul Bleicher)
Retired Engineer (06:13:43) :
Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”
Universe: “So ?”
John A. Wheeler to Universe: “I think, therefore you are”.
George Hebbard (05:20:20) :
I haven’t seen anything better than Landscheidt’s solar torque effects to explain variations in the solar dynamo…
Carsten and Idlex showed right here on WUWT that Landscheidt’s solar torque mechanism is based on wrong physics, regardless of whatever confidence one wishes to bestow on the correlations.
MattN (08:04:46) :
“The NCAR team is planning in the next year to issue a forecast of Cycle 25, which will peak in the early 2020s.”
Can we see this prediction of #25? Please?
They stopped saying that after a while. It probably cannot be done [unless you belong to the astrology cult that can forecast solar activity with absolute precision thousands of years in advance]
Basil (06:08:50) :
Then you must be a reasonable reviewer, i.e., one who recognizes that sometimes even “reasonable minds disagree,”
But I am, of course. And it is not about disagreements at all. All journals have the policy [AFAIK] that disagreement is not a reason for rejection. And it is not about a ‘certain standard’ either [although that must be met to a degree], but rather about whether the paper brings something to the table. Often papers that are wrong can be the most successful in furthering the field by their effect on and inspiration to other researchers. Lockwood et al.’s 1999 Nature paper about the ‘doubling’ of the Sun’s open magnetic flux is a good example. Another example may be Dikpati’s paper which I recommended for publication even having severe reservations about it.
Rik Gheysens (06:37:40) :
Is the past break-even point a strong argument putting the solar minimum in August 2008 and not in December 2008 as NOAA predicts?
Break-even point is only really meaningful if the two cycles are of equal strength, but the main point is that there is no sharp definition of ‘minimum’.
Syl (07:58:38) :
Come on guys. Their model has proven to be inadequate, that’s all. I don’t fault them for having a theory in the first place, then building a model to test it. That’s how it works. There are competing theories among solar scientists, and that’s a good thing.
And Syl is quite right…
Frank K. (07:59:23) :
Note the use of the words “unprecedented” and “breakthrough”. These are very strong words, and entirely undeserved.
and should not be used about such a flimsy thing, but such is the influence of the PR machine that NASA uses to justify funding when times are lean.
FWIW, where you have the image from ucar.ed “Fiigure Comparison” it clips on the right hand side. The source code indicates it is in a table of width 550 and the image has width is set to 534. I suspect it needs to be more like 500. Height at 551 ought to be scaled accordingly to about 516. We’ll see if wordpress eats the html, but I think it ought to be like:
NCAR scientists have succeeded in simulating the intensity of the sunspot cycle by developing a new computer model of solar processes. This figure compares observations of the past 12 cycles (above) with model results that closely match the sunspot peaks (below). The intensity level is based on the amount of the Sun’s visible hemisphere with sunspot activity. The NCAR team predicts the next cycle will be 30-50% more intense than the current cycle. (Figure by Mausumi Dikpati, Peter Gilman, and Giuliana de Toma, NCAR.)
Oh, and the reason for the Hubris comment is that here we have yet another case of someone modeling part of a larger cycle and thinking it is truth. Their modeled period does not contain several known discontinuities (such as the Maunder) and so they are just doing “data modeling” which will work right up until it doesn’t… when the missing events return. IMHO, that looks like it’s setting up to be now.
BTW, here it is June and I’m under cloudy skies with cool temperatures, no tomatoes, and sulking greenbeans. But my cabbages, peas, onions and other cool season crops are doing just fine (when normally the expected 80F to 90F under clear skies with piercing sun would have fried them by now).
Yeah, it’s just “weather” and only on the west coast… but… this is not normal and not like past decades. Something is Different. That is the kind of discontinuity these folks are missing.
Leif Svalgaard (08:35:24) :
There is no doubt that SC24 is on its way now,
Hmm. It looks like two independent cycle 24 tiny tims in the SOHO view. The magnetogram is out of time but it can be seen in http://gong.nso.edu/Daily_Images/
Cannot be seen in the sunspot views there, just the magnetograms.
I would place my bets on weak to very weak. Are there sunspot images from the equivalent beginning of 23, assuming you are right and 24 started ? I could not find any in SOHO.
Leif Svalgaard (20:29:17) :
“I believe that all reviews should be published [as an electronic supplement to the paper] and I have never insisted on anonymity in reviewing. IMHO, the review is as important to the public as the paper itself.”
Amen! That would tell the world how rigorously the paper was reviewed and what elements were in question. Good luck in getting that past The Team.
I wouldn’t believe NCAR solar scientists and astrophysicists even if they were the spoken authority of the pope. NCAR is so tight with the pro AGW climatologists they are practically twins. As time has shown, their computer model is junk as it is three years later and their predictions are way off.
Leif Svalgaard (08:35:24) :
Huh? Oh – sneaky way to get people to read the paper? http://www.leif.org/research/Reduction%20of%20Spatially%20Resolved%20Magnetic%20Field%20by%20Scattered%20Light.pdf makes it clear.
I imagine a lot of astronomers and telescope operators would be very reluctant to apply that. Did they get “bribed” with the promise of recoating? Perhaps Rob Bateman would be happy to reproduce that experiment with his ‘scope the next time there’s a sunspot to draw.
As far as I know, Hubble made it through the SC23 peak(s) okay. Do I just not know the right stuff or was the concern then that SC24 might be too big? And if NASA brought back Hubble, what’s the chance it would go back up soon after solar max? Was some of that thinking due to having to fix things that were not designed to be fixed in orbit?
Leif Svalgaard (09:18:15)
Science rejected the Livingston and Penn fading sunspot paper citing it relying on statistics and not proposing a mechanism, IIRC. While I think they should have submitted to Icarus or some other astronomical journal, how often do papers that have statistics over mechanism get published? In retrospect, at least, they certainly brought something interesting to the table. I’ll grant it may not have appeared as likely then as it does now.
Leif Svalgaard (22:11:18) : I asked her how she could have faith in the correctness of the programming if the code was such a mess, but never got a good answer.
I can actually answer this. Code grows and mutates over time. You can follow all the threads, but it has layers of history in it. Prior to being “public” the programmer likes to go back and clean up the “cruft”. A crufty program is one that works well (or well enough) but has lots of messy and not “prefessional looking” bits in it (yes, there is a ‘term of art’ for this condition, it is so common). That does not make the code wrong.
I’ll give a fictitious example here. Say I wanted to add 2+2 and make a decision based on the result.
andwer=2+2
comment “Does bob know where the &*&^ we got the input from?
if andwer greater than 4 goto bigcase
#commentedout if sndwer greater than 4 goto gigcase
#commentedout if sndwer lessthan 4 goto dinkycase
#commentedout That George is a wanker, canteven spll andwer right!
if andwer lessthan 4 goto smallcase
print “We were right! It’s a 4, go tell Mabel!”
#comment Anybody know why were looking for four?
goto end2
bigcase: Print “Oops. Too big.”
goto end2
smallcase: Print “Oops. Too small.”
end2: end
Or the cleaner version
comment Input data from NCAR archive #2349
comment Written by E.M.S on 1june2009
comment purpose is to compute answer and predict value of 4
comment Source archive checked in, QA verified, audit number 4554
if [ (answer=2+2) > 4 ] then bigcase; else
if [ answer < 4 ] then smallcase; else
print "Successful run, answer matches prediction of 4."
endif
endif
bigcase: Print "Result exceeded prediction"; exit
smallcase: Print "Result below prediction"; exit
Both of these would produce the same result. One of them would cause a fair amount of embarrassment in public.
Actual code can be much worse in "cruftiness" than this example… but it generally consists of a few specific things. Rarely does "management" care about these, so once the code works the "SHIP IT" mantra begins no matter how much the code is an embarrassment to the writer. This is part of why programmers are often a bit "cautious" about announcing when the code is "done and working". They want time to make the "presentation" nice…
(Having been both the programmer and the management, I can speak to both sides of this… I usually made my guys "ship it" as binary but gave them time to clean up the source code before moving ALL their time to the next project…)
1) Either a near complete lack of comments or comments that ought not to see the light of day.
2) Messy and/or poor "style" that works, but is not considered 'good style' today. (There are endless 'style wars' fought over things like "goto vs nested if " or the best way to evaluate a formula, and similar things).
3) "Dead code" from some prior iteration before you figured out what was wrong, but left around while you were figuring it out (good for the forensic "WTF Did I change?" that inevitably comes up when the program either starts working fine or breaks in a completely unexpected way 😉
4) Things that work, but are embarrassing due to, for example, misspelling.
5) Poor physical formatting. Called "pretty printing", there is a formal process of going through and turning unreadable blocks of working code into a nicely formatted readable indented work of page art.
Forgot about the wordpress gremlins that steal gt and lt signs… revised to omit and use greaterthan instead… We’ll see if my pseudocode survives wordpress this time…
Leif Svalgaard (22:11:18) : I asked her how she could have faith in the correctness of the programming if the code was such a mess, but never got a good answer.
I can actually answer this. Code grows and mutates over time. You can follow all the threads, but it has layers of history in it. Prior to being “public” the programmer likes to go back and clean up the “cruft”. A crufty program is one that works well (or well enough) but has lots of messy and not “prefessional looking” bits in it (yes, there is a ‘term of art’ for this condition, it is so common). That does not make the code wrong.
I’ll give a fictitious example here. Say I wanted to add 2+2 and make a decision based on the result.
andwer=2+2
comment “Does bob know where the &*&^ we got the input from?
if andwer greater than 4 goto bigcase
#commentedout if sndwer greater than 4 goto gigcase
#commentedout if sndwer lessthan 4 goto dinkycase
#commentedout That George is a wanker, canteven spll andwer right!
if andwer lessthan 4 goto smallcase
print “We were right! It’s a 4, go tell Mabel!”
#comment Anybody know why were looking for four?
goto end2
bigcase: Print “Oops. Too big.”
goto end2
smallcase: Print “Oops. Too small.”
end2: end
Or the cleaner version
comment Input data from NCAR archive #2349
comment Written by E.M.S on 1june2009
comment purpose is to compute answer and predict value of 4
comment Source archive checked in, QA verified, audit number 4554
if [ (answer=2+2) greaterthan 4 ] then bigcase; else
if [ answer lessthan 4 ] then smallcase; else
print “Successful run, answer matches prediction of 4.”
endif
endif
bigcase: Print “Result exceeded prediction”; exit
smallcase: Print “Result below prediction”; exit
Both of these would produce the same result. One of them would cause a fair amount of embarrassment in public.
Actual code can be much worse in “cruftiness” than this example… but it generally consists of a few specific things. Rarely does “management” care about these, so once the code works the “SHIP IT” mantra begins no matter how much the code is an embarrassment to the writer. This is part of why programmers are often a bit “cautious” about announcing when the code is “done and working”. They want time to make the “presentation” nice…
(Having been both the programmer and the management, I can speak to both sides of this… I usually made my guys “ship it” as binary but gave them time to clean up the source code before moving ALL their time to the next project…)
1) Either a near complete lack of comments or comments that ought not to see the light of day.
2) Messy and/or poor “style” that works, but is not considered ‘good style’ today. (There are endless ‘style wars’ fought over things like “goto vs nested if ” or the best way to evaluate a formula, and similar things).
3) “Dead code” from some prior iteration before you figured out what was wrong, but left around while you were figuring it out (good for the forensic “WTF Did I change?” that inevitably comes up when the program either starts working fine or breaks in a completely unexpected way 😉
4) Things that work, but are embarrassing due to, for example, misspelling.
5) Poor physical formatting. Called “pretty printing”, there is a formal process of going through and turning unreadable blocks of working code into a nicely formatted readable indented work of page art.
Well, wordpress stole the indenting…
There ought to be a nice stair stepped indent for the if statments.
if if print endif endifoh well…
REPLY: for displaying code, use the html tags “pre” and “/pre” (which stands for preformatted) each inside the greater than less than signs to do this. – Anthony
Leif, thanks for your contributions – very helpful.
Leif,
I respect your general scepticism even when it contradicts my own favoured viewpoints because it makes me refine and if necessary correct my ideas.
Could you suggest any evidence that, in your opinion, would reveal the Earth’s climate as being more sensitive to minor solar changes than is currently accepted ?
As you know, I think that oceanic variability modulates those small solar changes. Up to a point you seem to accept that.
Can you suggest any specific data that could resolve the issue either way ?
Another Ian (23:46:32) : “Empixelated”
as a descriptor of those who spend far too much time looking at computer screens and not nearly enough time looking out of windows
I like it!
And how about, for their process: “Applying pixel dust” 😉
(Apologies to all Pixies everywhere, not intended to impune the efficacy of real pixie dust which is known to be far more effective than pixel dust 😉
So one could say something like:
“After 4 years of work during which NCAR applied a great deal of pixel dust, the result was a prediction of…”
anna v (09:31:53) :
Are there sunspot images from the equivalent beginning of 23, assuming you are right and 24 started ? I could not find any in SOHO.
It is instructive to look at the drawings from Mt. Wilson from that [and other times]:
ftp://howard.astro.ucla.edu/pub/obs/drawings/
Click on the year you want, 1997, e.g.
Ric Werme (10:02:23) :
I imagine a lot of astronomers and telescope operators would be very reluctant to apply that. Did they get “bribed” with the promise of recoating?
We are putting in a new mirror anyway in a couple of weeks, so can afford to mess with the old one.
Ric Werme (10:12:51) :
how often do papers that have statistics over mechanism get published? In retrospect, at least, they certainly brought something interesting to the table. I’ll grant it may not have appeared as likely then as it does now.
Different Journals have different policy in that regard. Livingston thinks that the rejection was OK. He is working on a new and more substantial paper [still no mechanism]. Several of my papers [even my very first one 41 years ago] have been rejected. They have usually turned out significantly improved the second [or third!] time around. Here is an example: http://www.leif.org/research/No%20Doubling%20of%20Open%20Flux.pdf First you’ll see the paper, then a resubmission [also rejected] and then reviewer reports and resulting whining by the authors. Eventually [years later], it turned out that we were correct after all and Lockwood has effectively abandoned his earlier views [except he’ll not admit it is asked outright].
E.M.Smith (10:30:18) :
That does not make the code wrong.
Very true [it is probably her model/assumptions that are wrong, rather than the code]. But at the time, her refusal to show us the messy code, made it impossible for us to gauge its quality, and more importantly the [often hidden] assumptions and adjustable parameters [she claims only one, I count at least a dozen in her paper and related papers].
This excerpt — especially the last sentence — from Richard Feynman’s 1974 talk on “Cargo Cult Science” is worth remembering when dealing with “models” that are based mainly on past performance:
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school — we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
jh (03:58:04) : That said de Jager and Duhau published another paper in 2008 based on some empirical observations on the long term osciilation around these phase transitions and came up with this prediction.
“The regularities that we observe in the behaviour of these oscillations during the last millenim enable us to forecast solar activity. We find that the system is presently undergoing a transition from the recent Grand Maximum to another regime.
Oh Boy! “Cyclomania” in a peer reviewed paper!
See, it IS all about cycles! 😉
The first of these oscillations may even turn out to be as strongly negative as around 1810 in which case a short Grand Minimum similar to the Dalton one might develop. This moderate to low activity episode is expected to last for at least one Gleissberg cycle (60-100 years).”
I agree, but without any decent foundation…
The old, old story of the beautiful maiden hypothesis and the ugly ogre, truth!
Now if I could just stop Leif from stealing my Beer Goggles ! 8-}
Stephen Wilde (11:03:41) :
Could you suggest any evidence that, in your opinion, would reveal the Earth’s climate as being more sensitive to minor solar changes than is currently accepted ?
I think there must a solar influence at some level below 0.1 degree as the changes in TSI demands that [radiation balance], anything more than that has very little evidence [IMO] going for it [in spite of the hundreds or thousands of claims]. If we are still in vain debating and looking for [refining the methods until the data yields the desired result] the clear and unmistakable solar cycle signal at the below 0.1 degree level that everybody can agree on then it seems even harder to accept ‘amplifiers’ and ‘feedbacks’ and ‘known or unknown unknowns’. Once we have ice cores and climatology for other planets we may have the data needed for a comparative study as the solar signal may be a common factor. Before that, I don’t see much hope, barring a completely new approach that somebody still has to come up with.
E.M.Smith (11:35:10) :
The old, old story of the beautiful maiden hypothesis and the ugly ogre, truth!
Well, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find one that turns into a princess [or prince, depending on your orientation].
MH (00:20:04) wrote:
“I am a full time trader and trade the stock markets for a living. All the big banks have these models that can predict past stock market behavior very accurately and but are total useless in predicting the future. They curve fit the historical data with their models and then use this model to try to predict the future. They failed miserably as evidence by the present financial crisis.”
Not only that, they’ve failed to predict the current rally, and most quant-based funds (like D.E. Shaw) have shorted it and lost badly.
The more science relies on government funding, the more it is susceptible to distortions arising from political factors. IPCC is primarily a political entity, and like all political entities has a vital interest in its own continuation. The scientists promoting AGW are also self-interested. If they produce objective analyses showing that AGW is a minor factor, or a non-factor, in future climate then they have no rationale for continued funding of research in this area.
REPLY: for displaying code, use the html tags “pre” and “/pre” (which stands for preformatted) each inside the greater than less than signs to do this. – Anthony
Hmm, I don’t mention that in my http://wattsupwiththat.com/resources/#comment-65319 . Double hmm, that comment refers to “See the “You can use these tags” line in the “Leave a comment” area? I don’t see that any more. Mind if I try <pre> here?
No indent if (indent == 4) printf("Wordpress isn't eating leading spaces any more!\n"); printf("I wonder just what they allow theses days\n");Let me try <code> too.
This line is indenet four spaces.
This line has 4 commands at the start.
This concludes this month’s periodic test of WordPress fomatting features. Had this been a full featured blog system, I woulda just clicked preview. 🙂
Leif Svalgaard (11:16:38) :
Thanks, yes, it is instructive.
We have yet to see something like
ftp://howard.astro.ucla.edu/pub/obs/drawings/1997/dr970125.gif
From a cursory scan of 96 and 97 ( looking at the large files 🙂 ) I will still bet on a weak 24 cycle.
Retired Engineer (06:13:43) : Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”
Universe: “So ?”
Love it! JUST LOVE IT!
OT, smoking doesn’t kill people. It isn’t as if they’ll live forever if they don’t smoke. It may shorten their lives (in my ancestors cases, it probably lengthened them) but many things shorten lives.
Interesting point… the lengthening bit…
BTW, my Dad died of smoking induced cancer. With that said, when fishing together, he would blow smoke around himself and be happily mosquito free… while I would be the human pincushion covered in little red welts… (leaving me with a life long hatred of mosquitos…)
Now this was in a place with sporadic Malaria (one case every few years). Later, when decent repellants were invented, I stopped being the pincushion, but it left me to wonder:
To what extent does the nicotine level in the smoker and the smoke about the smoker prevent them from contracting any large number of bug vector diseases? Nicotine is an insecticide. You can use tobacco tea to protect your garden. Ought not a nicotine soaked person have some similar benefit?
I once asked him why he started smoking. He said that during WWII in a foxhole it mattered more that you be 1/10 second faster than the other guy and less what would happen in 30 years… Having “sampled” nicotine (via absorbing some of that “tea” while applying… use gloves…) I can tell you that it does speed you up some fair amount. It also kills various parasitic worms and microbes (and I think may have cured a small persistent skin lesion of unknown etiology I had — it ‘went away’ right after the “tea” soaking…)
So I’ve turned from a rabid anti-tobacco person into a “whatever you want, just out of my nose, please” person. Because maybe, just maybe, I was wrong to condemn it outright. To be so absolutely sure.
I think this is illustrative of what needs to happen with the same effect in the AGW ‘non-debate’ where the “right feeling answer with truthyness” is held as a high moral standard, despite what the reality might mean and despite that there may be some problems in that truthyness… (i.e. maybe you don’t die of cancer in 40 years, you die of a bullet now, or malaria, or worms, or… Similarly, maybe we don’t die of heat in 40 years, we die of malaria or economic collapse now.)
Basically, the ‘tobacco’ thing was something I was once absolute about. Not a single nanometer of quarter given. Now, not so much… I think a similar transition needs to happen to the AGW true believers. They need to realize the limits of their truthyness… and that maybe the cure is for the wrong disease…
E.M.Smith (12:05:37) :
ontinuing on your OT
reminds me of Mediterranean anemia, the recessive gene protects from malaria, but when two appear in a child, the child dies before teens. A stiff price to pay for protection of the tribe, but evolution does not ask, whereas addictions are voluntary choices.
I had an aunt who was prescribed smoking for her asthmatic lungs, go figure, back in the 1940s.
In the evils of nicotine add that the dose from a single cigarette could start a spasm on plaque coated arteries that would dislodge some of it and create a heart attack, an embolism or what have you. Russian roulette after a certain age.
anna v (12:05:18) :
From a cursory scan of 96 and 97 ( looking at the large files 🙂 ) I will still bet on a weak 24 cycle.
Me too, of course, except my betting was done in 2004.