The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection - Hardcover

Soon, Willie Wei-hock; Yaskell, Steven H

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9812382747 ISBN 13: 9789812382740

Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Co Pte Ltd, 2004

Synopsis

This book takes an excursion through solar science, science history, and geoclimate with a husband and wife team who revealed some of our sun's most stubborn secrets.E Walter and Annie S D Maunder's work helped in understanding our sun's chemical, electromagnetic and plasma properties. They knew the sun's sunspot migration patterns and its variable, climate-affecting, inactive and active states in short and long time frames. An inactive solar period starting in the mid-seventeenth century lasted approximately seventy years, one that E Walter Maunder worked hard to make us understand: the Maunder Minimum of c 1620-1720 (which was posthumously named for him).With ongoing concern over global warming, and the continuing failure to identify root causes driving earth's climatic changes, the Maunders' story outlines how our cyclical sun can alter climate. The book goes on to view the sun-earth connection in terms of geomagnetic variation and climatic change; contemporary views on the sun's operating mechanisms are explored, and the effects these have on the earth over long and short time scales are pondered.If not a call to widen earth's climate research to include the sun, this book strives to illustrate how solar causes and effects can influence earth's climate in ways we must understand in order to enhance solar system research and our well-being.

About this title

Review

"This book is a wonderful reading which combines intellectual ideas from various branches of modern science, i.e. astronomy, climatology, physics, history of science, biology, etc. The content is very deep and the authors are not afraid to show the soul of scientific methods to the reader. Yet the book avoids complicated mathematical details. The book is interesting for specialists and understandable for general public. One learns from the book about a cataclysm which happened about 350 years ago on the Sun supported and probed by various observational methods including the novel technique of learning about the Sun from other 'solar stars'. A coherent understanding of the information obtained perhaps requires a century and this story looks more intriguing, rather like many crime stories. The Maunder minimum of solar activity affected various aspects of life on Earth and it is impossible to ignore related experiences by discussing such important topics as global warming, greenhouse effect, sun-climate relation, etc. I believe that everybody who would like to know what modern science offers about these varieties of topics can learn a great deal from the book of W Soon and S Yaskell."

.,." an engaging summary of sunspot understanding, sunspot observation, and linkages between sunspots and changes in Earth's atmosphere.?

Edition details

• Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Co Pte Ltd
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9812382747
• ISBN 13: 9789812382740
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296