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Dr. Jeff Hall
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Dr. Jeff Hall Astronomer, Director, Lowell Observatory
TRANSCRIPT:
There are some very interesting potential effects. We know the sun affects climate. It was one of the important discoveries that the Space Age revolution brought to this particular field, as it did so broadly in astrophysics. It was 1978 that the first satellite was launched that had an instrument that just stared at the sun and measured its brightness. One of the first things we discovered was that the so-called "solar constant" -- or the amount of solar energy hitting Earth's atmosphere -- isn't. The entire sun gets slightly brighter and fainter as its activity rises and falls. Not by very much, just a part in a thousand, but instead of a constant set of radiation hitting the Earth's atmosphere, there's this 11-year pulse.
Moreover, the distribution of that variability in different parts of the sun's radiation is very different over the course of the activity cycle. The sun's X-ray emission rises and falls by a factor of 10. It becomes tremendously more active at solar maximum. How does all this propagate into the complex currents that drive terrestrial climate? The picture is not fully worked out, but if the sun's cycle ceases, there could certainly be noticeable effects, probably not uniformly around the globe but certainly in various regions.
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