Feb 21 1977
From The Space Library
A lack of sunspots during the past yr and a half might have caused recent unusual cold weather and drought in the U.S., Dr. John A. Eddy of the Natl. Center for Atmospheric Research told the 143rd meeting of the Am. Assn. for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Eddy, an astronomer who had studied the complex relation between solar activity and historic and climatic events, had traced short- and medium-term effects over several thousand yr in history records and as far back as 7000yr by measuring carbon-14 levels in tree rings.
The theory was that sunspots increased the solar wind (solar particles and radiation that, fan the earth) which determined the amount of cosmic and galactic radiation striking the earth. Tree-ring studies echoed abnormal conditions of cold weather and drought when the rings exhibited high levels of carbon-14 resulting from reduced solar-wind activity, resulting from fewer sunspots.
". . . The record of climate [has] a one-to-one correspondence that's so good I don't want to believe it," Dr. Eddy told the Denver meeting. History reported the reign of King Louis XIV of France (1643-1713) as a time of high carbon-14 levels; Eddy said the most severe temperature drops on earth in the last thousand yr occurred in that period. Crops failed in the British Isles, a Norse colony in Greenland perished of cold, and Spanish conquistadors had ridden their horses into Mexico across a frozen Rio Grande. The aurora borealis produced by solar particles striking earth's magnetic field did not appear during that period; astronomer Edmund Halley was 60yr old when he first saw northern lights in 1715, when the "little ice age" ended. "The fact is, we should have been into a rise of solar activity in the autumn of 1975," Eddy noted, "and here we are a year and a half overdue into getting that rise." (W Post, Feb 22/77, A-3; NYT, Feb 22/77, 13)
Japan's Natl. Space Development Agency announced rescheduling to Feb. 23 of the launch of a 3-stage N rocket carrying the first geostationary meteorological satellite to be orbited by Japan. The launch had been postponed because of trouble with the system controlling the rocket's first stage. (FBIS, Tokyo Kyodo in English, Feb 21/77)
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