Posted for Quirin Schiermeier

The American astronomer Jack Eddy, famed for his studies on the connections between solar activity and terrestrial climate, died last Wednesday in Tucson, Arizona.

Born John Allen Eddy in 1931 in Pawnee City, Nebraska, Eddy was in 1949 appointed to the US Naval Academy where he crawled out on the roof one night to look at the stars. After graduation, he served for four years in the Korean War. In 1957 he became the first student in the astro-geophysics graduate school at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After a period of teaching he joined the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). When laid off from NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory in 1973 he was hired by NASA.

In a famous study published in 1976 in Science, Eddy demonstrated a link between unusually low solar activity and the coldest period of the so-called little ice age.

During the 1640-1710 ‘Maunder Minimum’ – a term Eddy coined in honour of the 19th century British astronomer Edward W. Maunder whose sunspot studies inspired his own work on sun-climate connections – Europe and North America experienced a series of exceptionally cold winters.

Irregular variations in the 11-year sunspot cycle are an endlessly appealing topic for all those who would rather believe that the sun – not fossil fuels – is driving current climate change.

Eddy distrusted wackiness in science, but he was well aware that his discoveries were alluring to obscurants.

“There is a hypnotism about cycles that seems to attract people. It draws all kinds of creatures out of the woodwork,” he once told science historian Spencer Weart.