UK Researchers, Little Ice Age was Global: Sun Plays Role

A team of UK researchers has shed new light on the climate of the Little Ice Age, and rekindled debate over the role of the sun in climate change. The new study, which involved detailed scientific examination of a peat bog in southern South America, indicates that the most extreme climate episodes of the Little Ice Age were felt not just in Europe and North America, which is well known, but apparently globally. These extreme times coincide with periods when it is known that the sun was unusually quiet. In the late 17th to mid-18th centuries it had very few sunspots—fewer even than during the run of recent cold winters in Europe, which other UK scientists have linked to a relatively quiet sun.

More from the University of Gloucestershire, HERE.

H/T to Benny Peiser at GWPF

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Climate capers of the past 600,000 years

by Staff Writers, TerraDaily Bonn, Germany (SPX) Nov 18, 2014

“Fluctuations in climate were due in large part to periodic changes in the Earth’s orbit parameters.”

If you want to see into the future, you have to understand the past. An international consortium of researchers under the auspices of the University of Bonn has drilled deposits on the bed of Lake Van (Eastern Turkey) which provide unique insights into the last 600,000 years. The samples reveal that the climate has done its fair share of mischief-making in the past.

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In the sediments of Lake Van, the lighter-colored, lime-containing summer layers are clearly distinguishable from the darker, clay-rich winter layers — also called varves. In 2010, from a floating platform an international consortium of researchers drilled a 220 m deep sediment profile from the lake floor at a water depth of 360 m and analyzed the varves. The samples they recovered are a unique scientific treasure because the climate conditions, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of the past 600,000 years can be read in outstanding quality from the cores.

The team of scientists under the auspices of the University of Bonn has analyzed some 5,000 samples in total. “The results show that the climate over the past hundred thousand years has been a roller coaster. Within just a few decades, the climate could tip from an ice age into a warm period,” says Doctor Thomas Litt of the University of Bonn’s Steinmann Institute and spokesman for the PALEOVAN international consortium of researchers.

Unbroken continental climate archives from the ice age which encompass several hundred thousand years are extremely rare on a global scale. “There has never before in all of the Middle East and Central Asia been a continental drilling operation going so far back into the past,” says Doctor Litt. In the northern hemisphere, climate data from ice-cores drilled in Greenland encompass the last 120,000 years. The Lake Van project closes a gap in the scientific climate record.

The sediments reveal six cycles of cold and warm periods
Scientists found evidence for a total of six cycles of warm and cold periods in the sediments of Lake Van. The University of Bonn paleoecologist and his colleagues analyzed the pollen preserved in the sediments.

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These analyses enable the team of researchers to read the varves of Lake Van like thousands of pages of an archive. With these data, the team was able to demonstrate that fluctuations in climate were due in large part to periodic changes in the Earth’s orbit parameters and the commensurate changes in solar insolation levels.

Read the rest HERE.

 

Has the Sun gone to sleep?

Here is a BBC Video discussing the possibility of a Maunder Minimum:

Check out the video link HERE.

Following are excerpts from the video, thanks to Ice Age Now:

“Scientists are saying that the Sun is in a phase of ‘solar lull’ – meaning that it has fallen asleep – and it is baffling them.

“Something is happening to the solar activity on the surface of the sun: It’s declining…fast.

Whatever measurement you use, it’s coming down. Solar peaks are coming down.

“Richard Harrison is head of space physics at the Rutherford-Appleton laboratory in Oxfordshire. He says the rate at which solar activity is falling mirrors a period in the 17th century where sunspots virtually disappeared.

“The Maunder Minimum of course was period when we saw almost no sunspots for decades, and it was a really dramatic period when we saw really cold winters in the northern hemisphere, where you had a kind of a mini-ice age.

“Rivers and canals froze across northern Europe….It wasn’t just the Thames that froze over. The Baltic Sea did too.

“Crop failures and famines were widespread across northern Europe.

“The sun does seem to be in a similar phase at it was during the run up to the Maunder Minimum,” says Lucy Green, at the Moloff Space Science Laboratory in the North Downs.

Fastest decline in solar activity in 10,000 years.

Professor Mike Lockwood says this is the fastest decline in solar activity in 10,000 years. “There’s a 20 percent probability that we could be back in Maunder conditions within 40 years,” says Lockwood.

Less solar activity seems to affect the behavior of the jet stream, says Lockwood. This ends up blocking warm air from reaching northern Europe, causing long, cold winters.

“Right now we’re at a peak of a solar cycle … but this solar cycle is eerily quiet.

“The number of sunspots is a fraction of what scientists expected.

“History suggests that periods of unusual ‘solar lull’ coincide with bitterly cold winters.

Are we on the cusp of the next grand minimum?

100 Year Snow Records broken across the South Eastern US on October 31st and November 01st

Are we on the cusp of the next Grand Minimum?

Watts Up With That?

It was the earliest and heaviest snow in several places since records have been kept dating as far back as 1880.

100 Year Snow Records broken across the South Eastern US on October 31st and November 01st. It was the earliest and heaviest snow in several places since records have been kept dating as far back as 1880. Reduced sunspot count shows Solar hibernation is occurring along with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) showing a cooling Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMO) Atlantic Ocean temperature is predicted to fall by 2020, which screams of cooling events to take place globally.
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h/t David DuByne

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