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A study by the University of California San Diego has claimed that by 2050, the Sun is expected to become cool. You might think “what’s the big deal,” but remember that this means the solar activities that create the heat of the Sun to sustain life on Earth may diminish. And the last time it happened was in the 17th century when the Thames River froze. Scientists call this the “Maunder Minimum”.
Physicist Dan Lubin at the university and his team studied the past event and concluded that we are in for a worse case. The Sun is expected to get much dimmer than last time and, in scientific terms, it is a “grand minimum” — a time period in the 11-year solar cycle when the solar activities are at the lowest point.
According to the study, titled Ultraviolet Flux Decrease Under a Grand Minimum from IUE Short-wavelength Observation of Solar Analogs and published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, this grand minimum will be 7 percent cooler than such periods from the past. [Emphasis added]
Scientists also said that the Sun might have another cooling period in a decade.
However, predicting a solar minimum or maximum is a challenge to scientists because of the non-linear characteristic of solar activities that happens every day. During a minimum cycle, though solar cycles still occur, the intensity is very low, while during a maximum cycle, solar flares go up and sun spews out billion-ton clouds of electrified gas into space. These two extremes can bring about some major global and regional climate changes.
The full article is HERE.
Looks like we are going to need all the anthropogenic global warming we can generate!
I found this very interesting paper on Jo Nova’s blog. Not sure I understand the details, but want to share with readers. I have always been puzzled by the apparent step function in global temperatures like the one that occurred in 1977. Is delay the answer?
Figure 1: Global temperature and 11-year delayed TSI, both 11-year smoothed, have mainly trended together. (For the composite TSI from standard sources replaced by Leif Svalgaard’s reconstruction)
For decades, people have been looking to see if the Sun controlled our climate but the message was perplexingly muddy. In the long run, solar activity appears linked to surface temperatures on Earth. (Solar activity was at a record high during the second half of the 20th century when temperatures were also high.) But when we look closely, firstly the solar peaks don’t exactly coincide with the surface temperature peaks, and secondly, the extra energy supplied during the solar peaks is far too small to do much warming. So how could changes in surface temperature be due to the Sun?
A few researchers noted an esoteric correlation of long solar cycles with lower temperatures in the next solar cycle, but mostly those papers were left on the shelf, ignored. Dr David Evans’ notch-delay solar delay theory can explain this odd pattern.
To unravel the connections David took a new approach which cleared out the dead-end complexity of the current climate research. Instead of trying to predict everything from a bottom up detailed approach, he worked “top-down”, treating the Earth as a black box, as a simple Energy-In-Energy-Out type problem, and used the kind of maths that makes modern electronics work. It was an odd combination of factors that came together: David would have to be the only professional modeller on Earth who has a high level PhD in Fourier transforms, experience in electrical engineering in Silicon Valley, and a science blogger as a wife to focus him on this problem (and raise barely enough funds to pay the bills while he worked — it’s been three years full time work now).
This was an Oooh-look-at-that moment. Eleven Years?!
The light in the darkness was this extraordinary pattern that turned up in the Fourier analysis. It lit up a strange path, and following it uncovered the papers that had been largely ignored. Suddenly the disparate observations which had made no sense in conventional models fitted the new theory.
The light on the new path was finding a “notch” filter (it’s a common garden-thing for an electrical engineer, but probably unknown to climate scientists). That notch filter was published here 18 months ago. With one minor proviso, almost all that work there remains intact, and stronger. The proviso is that at the time we thought the notch guaranteed a delay, but we now know that while notch filters can work with a delay, it’s not obligatory. That difference is mostly immaterial now, because the evidence found for a delay turned out to be so strong.
Full paper and discussion are HERE.
James A. Marusek has a long, long quest post at Watts Up With That on the future of solar cycle 25 HERE. I found some of the comments on the post most interesting and deserve your attention. Not everyone agrees with the author.
I predict that the intensity of Solar Cycle 25 will be fairly similar to Solar Cycle 24. I base this prediction on two observations:
1. The pattern seen in Solar Cycles 22 through 25 matches fairly close to the historical pattern seen in Solar Cycles 3 through 6. Refer to Figure 3. Solar Cycle 4 to Solar Cycle 7 corresponded to a period known as the Dalton Minimum. The Dalton Minimum was a time of minimal sunspots, a series of weak solar cycles; but it is not weak enough to be described as a Solar Grand Minima.
2. Solar cycles come in pairs. A solar cycle is in reality a half cycle. It takes two solar cycles to complete one full cycle. In one solar cycle, the magnetic polarity of the sun faces north and in the next it faces south. At the end of 2 solar cycles the sun is back to its original starting point. So they are two different sides of the same coin. The intensity of each half cycle is approximately equal.
In my opinion, the most interesting part of the upcoming solar cycle is the period of minimal sunspotsÅ rather than the period of maximum sunspots because the minimum represents the extreme, the primary actor that foreshadows weather events. When I compared this upcoming period of minimal sunspots with the corresponding period of minimal sunspots during the Dalton Minimum (between solar cycle 5 and 6), I made the following predictive observation. The upcoming period of minimal sunspots will extend from the winter of 2016/17 to the winter of 2024/25. This period is analogous to the similar Dalton Minimum timeframe from the winter of 1806/07 to the winter of 1814/15.
I predict this upcoming period of minimal sunspots shall be longer and deeper than the last one. The changes during this solar minimum shall be more pronounced than during the last solar minimum. These parameters include sunspot numbers, Average Magnetic Planetary Index (Ap index), Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) flux rates, heliosphere volume, the sun’s interplanetary magnetic field strength, solar wind pressure, solar Ultra Violet (UV) flux rate, Earth’s thermosphere volume, solar radio flux per unit frequency at a wavelength of 10.7 cm, and the latitude of Noctilucent Clouds (NLC) sightings.
The full scope of this long article is HERE.
Reduced sunspot activity has been observed and indicates the sun is heading into a 50 year reduced solar activity similar to what happened in the mid-17th century.
A team of scientists led by research physicist Dan Lubin at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego has created for the first time an estimate of how much dimmer the Sun should be when the next minimum takes place.
There is a well-known 11-year cycle in which the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation peaks and declines as a result of sunspot activity. During a grand minimum, Lubin estimates that ultraviolet radiation diminishes an additional seven percent beyond the lowest point of that cycle. His team’s study, “Ultraviolet Flux Decrease Under a Grand Minimum from IUE Short-wavelength Observation of Solar Analogs,” appears in the publication Astrophysical Journal Letters and was funded by the state of California.
“Now we have a benchmark from which we can perform better climate model simulations,” Lubin said. “We can therefore have a better idea of how changes in solar UV radiation affect climate change.”
Lubin and colleagues David Tytler and Carl Melis of UC San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences arrived at their estimate of a grand minimum’s intensity by reviewing nearly 20 years of data gathered by the International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite mission. They compared radiation from stars that are analogous to the Sun and identified those that were experiencing minima.
The reduced energy from the Sun sets into motion a sequence of events on Earth beginning with a thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer. That thinning, in turn, changes the temperature structure of the stratosphere, which then changes the dynamics of the lower atmosphere, especially wind and weather patterns. The cooling is not uniform. While areas of Europe chilled during the Maunder Minimum, other areas such as Alaska and southern Greenland warmed correspondingly.
Lubin and other scientists predict a significant probability of a near-future grand minimum because the downward sunspot pattern in recent solar cycles resembles the run-ups to past grand minimum events.
Wait, wait for it, here it is, the required global warming clamoring:
Thus, a main conclusion of the study is that “a future grand solar minimum could slow down but not stop global warming.”
The required statements in every climate study to assure publication.
Bottom line: Another grand minimum is coming, prepare for it!
The rest of the story is HERE.
The Next Grand Minimum 