Total Pageviews

Friday, August 21, 2015

Maunder Minimum - coldest climate in past 400 years


The Maunder Minimum is an unusual period from 1645 to 1715.

The Sun's surface had no heat-releasing magnetic storms.

It was also unusually cold on Earth.

The Maunder Minimum was part of The Little Ice Age.

The Little Ice Age was a period of several centuries with cool temperatures, before the current Modern Warming began in 1850.

The Earth had been cooler than usual for hundreds of years.

Since 1850, the Earth has warmed one or two degrees F. 

People with common sense cheer that slight warming.

People with ulterior motives use that slight warming as a foundation for false, scary claims that a global warming disaster is coming, unless everyone does as they say without question!

Most climate proxy studies had found many mild warming/cooling climate cycles like these.

Ice core studies identified them going back hundreds of thousands of years, with each full cycle averaging 1,000 to 2,000 years .

The Little Ice Age was from about 1300 to 1850. 
( It was identified in the Northern Hemisphere. There are not enough data to determine if the average temperature of the Southern Hemisphere was cooler than usual too. That's because the Southern Hemisphere is mainly oceans, and ocean temperature was not measured there in those centuries. ).

The Maunder Minimum was named by astronomer John Eddy in 1976.

In the 1890s English scientist E. W. Maunder and German scientist Gustav Spörer first noticed the 1645 to 1715 decline in solar activity.

Mr. Eddy double-checked those two scientists by looking through historical documents, going back to Galileo, to find all known visual observation records of sunspots.

He corroborated Maunder and Spörer's work.

Increased solar activity reduces the amount of cosmic rays that penetrate the atmosphere.

Cosmic rays affect cloud formation.

When the sun is stronger, fewer cosmic rays strike the Earth, causing less cloud cover in the lower atmosphere.

Less cloud cover means a lower percentage of incoming sunlight is blocked by clouds.

Less sunlight blocked by clouds means more solar energy reaches Earth's surface, making our planet warmer than you'd expect from just the small change in solar activity.

Cosmic ray variations can be verified by measuring carbon-14 formation.

Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope associated with living things that correlates with solar activity. 

Carbon14 is produced in the upper atmosphere when cosmic rays hit nitrogen-14 and convert it to carbon-14. 
.
John Eddy found that carbon-14 in tree rings also showed low solar activity from 1450 to 1540, a period ending a century before the Maunder Minimum began in 1645.

Eddy named that earlier period the Spörer Minimum.

He noted the Maunder Minimum and Spörer Minimum both happened during the coldest years of The Little Ice Age.

Most climate proxy studies say the Little Ice Age started around 1300 or 1350, so would include both the Spörer Minimum and Maunder Minimum. 

Note: NASA claims The Little Ice Age started in 1550, so their definition would not include the Spörer Minimum. 

There are 400 years of sunspot counts.

People also kept track of aurorae — up to 150 a year.

Aurorae tell us something about the strength of the solar wind. 

Great Britain was at an ideal latitude for observing aurora during the Maunder Minimum, and for 80 years there were almost no reports of auroras in Great Britain.

Careful observations were revealed by the surviving notebooks kept by scientists at the time. 
.
Many observers were looking for auroras, and recording “clear skies” in their notebooks day after day.

Back to today:
The Sun surprised scientists with low activity in the current Solar Cycle 24 -- almost no one predicted this. 

The previous five solar cycles had been unusually active, with so many sunspots they were called a "Grand Maximum".  

Solar Cycle 24's low solar activity was reflected in sunspot counts, solar magnetic field variations, modulation of cosmic rays, and interplanetary coronal mass ejections.   

Solar Cycle 24 also made it obvious sunspot counts in one 11-year solar cycle are not reliable for predicting solar activity in the next 11-year solar cycle.

Three English scientists developed a new method for predicting solar cycle activity***.

They looked at the Sun's solar background magnetic field (SBMF) in cycles 21–23, and found two principal components with opposite polarity, originating in the northern and southern hemispheres of the Sun.

Their predictions for the current Solar Cycle 24 have been reasonably accurate so far, and that cycle is nearly over. 

Their backtesting for Solar Cycles 21, 22 and 23 worked well.

They predict low solar activity in the next two solar cycles = a cool Earth.

In fact, they predict a big reduction of the SBMF in cycles 25 and especially 26 ... "possibly leading to a lack of noticeable sunspot activity on the solar surface lasting for a decade or two, similar to those recorded in the medieval period."

Most predictions of the future are wrong.

Predictions of the future are not even science.

But saying one expects the 11-year solar cycle to repeat is a very safe prediction.

And saying the Sun's activity varies is also a very safe prediction.

The only risky prediction here is claiming the Sun's magnetic field has predictable cycles too. 

We'll see -- there is no consensus on global warming.

These three English scientists have done far more important work than climate modelers, who play computer games all day, falsely demonize CO2, and have been making inaccurate predictions for 40 years, yet are still taken very seriously by all media sources with left-wing bias !

Real scientists don't play computer games and make wrong predictions about CO2 for 40 years. 

Many scientists study the only source of heat for our planet, the Sun, and its effect on Earth's climate. 

They don't get headlines in newspapers because their work can't be used by leftists to blame people for destroying the Earth.

"Global warmists" claim CO2 is the 'climate controller'.

But they never have a logical explanation for why the big ramp up of manmade CO2 after 1940 was accompanied by GLOBAL COOLING from 1940 to 1975, rather than warming !

"Global warmists" claim the Sun is not important when it comes to Earth's climate, but offer no other explanation for the unusually cold climate during the low solar activity Maunder Minimum period.

For many years the warmists used the now-discredited Michael Mann 'hockey stick chart' in a failed attempt to "hide the decline" (hide the Little Ice Age).  

The change in total solar irradiance (incoming energy from the Sun) seems small, but that doesn't mean the effect on Earth's climate has to be small.

There's strong evidence Earth's climate changes as solar activity changes.

There's virtually no evidence CO2 levels correlate with Earth's average temperature, except for a brief period from 1976 to 1998.

"Global warmists" have been bellowing about many different alleged 'coming environmental crises' since the 1960s ( DDT, acid rain, hole in the ozone layer, and many others )

"Global warmists" want to shut down economic growth by blaming people for a coming environmental catastrophe … which has been "coming" since the 1960s … but never arrives.

Changes of incoming solar energy can't be blamed on people.

Solar energy can't be controlled by new laws and new EPA regulations.

That's why "global warmists" don't care about the Sun.
The Astrophysical Journal, 795:46 (8pp), November 1, 2014:

"PREDICTION OF SOLAR ACTIVITY FROM SOLAR BACKGROUND MAGNETIC FIELD VARIATIONS IN CYCLES 21–23", 

by Simon J. Shepherd, Sergei I. Zharkov, and Valentina V. Zharkova 

Posted by at