The "Mini Ice Age" and the solar minimum

Following Facebook I have been vaguely aware of claims in the tabloid press about a new ice age starting in the 2030's. I have not bothered to follow it because even if it were true I would suggest that by 2030 human civilisation (if not the species itself) will be toast.

Here is the response from Guy McPherson:

"This shit about the mini ice age is so fucking ignorant and stupid it hurts. I'll address it for about the twentieth time today. And the last, if all goes well.

"The clathrate gun has been fired. There is no way the proposed mini ice age will significantly slow the heating.

"Every report I've read about this study misquotes it. Solar *magnetic* activity was evaluated. Media reports are claiming solar *intensity* will decline.

"The anticipated 60% reduction in solar magnetic-cycle magnitude translates to a climate forcing of -0.1 W/m2. That's equivalent to a decrease of 8 ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide. The atmosphere currently holds about 400 ppm CO2, with 350 ppm ultimately lethal to humans. Subtracting 8 ppm at this point is analogous to giving a blood transfusion to a dead man."

Speaking for myself, I have fairly successfully insulated myself from the worst of the nutcases.

Here are a couple of reports responding to the reports.

If you want to see the claims you can see them here - 

Earth heading for 'mini ice age' within 15 years

River Thames could freeze over in 2030s when Northern Hemisphere faces bitterly cold winters, scientists say

Media Reports The World Will Enter A ‘Mini Ice Age’ In The 2030s. The Reverse Is True.

Joe Romm

Think Progress,

13 July, 2015

U.K. tabloids, conservative media, and others are (mis)reporting that the Earth will enter a “mini ice age” in the 2030s. In fact, not only is the story wrong, the reverse is actually true.

The Earth is headed toward an imminent speed-up in global warming, as many recent studies have made clear, like this June study by NOAA. Indeed, a March study, entitled “Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change,” makes clear that a stunning acceleration in the rate of global warming is around the corner — with Arctic warming rising 1°F per decade by the 2020s!

Also, right now, we appear to be in the midst of a long-awaited jump in global temperatures. Not only was 2014 the hottest year on record, but 2015 is in the process of blowing that record away. On top of that, models say a massive El Niño is growing, as USA Today reported last week. Since El Niños tend to set the record for the hottest years (since the regional warming adds to the underlying global warming trend), if 2015/2016 does see a super El Niño then next year may well crush the record this year sets.

Whatever near-term jump we see in the global temperatures is thus likely to be followed by an accelerating global warming trend — one that would utterly overwhelm any natural variations such as a temporary reduction in solar intensity. 

A recent study concluded that “any reduction in global mean near-surface temperature due to a future decline in solar activity is likely to be a small fraction of projected anthropogenic warming.”

That’s true even for one as big as the Maunder Minimum, which was linked to the so-called Little Ice Age.

The “Little Ice Age” is a term used to cover what appears to have been two or three periods of modest cooling in the northern hemisphere between 1550 and 1850.

I know you are shocked, shocked to learn that unreliable climate stories appear in U.K. tabloids, the conservative media, and those who cite them without actually talking to leading climate scientists. Often there is a half truth underlying such stories, but in this case it is more like a nano-truth.

Last week, in Llandudno, north Wales, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) held Cyfarfod Seryddiaeth Cenedlaethol 2015 — the “National Astronomy Meeting 2015″ (in case you don’t speak Welsh). An RAS news release had this startling headline, “Irregular Heartbeat Of The Sun Driven By Double Dynamo.”

Okay, that wasn’t the startling part. This was: “Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645.”

CREDIT: WIKIPEDIA

Ah, but the word choice was confusing. We’re not going to have temperature “conditions” last seen during the Little Ice Age. If this one study does turn out to be right, we’d see solar conditions equivalent to the Maunder Minimum in the 2030s.

This won’t cause the world to enter a mini ice age — for three reasons:

• The Little Ice Age turns out to have been quite little.
• What cooling there was probably was driven more by volcanoes than the Maunder Minimum.
• The warming effect from global greenhouse gases will overwhelm any reduction in solar forcing, even more so by the 2030s.
  So how little was the Little Ice Age?
  The most comprehensive reconstruction of the temperature of the past 2000 years done so far, the “PAGES 2k project,” concluded that “there were no globally synchronous multi-decadal hot or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age.”
  
  
  
  Green dots show the 30-year average of the new PAGES 2k reconstruction. The red curve shows the global mean temperature, according HadCRUT4 data from 1850 onwards. In blue is the original hockey stick of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1999 ) with its uncertainty range (light blue). Graph by Klaus Bitterman.
  
  
  The Little Ice Age was little in duration and in geographic extent. It was an “Age” the way Pluto is a planet.
  
  
  Writing on Climate Progress, climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf noted the researchers “identify some shorter intervals where extremely cold conditions coincide with major volcanic eruptions and/or solar minima (as already known from previous studies).”
  
  
  That brings us to the second point: The latest research finds that what short-term cooling there was during the Little Ice Age was mostly due to volcanoes, not the solar minimum. As “Scientific American” explained in its 2012 piece on the LIA, “New simulations show that several large, closely spaced eruptions (and not decreased solar radiation) could have cooled the Northern Hemisphere enough to spark sea-ice growth and a subsequent feedback loop.” The period associated with the LIA “coincide with two of the most volcanically active half centuries in the past millennium, according to the researchers.”
  
  
  The cooling effect from the drop in solar activity during even a Maunder Minimum is quite modest. Environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli discussed the literature underscoring that point in a U.K. Guardian post from the summer of 2013, the last time the “Maunder Minimum” issue popped up.
  
  
  That brings us to the third point: Whatever cooling the Little Ice Age saw as result of the Maunder Minimum, it pales in comparison to the warming we are already experiencing — let alone the accelerated warming projected by multiple studies. That’s clear even in Pages 2k reconstruction above.
  Just last month “Nature Communications” published a study called, 
  
  
  “Regional climate impacts of a possible future grand solar minimum.” This found that, “any reduction in global mean near-surface temperature due to a future decline in solar activity is likely to be a small fraction of projected anthropogenic warming.” As with the Little Ice Age, any significant effects are likely to be regional in nature — and, of course, temporary, since a grand solar minimum typically lasts only decades.
  
  
  So, no, the Daily Mail is quite wrong when it trumpets, “Scientists warn the sun will ‘go to sleep’ in 2030 and could cause temperatures to plummet.”
  In actuality, what is going to happen in the business-as-usual emissions scenario (RCP8.5) is closer to the figure below, which plots “rate of change” of warming:
  
  
  
  Global rates of decadal temperature change over 40-year periods. Results are shown for: central climate assumptions (thick solid line), range due to uncertainty in aerosol forcing (grey shading), and range due to uncertainty in climate sensitivity (blue shading). The outer bounding cases are shown as dotted lines. The thin solid black line shows the historical rate of change using the HADCRU4 observational data. The vertical dashed line indicates 2014. Via PNNL.
  
  
  In the RCP8.5 scenario, the rate of warming post-2050 becomes so fast that it is likely to be beyond adaptation for most species — and for humans in many parts of the world, as I discussed here. The warming rate in the central case hits a stunning 1°F per decade. Arctic warming would presumably be at least 2°F per decade. And this goes on for decades.
  
  
  No Maunder Minimum can save homo sapiens from that catastrophic outcome. Only humanity can — by ignoring those who deny or mislead on climate science and instead taking aggressive action to slash carbon pollution ASAP.

This shit about the mini ice age is so fucking ignorant and stupid it hurts. I'll address it for about the twentieth time today. And the last, if all goes well.

The clathrate gun has been fired. There is no way the proposed mini ice age will significantly slow the heating.

Every report I've read about this study misquotes it. Solar *magnetic* activity was evaluated. Media reports are claiming solar *intensity* will decline.

The anticipated 60% reduction in solar magnetic-cycle magnitude translates to a climate forcing of -0.1 W/m2. That's equivalent to a decrease of 8 ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide. The atmosphere currently holds about 400 ppm CO2, with 350 ppm ultimately lethal to humans. Subtracting 8 ppm at this point is analogous to giving a blood transfusion to a dead man.

No, Earth is not heading toward a ‘mini ice age’

By Chelsea Harvey

A solar flare erupts on the sun’s northeastern hemisphere. Media coverage of research into a predicted solar minimum has indicated that Earth is heading toward another “mini ice age.” But climate scientists insist this isn’t the case. (NASA via AP)

Washington Post,

14 July, 2015

This week, warnings of an impending “mini ice age,” set to hit in the 2030s, have been circulating in the media. It’s a story that has caused shivers among the public, but there’s one problem: Climate scientists aren’t buying it.

The ice age idea got rolling last week when researcher Valentina Zharkova, a professor of mathematics at Northumbria University in England, presented some of her recent research into solar variations at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Wales. The presentation was based on a study she had published last year in the Astrophysical Journal, which presented a technique for understanding variations in solar radiation and made some predictions about how this radiation will change in the near future. Most notably, the research predicts that between 2030 and 2040, solar activity should drop significantly, leading to a condition known as a “solar minimum.”

[Why the Earth’s past has scientists so worried about sea level rise]

According to the research, solar activity at this time should resemble conditions last seen in the mid-1700s during a period known of low solar radiation known as the “Maunder Minimum.” The interesting thing about this period was that it coincided with a “little ice age” in Europe and North America — a time marked by unusually cold temperatures and bitter winters. Now that Zharkova and her colleagues are predicting another solar minimum coming up, media coverage has jumped on the idea that a modern “mini ice age” is in store.

It’s a dramatic idea, but it isn’t being embraced by many climate scientists, who argue that anthropogenic global warming — brought on by a human outpouring of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere — will far outweigh any climate effects that might be caused by the sun. As far as the solar variations go, “The effect is a drop in the bucket, a barely detectable blip, on the overall warming trajectory we can expect over the next several decades from greenhouse warming,” said Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, in an e-mail to The Washington Post.

However, the issue isn’t so simple for Zharkova, who is openly skeptical about the strength of anthropogenic greenhouse gases when compared to the influence of the sun.

On the one hand, Zharkova maintains that her research was not intended to make assumptions about the effects of solar variation on climate — only to lay out predictions about the solar activity itself. “What will happen in the modern Maunder Minimum we do not know yet and can only speculate,” she says. On the other hand, she adds, her gut assumption is that temperatures will drop as they did 370 years ago.

The reason, she says, is her belief that the sun is a bigger influence on earthly climate than the effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. “I am not convinced with the arguments of the group promoting global warming of an anthropogenic nature,” Zharkova says, adding that she would need to examine more research before she could take a clear stance on anthropogenic climate change. Given the right evidence, she says she might accept that human-caused climate change is a bigger factor — but her belief for the time being is that changes in solar radiation are likely to have a bigger influence on temperature changes on Earth, not just during times of solar minimum, but throughout history.

However, this belief is in direct contrast with much literature on the topic. Georg Feulner, deputy chair of the Earth system analysis research domain at the Potsdam Institute on Climate Change Research, co-authored a paper in 2011 specifically examining the effect a solar minimum might have on Earth’s climate. His paper, and subsequent related research has concluded that any solar-related temperature drops would be far outweighed by human-caused global warming. In the case of a solar minimum, such as the one predicted by Zharkova and colleagues, “The expected decrease in global temperature would be 0.1°C at most, compared to about 1.3°C warming since pre-industrial times by the year 2030,” Feulner wrote in an e-mail to the Post.

Complicating the matter further is the idea that the 17th century’s “little ice age” wasn’t even really the result of the solar minimum going on at the time. Feulner also authored another 2011 paper that concluded that volcanic activity was the major cause of a cooler climate during this time, rather than solar variations. The takeaway is that changes in solar radiation are unlikely to hold a candle to the climatic effects being brought about by human-related greenhouse gas emissions.

While Zharkova is one of a small minority of scientists who do not fully accept human activities as the greatest drivers of current climate change, she says she’s surprised at the media response her study has garnered. “I didn’t realize there would be such a strong response from the climate people,” she says, adding that she would need to repeat the calculations of mainstream climate scientists and examine the evidence herself to decide if she can accept their point that anthropogenic influences outweigh those of the sun.

So there may well be a solar minimum in store for the near future — but it’s still probably safe to put your scarves and mittens back in storage for now. Research in the area suggests that greenhouse gas-related warming, not solar variations, will be the dominant climate factor for many years to come.

Still, Zharkova cautions, there’s not much time left until her predicted solar minimum hits. “We have only 15 years to wait, so we’ll learn soon enough,” she says.