Yet Another: Sun To Cause Cooling

New Scientist has fully been on board with the catastrophic global warming. Yesterday, they changed their tune:

The sun's activity is in free fall, according to a leading space physicist. But don't expect a little ice age. "Solar activity is declining very fast at the moment," Mike Lockwood, professor of space environmental physics at Reading University, UK, told New Scientist. "We estimate faster than at any time in the last 9300 years."
Lockwood and his colleagues are reassessing the chances of this decline continuing over decades to become the first "grand solar minimum" for four centuries. During a grand minimum the normal 11-year solar cycle is suppressed and the sun has virtually no sunspotsMovie Camera for several decades. This summer should have seen a peak in the number of sunspots, but it didn't happen.
Lockwood thinks there is now a 25 per cent chance of a repetition of the last grand minimum, the late 17th century Maunder Minimum, when there were no sunspots for 70 years. Two years ago, Lockwood put the chances of this happening at less than 10 per cent (Journal of Geophysical Research, DOI:10.1029/2011JD017013).

Little ice age

The Maunder Minimum coincided with the worst European winters of the little ice age, a period lasting centuries when several regions around the globe experienced unusual cooling. Tree ring studies suggest it cooled the northern hemisphere by up to 0.4 °C.
But Lockwood says we should not expect a new grand minimum to bring on a new little ice age. Human-induced global warming, he says, is already a more important force in global temperatures than even major solar cycles. Temperatures have risen by 0.85 °C since 1880, with more expected, according to the most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
If we accept Dr. Lockwood's assessment, then greenhouse gasses would become a very good thing -- preventing the mass starvation associated with major cooling!

Second, there is good evidence to believe the "tree rings" mentioned above underestimate the amount of cooling during the Maunder Minimum. There is a strong bias in climate science not to discredit the research surrounding the "Hockey Stick." My reading of the data was the Little Ice Age affected the entire planet not "regions" as stated above. I believe a repeat of the Maunder Minimum would cause more cooling than indicated above but that is educated speculation.

As we have discussed numerous times on the blog, more and more scientists are becoming concerned about the sun's behavior. We should be spending much more on solar research and less on worrying about greenhouse gasses. 

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