Sunspot activity on the surface of the Sun follows a well-known but little understood 11-year cycle. Activity rises and falls creating the so-called solar maximum and then a solar minimum. During a solar maximum, the Sun is more powerful and is littered with sunspots.
Conversely, when the Sun enters a solar minimum – which it did about two years ago – energy from our host star begins to lessen.
However, one expert has warned that the Sun will enter a period of “hibernation” this year, in what as known as a Grand Solar Minimum (GSM).
Prof Valentina Zharkova, from the department of mathematics, physics and electrical engineering at Northumbria University, warned this could cause global temperatures to drop by one degrees Celsius.
While that sounds like an insignificant drop, it could have major ramifications for the planet, including a slow down in agricultural production.
The expert added the Sun’s hibernation period could last for three decades, which will lead to wetter and colder summers.
Prof Zharkova told The Sun: “The Sun is approaching a hibernation period.
“Less sunspots will be formed on the solar surface and thus less energy and radiation will be emitted towards the planets and the Earth.”
“The reduction in temperature will result in cold weather on Earth, wet and cold summers, cold and wet winters.”
“We will possibly get big frosts as is happening now in Canada where they see [temperatures] of -50C.
“But this is only the start of GSM, there is more to come in the next 33 years.”
The last GSM, which comes around roughly every 400 years, came in the 17th century.
Research produced by NASA indicated during this last prolonged solar minimum the cooling temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were indeed exacerbated by that Maunder minimum.
In 2006, NASA said: “From 1650 to 1710, temperatures across much of the Northern Hemisphere plunged when the Sun entered a quiet phase now called the Maunder Minimum.
“During this period, very few sunspots appeared on the surface of the Sun, and the overall brightness of the Sun decreased slightly.
“Already in the midst of a colder-than-average period called the Little Ice Age, Europe, and North America went into a deep freeze: alpine glaciers extended over valley farmland; sea ice crept south from the Arctic; and the famous canals in the Netherlands froze regularly—an event that is rare today.”
During this period, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere on land and in the winter were reportedly 1.3C lower than yesterday leading to shorter seasons and ultimately food shortages in what NASA described as a “little Ice Age”.
Prof Zharkova said: “We can only hope that the mini ice age will not be as severe as it was during the Maunder Minimum.
“This would dramatically affect food harvests in middle latitudes because the vegetables and fruits will not have enough time for harvesting.
“So it could lead to a food deficit for people and animals, as we [have seen] in the past couple of years when the snow in Spain and Greece in April and May demolished they veggie fields, and the UK had a deficit of broccoli, and other fruits and veggies.”
Read rest at Express
This should not be a problem, according to what we are told today all we will need is more diesel cars to keep the temperatures up.
And restart the closed coal-burning plants to more rapidly increase the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
we can,t priduce much heat via vehicles to offset the big chill brought by the absence of sun,s energy.
I would like to see it snow on a bunch of the Global Warming/Climate Change screwballs i would like to see the look on their faces when it starts to snow on the very ones who predicted it would never snow again because of Global Warming/Climate Change
It would be great to see a period of cooling which should prove that the sun controls the earth’s temperature much more than CO2 does. However, this mini ice age has been just around the corner for at least 5 years now. One example of several: In June 2015 was this article on Climate Change Dispatch: “Met Office: Temperatures Could Plummet As Sun Enters Cooler Phase” During the same 5 year period, global average temperature are continuing to creep up even on data sets that don’t “adjust” the data. (Look at UAH data for just the last 5 years). I’m not sure how to explain the discrepancy. Maybe just a lag between solar activity drop and actual temperature drop?
We’ll need more and bigger solar panels.
The current solar minimum is the end of cycle 24, and in shift towards new cycle 25, some opinions that cycle 25 will be the lowest since records began. The cyclic period of approximately eleven years or so follows the last hibernation minimum, which was December 2008. Following that were in the UK the snowy cold winters of 2009, 2010 2011 and 2012. Climate is obviously controlled, as is life, by the sun and its centrality to a solar system giant “atom”, interactions of the large planets, cosmic rays, gravity, orbit shifts, axial tilt, etc etc. The Little Ice Age ended around the mid to late 1800s. By the 1930s it was warm with heatwaves and the dust bowl of America, then, the 1940s to 1970s warnings of a coming new little ice age, until it started to warm up a bit. Climate changes, we still know very little about it, though Greta, whose Swedish life is a product of what she condemns, claims to know all about it. at the end of his life, Jung warned of coming psychic epidemics. there is also a known sun cycle of around 206 years: back in the late 1700s and early 1800s, huge shifts in human affairs occurred, the French Revoltion, Industrial, American revolutions, Napoleonic wars, Romantic revolution. We and life are not separate from the totality of the sun system.
Temperatures are already plunging in Canada and when I checked this morning they say it was down to MINUS 50 in some part. Now I see from the latest report that it is MINUS 13 Centigrade in Quebec. This ties in with the graph in a page about Professor Valentina Zharkova’s report. So why on Earth do the Climate Alarmists ridicule her and try to make out that what she has found is false?
Zharkova’s models have been running at 97% accuracy whilst only 2 out of 150 Alarmist models have been anywhere near what is happening.
Even NASA have now predicted that the next Solar Cycle will be the lowest in 200 years.