Could A New Mini Ice Age Be Headed Our Way In Fifteen Years

Scientists Predict Mini-Ice Age Coming Soon

July 12, 2015 By Colleen Conley

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Oh, that pesky global warming.  Or climate change.  Or whatever the environmental Nazis (and the Pope) are calling it now.

The Earth could be headed for a ‘mini ice age’ researchers have warned.  And it has nothing to do with human activity.

A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles – and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out, leading to a phenomenon known as the ‘Maunder minimum.’

The last Maunder minimum occurred between 1646 and 1715, and caused London’s River Thames to freeze over.  We also know from historical documents that the earliest settlers in America endured particularly harsh winters as compared to today.

Predictions from a new model of the Sun’s solar cycles, 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, according to the results presented by Prof Valentina Zharkova at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.

The Sun has a pair of waves which vary in length and intensity during its 11 year “heartbeat.”  The waves will become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022.

During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity.

“In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun,” said Zharkova.

Zharkova says that the wave’s interactions will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other, leading to the next ‘Maunder minimum.”

Effectively, when the waves are approximately in phase, they can show strong interaction, resulting in strong solar activity.  When they are out of phase, we have solar minimums.

“When there is full phase separation, we have the conditions last seen during the Maunder minimum, 370 years ago,” she stated.

Zharkova and her colleagues have found that over the cycle, the waves fluctuate between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Sun. “Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97%,” said Zharkova.

They derived their model using a technique called ‘principal component analysis’ of the magnetic field observations from the Wilcox Solar Observatory in California.

The researchers examined three solar cycles-worth of magnetic field activity, covering the period from 1976-2008. In addition, they compared their predictions to average sunspot numbers, another strong marker of solar activity.

All the predictions and observations were closely matched.

What are the climate change Chicken Littles going to say about this? How is it possible that the earth and sun interact on their own, as they have for millennia, regardless of human activity?

H/T Daily Mail