Inactive sun leads to prediction of colder winters

A new theory relating the sun’s changing activity levels to climate undercuts global warming alarmism and the Biden green programs. The theory’s prediction of colder winters over the next three decades takes on especial importance given the mid-February near-collapse of the Texan and German energy grids. When faced with an unexpectedly severe cold spell, they lacked the surge-demand reliability that an adequate reserve of coal and nuclear power plants affords.

by Richard Schulman

Will the next few solar cycles bring on the very cold winters of the 1645-1710 Maunder minimum? Mostly out of sight of the public – perhaps because the answer will profoundly undermine the trillion-dollar green programs being pushed by the Biden administration — this question is now being actively discussed and debated by solar scientists.

It’s important to get this question right, as was demonstrated recently by the deaths and near collapse of the energy grids of Germany and Texas when hit with an unexpected winter freeze in mid-February. If we are indeed entering a Modern minimum like its Maunder predecessor, there will be more such unexpected freezing spells. Grids will need to be made more resilient with coal and nuclear power plants to handle the surges in energy demand lest people and livestock perish, as just happened in Texas.

Sun and clouds more important for climate than CO2

There are many determinants of earth’s climate, some more important than the others. The most important determinant by far is the sun, bestowing life-giving light and heat upon earth. The second most important is earth’s awning, the clouds, which determine how much of the sun’s energies reach earth’s surface.

The fact that clouds are in constant flux is so familiar it has been seized on as the very image of change:

I am the daughter of Earth and Water
   And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores:
   I change but I cannot die.  

The sun also changes

Not so well known is the fact that the sun too is in flux. Its changes in luminosity, wavelength distribution, sunspots, and outbound plasma-streams wax and wane during solar cycles approximately eleven years in length (or twenty-two years when considered pairwise). Furthermore, the eleven-year cycles themselves wax and wane in intensity across approximately 350 to 400-year major cycles, as seen in the time series below.

Although the changes in luminosity within and between cycles typically measure only 0.1% of the sun’s total luminosity, that seemingly small change exerts profound effects on earth’s climate.

In 2020, the sun entered into cycle 25, characterized by low levels of sunspots and solar activity and an expectation of this continuing for the next several eleven-year cycles. This suggests that earth is entering a Maunder minimum type period with an expectation of significantly colder winters to accompany it.

Worse than Lysenko

The anticipated cold spell could prove embarrassing to the flacks in the major media and Democratic Party talking up the inevitability of a global-warming climate catastrophe if fossil fuel production and consumption aren’t halted, whatever the costs to the economy and standards of living.

Astonishing as it may seem, the physics of two primary determinants of earth’s climate — sun and clouds — is poorly incorporated into the climate models upon which the Biden administration’s trillion-dollar green-energy spending blowout is based. This is the greatest scandal in the history of science — an even greater scandal than Stalin’s promotion of the false genetic theories of Trofim Lysenko, which devastated agriculture and the study of biology in the USSR.

The green program of the Biden administration is based on a misguided attempt to explain the modest natural warming of the earth since the second half of the 19^th century as being driven by anthropogenic CO2 emissions from combustion of fossil fuels. It is furthermore claimed, especially by Democratic politicians and their media supporters (as opposed to most climate scientists), that unless fossil fuel use is reduced to zero within a few decades, runaway warming will destroy the planet and its species.

Like Lysenkoism, this is a false, politically-driven theory that is easily debunked, so easily in fact that its journalistic proponents must endlessly tell their gullible listeners that “the science is settled.” But to even utter that phrase is to identify oneself as an enemy of science, for the flourishing of the sciences have always depended upon evidence-based skepticism.

Far from the science being settled, a surprising number of scientific papers – over 400 in 2020 by one count – “support a skeptical position on climate alarm.”

The physics of clouds and the sun

The physics of clouds in relation to climate has been known for over two decades. It received a magisterial popular discussion in Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder’s 2007 book, The chilling stars: a new theory of climate change. But physics-based – as opposed to descriptive – studies of solar variance and solar cycles have only come into view in the past few years.

Valentina Zharkova and her colleagues have played a leading role in these developments. In her latest contribution, an editorial in Temperature, she unifies her theory of the physics of the sun’s cycles with Svensmark’s theory of cloud formation and makes predictions of likely temperature developments in the coming years. If these prove to be correct, the natural cooling produced by a solar Grand Minimum through the early 2050s will reduce the post 19th century warming trajectory to a negligible quantity.

A Modern minimum

Zharkova, who has a PhD in astrophysics and is a professor of mathematics at Northumbria University in the UK, writes that

[T]he Sun has entered into the modern Grand Solar Minimum (2020–2053) that will lead to a significant reduction of solar magnetic field and activity — like during Maunder minimum — leading to noticeable reduction of terrestrial temperature…

From 1645 to 1710, the temperatures across much of the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth plunged when the Sun entered a quiet phase now called the Maunder minimum. This likely occurred because the total solar irradiance was reduced by 0.22%… [T]hat led to a decrease of the average terrestrial temperature measured mainly in the Northern hemisphere in Europe by 1.0–1.5°C…This seemingly small decrease of the average temperature in the Northern hemisphere led to frozen rivers, cold long winters, and cold summers….

During this modern grand minimum, one would expect to see a reduction of the average terrestrial temperature by up to 1.0°C, especially, during the periods of solar minima between the cycles 25–26 and 26–27, e.g., in the decade 2031–2043…. This global cooling during the upcoming grand solar minimum 1 (2020–2053) can offset for three decades any signs of global warming and would require inter-government efforts to tackle problems with heat and food supplies for the whole population of the Earth.

A threat to people, livestock, and crops

The Express (UK) reports Zharkova as saying that

We can only hope that the [forthcoming] 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….

[I]t could lead to a food deficit for people and animals, as we seen in the past couple of years when the snow in Spain and Greece in April and May demolished the veggie fields, and the UK had a deficit of broccoli, and other fruits and veggies.

Contrary views in the “high-stakes” debate

Some of the scientists Express interviewed thought that any cooling effects from the solar minima would escape notice by being submerged in the ongoing global warming. Taking an even more oppositional approach, “a team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is predicting that the sunspot cycle that started this [past] fall could be one of the strongest since record-keeping began,” Phys Org reports.

Solar Physics sums up the debate: “Sunspot cycle prediction is a high-stakes business and has become a decadal event.”

The double dynamo

The double-dynamo solar theory put forward by Zharkova and colleagues is given a capsule summary in this 2015 notice in Science Daily:

It is 172 years since a scientist first spotted that the Sun’s activity varies over a cycle lasting around 10 to 12 years. But every cycle is a little different and none of the models of causes to date have fully explained fluctuations. Many solar physicists have put the cause of the solar cycle down to a dynamo caused by convecting fluid deep within the Sun. Now, Zharkova and her colleagues have found that adding a second dynamo, close to the surface, completes the picture with surprising accuracy.

“We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs, originating in two different layers in the Sun’s interior. They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different, and they are offset in time. 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.

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

Looking ahead to the next solar cycles, the model predicts that the pair of waves 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. Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other. We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum’,” said Zharkova. “Effectively, when the waves are approximately in phase, they can show strong interaction, or resonance, and we have 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.”

Implications

If Professor Zharkova and colleagues prove correct, this could be an important breakthrough for the so-called climate skeptics — the scientists and others who believe there is no scientific justification for alarmism over CO2 levels now and for the coming decades. This is because Zharkova’s theory of the physics and timing of solar cycles integrates well with the cosmic ray / solar activity / cloud formation theory of Professor Henrik Svensen and his collaborators. Thus, Zharkova in her recent Temperature piece writes:

[N]ot only solar radiation was changed during Maunder minimum. There is another contributor to the reduction of terrestrial temperature during Maunder minimum – this is the solar background magnetic field, whose role has been overlooked so far. After the discovery of a significant reduction of magnetic field in the upcoming modern grand solar minimum and during Maunder minimum, the solar magnetic field was recognized to control the level of cosmic rays reaching planetary atmospheres of the solar system, including the earth. A significant reduction of the solar magnetic field during grand solar minima will undoubtedly lead to the increase of intensity of galactic and extra-galactic cosmic rays, which, in turn, lead to a formation of high clouds in the terrestrial atmospheres and assist to atmospheric cooling as shown by Svensmark et al.

Physics-based theory, not parameters, please

Thus, the complex science of climate seems now to be taking a giant step forward by having physics-based predictive theories of the two key influences on earth’s climate — sun and clouds. This contrasts with the multitude of non-theory-based, parameter-tinkering models used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on which the Paris Agreement and the Biden green energy program are based. The averaged output of these models has repeatedly predicted temperatures that come in two degrees Centigrade higher than the subsequently measured empirical data. Serial tinkering with the model parameters hasn’t improved matters.

The great mathematician John von Neumann identified the problem. He had little respect for parameterized models as opposed to physics-based theories. As quoted by Enrico Fermi, he said: “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk”.

The IPCC models upon which the Biden green programs are based have many more than four parameters. Not only could they make an elephant wiggle his trunk – they could even make an advanced economy roll over and die. And will, if not stopped.