From BBC’s Paul Hudson It’s known by climatologists as the ‘Little Ice Age’, a period in the 1600s when harsh winters across the UK and Europe were often severe. The severe cold went hand in hand with an exceptionally inactive sun, and was called the Maunder solar minimum. Now a leading scientist from Reading University…
Guest post by Alec Rawls In an interview with NewScientist magazine, Imperial College professor of atmospheric physics Joanna Haigh scoffs at the idea that late 20th century warming could have been caused by the sun: Haigh points out that the sun actually began dimming slightly in the mid-1980s, if we take an average over its…
Mike Bromley writes in: BBC has the explanation for the European LIA… it wasn’t really an ice age at all. See this strange quote.
From the American Geophysical Union: Ultraviolet solar irradiance was low during recent solar minimum Solar irradiance, which varies with the 11-year solar cycle and on longer time scales, can affect temperature and winds in the atmosphere, influencing Earth’s climate. As the Sun currently wakes up from a period of low sunspot activity, researchers want to…
From the Institute of Physics More than 1 in 10 chance of colder UK winters As the Sun enters a period of low solar activity over the next 50 years, new research has calculated the probability of unusually cold winter temperatures occurring in the UK. Last year, the same group of researchers, from the University…
Guest post by Alec Rawls Andrew Orlowski at the UK Register has an anecdotal account of Downing College’s skeptics-vs-believers mash-up. Ace of Spades pulled the juiciest bit: In short, the day lined up Phil Jones, oceanographer Andrew Watson, and physicist Mike Lockwood, the latter to argue that the sun couldn’t possibly have caused recent warming.…
Guest post by Alec Rawls Solar physicist Sami Solanki and his colleagues at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research helped pioneer the use of cosmogenic isotopes from ice cores to create a proxy record for solar activity going back hundreds and thousands of years. Together with a group led by Ilya Usoskin at…
Guest post by Alec Rawls My first post on this subject remarked on the number of scientists who assert that late 20th century global warming cannot have been driven by the sun because solar activity was not trending upwards at the time, even though it remained at peak levels. To follow up, I asked a…
Guest post by Alec Rawls Study of the sun-climate link was energized in 1991 by Friis-Christensen and Lassen, who showed a strong correlation between solar-cycle length and global temperature: This evidence that much of 20th century warming might be explained by solar activity was a thorn in the side of the newly powerful CO2 alarmists,…