The “Maunder minimum” is a fancy-pants sciency phrase for a little ice age. A little ice age is a long period of weird weather where it mostly just gets colder for longer over a series of consecutive decades. These events are predicated on oscillations of total solar radiance, and solar or sunspot activity, which can be plotted, measured, and used to predict long term effects on climate based on previous solar activity in relation to recorded historical temperatures, observations, ice-core data–you know sciency stuff.
We’ve recently left one of those very active solar periods (when it got warmer), which even the scientists who write at Wikipedia refer to as a solar maximum. During the solar maximum, there was a lot of solar activity and the globe got warmer. After solar maximums you get the opposite, according to the science, which suggests a long period of colder temperatures–and more of those Polar vortex thingies.
Sorry if this is not the kind of “science” to which you Democrats are accustomed. Progressives prefer to get all Lifetime Network about the weather. Hiding emails about how you’ve been skewing data and keeping scientific papers that contradict your “settled science” from being published (probably to keep the government-funded millions pouring into your–for lack a of a better term ‘Research). To Democrats that seems like a more scientific method than actual science, but it’s not. The sun doesn’t care what you choose to believe. It’s gonna roll the way it rolls, and it appears to “rolling” toward the next Maunder minimum.
To back that up, I’ve included some actual science, from actual scientists, along with some”scary graphs” from their research which have the unpleasant effect of coinciding with actual global temperatures–as opposed to contrived hockey sticks by discredited frauds who made the data fit their desired outcome so failed politicians and two-bit hucksters could bilk armies of sheeple to amass their personal fortunes.
The text might be a bit difficult for progressives, mostly because it’s not in an email from the DNC. No one accuses anyone of being a racist or of hating women and children. And no one blames George Bush or Big Oil for anything, so this might be out of their depth.
But it makes perfect sense, which is all the Democrats will need to declare it a fraud and the work of hacks on the take, which is funny because that is an exact description of the people they claim are the true scientists who settled this when they predicted decreased snowfall, vanishing ice caps and glaciers, rising seas, more hurricanes, drought, and famine–right up until reality forced them to settle on exactly the opposite as proof of same.
When you make stuff up it is only natural to have to water-board your theory into meaning whatever it is we are seeing in the real world.
In the real world we have observations, weather, and global temperature patterns that match the evidence presented by solar cycles, we just left out the axegrinding, chest-pounding, Lifetime Movie version of climate science being peddled by the lefty-intelligentisa and their army of flying green monkeys.
(I did leave the snark in, but they deserve every ounce of it, and then some.)
Note: Seeing as this is actual science any change in the pattern of sun spot activity and or solar irradiance not predicted in the research will actually modify the results to produce new predictions, unlike AGW which is caused by everything no matter how ridiculous or contradictory the leaps required.
Here’s the excerpt from the “sciency stuff” I spoke of, with graphs from the same document to follow.
From early 1990s the values of both eleven-year and bicentennial components of TSI variations are decreasing at accelerating (at present) rate (Fig. 2), and hence a fraction of TSI absorbed by the Earth is declining at practically the same rate (e.g., Fröhlich, 2011; Abdussamatov, 2007b, 2009a, b). Average value of TSI in the 23rd cycle was by 0.17 W/m2 less than in the 22nd cycle. Smoothed value of TSI in the minimum between the cycles 23/24 (1365.24 ± 0.02 W/m2) was by 0.26 W/m2and by 0.33 W/m2 less than in the minima between cycles 22/23 and 21/22, respectively. However, forming from early 1990s long-term deficit of TSI (see Fig. 2) was not compensated by decrease in the emission of the Earth intrinsic thermal energy into space which practically remains on the same high level during 14±6 years due to thermal inertia of the World Ocean. Since the Sun is now entering a bicentennial long-term phase of low luminosity (e.g., Abdussamatov, 2004, 2005, 2007b;Penn and Livingston, 2010; American-astronomical-society, 2011) such energy imbalance of the system (E<0) will continue further for the next few 11-year cycles. As a result, the Earth as a planet will henceforward have negative balance (E<0) in the energy budget. This gradual consumption of solar energy accumulated by the World Ocean during the whole XX century will result in decrease of global temperature after 14±6 years because of a negative balance in the energy budget of the Earth. This, in its turn, will lead to the rise of Earth albedo, the drop of atmospheric concentration of the most important greenhouse gas – water vapor, as well as of carbon dioxide and other gases. Let us note that water vapor absorbs ~68% of the integral power of the intrinsic long-wave emission of the Earth, while carbon dioxide – only ~12%. As a consequence, a portion of solar radiation absorbed by the Earth will gradually go down together with manifestations of the greenhouse effect caused by the secondary feedback effects. The influence of the growing consecutive chain of such changes will cause additional decrease of the global temperature exceeding the effect of a bicentennial TSI decrease
Since the Sun is now approaching the phase of decrease of bicentennial luminosity on the basis of observed accelerating drop in both the 11-year and bicentennial components of TSI from early 90s, we can forecast its further decline similar to a so called Maunder minimum down to 1363.4±0.8 W/m2, 1361.0±1.6 W/m2 and down to a deep minimal level 1359.5±2.4 W/m2 in the minima between the cycles 24/25, 25/26 and 26/27, respectively (Fig. 3). Assuming an expected increase in the duration of the eleven-year cycles during the phase of decline of a bicentennial cycle (Abdussamatov, 2006, 2009a,b), we can expect the approximate moment of minimum between the cycles 24/25, 25/26 and 26/27 in 2020.3±0.6, 2031.6±1.2 and 2042.9±1.8, respectively. Under these circumstances the maximal smoothed for 13 months level of sunspot number in the cycles 24, 25 and 26 can reach 65±15, 45±20 and 30±20, respectively (Abdussamatov, 2007b, 2009a,b). Hence, we can expect the onset of a deep bicentennial minimum of TSI in approximately 2042±11 and of the 19th deep minimum of global temperature in the past 7500 years – in 2055±11 (Fig. 4). In the nearest future we will observe a transition (between global warming and global cooling) period of unstable climate changes with the global temperature fluctuating around its maximum value reached in1998-2005. After the maximum of solar cycle 24, from approximately 2014 we can expect the start of the next bicentennial cycle of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055±11. Thus, long-term variations of TSI (with account for their direct and secondary, based on feedback effects, influence) are the main fundamental cause of climate changes since variations of the Earth climate is mainly determined by a long-term imbalance between the energy of solar radiation entering the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere and the total energy emitted from the Earth back to space.
