A Winter Tale of Snow to Remember and Sun Long Ago



I wrote months ago about the coming mini ice age. Recently the reality of this cooling trend became mainstream news because of a new scientific study affirming it, and even more recently, the midwest decided to remind us of what mini ice ages might feel like. The reason for all of this is told here:


The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age. Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018, and the sun’s ultraviolet output has sharply dropped. New research shows that Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding. “We see a cooling trend,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold…. “The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum.” It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet. As 2018 comes to an end, the Thermosphere Climate Index is on the verge of setting a Space Age record for Cold. “We’re not there quite yet,” says Mlynczak, “but it could happen in a matter of months.”

That story was repeated and elaborated upon by The Sun in the UK in an article titled “DEEP FREEZE Long cold winter could hit space in months bringing record low temperatures,” which predicted the events that have just happened in the midwest and the UK:

A long cold winter could hit space in months bringing record low temperatures, NASA has warned. That’s the warning from a scientist who fears sunspot activity on the surface of our star has dropped so low that record low temperatures could soon set in.
The Sun
From there, the article proliferated on the Drudge Report and many other news sites. Then, this fact-checker said the story was just more fake news:

This fact-checker got several news outlets to correct a false story about a mini-Ice Age. The story warned of “long cold winter” that could bring record-low temperatures to Earth over the next few months…. Despite appearing in Fox News, two daily newspapers in the United Kingdom and at least 12 local radio shows, the claim is false — and its origin is a classic case of what Emmanuel Vincent likes to think of as media telephone.

Tell that to the City of Chicago and the upper midwest. Tell it to the UK. The story as it was originally told seems absolutely prescient now. It looks now like cooling of the upper atmosphere can create cooling down below.
Most of us recognized from our own experience that the earth felt like it was getting warming in the seventies and eighties and nineties, and we could see that glaciers were retreating rapidly. Now many of us feel by our same experience that the earth is actually cooling. We have had a few severe winters of late, and each one feels more severe than the one before.

As I write right now, the polar vortex has made its way to the Pacific Northwest, and snow is blowing sideways across the fields from the north. That’s not unusual for the mountain region where I live, but for the last three years winters have brought record snowfalls to parts of the Cascades.
So, what is normal? Can the earth be cooling when there are clearly more greenhouse gases now than back in the 1700s? It is cooling because the sun is going into a mini ice age event called a solar minimum in which the sun stops emitting solar flares, which means it stops bathing the earth’s out atmosphere in as much ejected radiation (and the heat that goes along with that).
The last time the sun settled into one of these reduced-activity cycles was back in the 1600s and 1700s. Benjamin Franklin was visiting France in those days, and the United States of America did not exist. That the earth was cooler in those decades of reduced solar flares is born out by numerous writings that talked about how the Themes would freeze over and other great winter-storm events.
Surprise! The sun is also a factor in the earth’s temperature, and the sun’s emission of energy changes on a about a 300-year cycle, which means the earth is going to cool for the next fifty to one-hundred years, despite greenhouse gases. It may not cool as much as it did in the 1600s, thanks to greenhouse gases. We may be glad for the short-term that we have a blanket of greenhouse gases to keep us warm.

At the same time, it may not be wise to squander the opportunity this gives us to set things right a rate that is not economically destructive because it also means the solar minimum will end; the sun will start slowly moving back toward a high level of solar flares, and global warming could become even more serious than it was in the cycle we just completed if we accumulate more of those gases during the minimum.

How cold can it get?

The Little Ice Age lasted from about 1645 to 1715. It was the deep-cold part of a cooling period where solar flares started to decline in about the year 1600, reached their minimum around the year 1700 and then began to rise again, reaching a new peak around 1775 and again in the 1950s.




The bottom of this period is scientifically referred to as the Maunder Minimum, named after scientists Edward and Annie Maunder, who observed only 50 sunspots (which result from solar flares) over a 28-year period at the bottom of that cycle. That contrasts to about 50,000 during an equal time period when the sun is at its solar maximum. It seems reasonable to infer the difference in how much radiation bathes the earth, creating auroras and energizing the earth, is huge.

A number of scientists believe the solar minimum has, at least, a minor effect on the average global temperature between the highs and lows of those cycles, so the idea that it can be part of a mini ice age is not fake news. I remember first reading about the idea being put forward by a mathematician in my home town two decades ago, and I found is belief, which was heretical at the time, to make a lot of sense. I’ve believed it ever since, and now that we can finally measure its effect on the thermosphere and feel the polar vortex depending further south each winter, I find the idea has even more credibility and is, at last, regularly appearing in numerous publications.