Just a comment here, as The Bad Astronomer reported before in his headline, that it was in 2011 that the idea that solar activity would counteract the warming caused by greenhouse gases was debunked. Several years and the headline is about the same now.
So, in short, Phil Plait says exactly the same things I said in posts #2 and #6. The work isn’t peer-reviewed and is highly speculative, Zharkova isn’t a climate scientist, and even if it were true it wouldn’t have much significance to climate change. What I find perhaps the most amusing is that the latter point is right in the paper’s abstract. If any of the media that published the “mini ice age” nonsense had just read a couple of sentences in the abstract, it would have told them they were publishing utter bullshit.
This thread should stand as yet another reminder of how horribly bad popular media coverage of climate change issues is, and why there’s so much misinformation about it. As I said, I wish I had a dime for every time this happens!
Ah, another “deep freeze” story! If this was intended to be sarcastic it’s great, because it’s actually another perfect example of the above. But if it’s intended to be taken seriously a few words are in order…
Any assumption that a Younger Dryas type event is going to send us into a global “deep freeze” is wrong on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin. But here are a few points.
[ul]
[li]Let’s first of all understand that climate change will continue to be responsible for a lot of regional changes – droughts in some places, floods in others, extreme weather, much higher temperatures in some places but possibly unusually cold ones in others. But all this is going on against a background of unnaturally rising average global temperatures. That’s why it’s called “global” warming, even if it’s not uniformly homogenous.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]The Younger Dryas occurred in conditions very different from the present day, when the earth was transitioning from the last ice age to the present interglacial, and was part of a series of rapid changes that occurred during that process. Among the many differences from today is that major circulation systems like the thermohaline were just starting to get established and were likely much more subject to disruption. Indeed, just a few thousand years after the YD, there was a similar freshwater influx that failed to disrupt the Atlantic MOC and had no such effect on climate.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Even so, the YD wasn’t a globally synchronous event, but was scattered mainly through the northern hemisphere more or less in proportion to latitude. The YD is invisible in paleoclimate reconstructions from Antarctic ice cores because it didn’t occur there – in fact the Antarctic was warming at the time. It is posited to have probably been caused by changes in ocean heat transports, which are internal processes rather than external forcings. The factors I mention in the above posts are external forcings – strong radiative forcings caused by GHGs, which add huge amounts of net new heat energy to the earth’s net energy budget – and in the present circumstances these are never going to be overtaken by purely internal processes which simply move heat around.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]There are also credible hypotheses that the YD was really nothing more than a pause between two rapid warming events called Dansgaard-Oeschger events that preceded and followed it as the earth recovered from the last glacial maximum. Yet even during the extraordinary circumstances of the YD, the drop in average global temperature between the two D-O events was significantly less than the GHG induced warming of even the last century. There is so much lag in temperature equilibrium for any given increase in CO2 due to all the feedbacks that even if we stabilized it tomorrow, the warming is barely getting started.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]The most important object lesson in the Younger Dryas, Dansgaard-Oeschger events, and other events like them is the fact that the climate system really does have tipping points that can lead to very sudden changes and, in fact, in the right circumstances of accelerating feedbacks, can lead to runaway climate change. Indeed, Dansgaard-Oeschger events are named after the late Hans Oeschger, the climatologist who first discovered evidence of climate tipping points in ancient ice cores, and whose discovery informed his views on the risks of anthropogenic climate change for the rest of his life.[/li][/ul]
I think the honest answer to the OPs honest question is …
No … although the double dynamo is an important discovery in the field of solar physics, it’s not particularly relevant to climate change. Sure, some very slight reduction in solar output would have a very slight effect on global warming. Sure, commercial media will pay people to say “The Ice Age cometh”. We’re just not seeing anything here that rebuts The Master’s claim “the next [glaciation] in all likelihood has been postponed until further notice.”
Hello what’s this ? Sun's activity controls Greenland temperatures -- ScienceDaily "The new research also suggests weak solar activity, like the sun is currently experiencing, could slowly fire up the ocean circulation mechanism, increasing the amount of warm water and air flowing to Greenland. Starting around 2025, temperatures in Greenland could increase more than anticipated and the island’s ice sheet could melt faster than projected, " No mini ice age in Greenland then.
:rolleyes:
Message boards are not “contemporary climate science.”
A short article by Berger and Loutre that suggests that the next glacial period might not occur for 50,000 years
http://campus.udayton.edu/~physics/rjb/PHY399Winter2007/Berger%20-%20Long%20Interglacial.pdf
I doubt that there will be enough fossil fuels available to extend AGW until that period.
Mind you, in 50,000 years time there might be a completely different type of global warming - waste heat from human civilisation in that era could be just as bad as CO2 forcings, or even worse.
Orbital mechanics is hard to understand. So many variations and considerations, but it’s there and it effects global temperatures directly.
As soon as I saw the paper hadn’t been peer-reviewed, my skepticism went to “Cold Fusion” mode.
How odd …
Fleischmann, Martin; Pons, Stanley (1989), “Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium”, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry 261 (2A): 301–308, doi:10.1016/0022-0728(89)80006-3
Cold fusion was published in a peer-reviewed publication … but point taken, Science magazine is better viewed as commercial media on par with SciAm.
The weather here is below 95° today and yesterday, and forecasted to remain so for at least the coming week.
The new Ice Age is upon us indeed!
They have also published peer-reviewed articles on the same subject, but I can’t find any which are free to view.
However it should be noted that Berger and Loutre are not skeptical about anthropogenic climate change; far from it. They simply think that we would probably not have a full glacial period for several tens of thousands of years, whether we were pumping CO2 into the atmosphere or not.
92ºF right now, which is completely normal … 28% relative humidity, which is triple anything remotely close to normal … impossible for continued human life; it might not kill us, but we’re gonna wanna be dead …
The results of a new model (that is very good at explaining/predicting the sun’s behavior) were presented at the National Astronomy Meeting, which is put on by the Royal Astronomical Society.
(The NAM 2015 also incorporates the annual UK Solar Physics (UKSP) and Magnetosphere Ionosphere Solar-Terrestrial physics (MIST) meetings.) It’s not like this new discovery is a matter of contention, and subject to peer review.
Of course one should be skeptical of wild claims with little or no peer review behind them. Like the claims made by the top experts in 2006,
Yes, that’s right. The experts (with no peer review) did predict the current solar cycle.
They predicted it completely wrong.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10mar_stormwarning/
You have to love the way it was put. “Who’s right? Time will tell. Either way, a storm is coming”
Of course that they were as wrong as it’s possible to be doesn’t bother most people.
You can even take a look back into the past and see how science works.
Predictions 2007! (not peer reviewed)
You can compare the graphics with Predictions 2015 to see why it’s good to be skeptical.
The real problem is that as soon as these “Mini Ice Age” headlines came out, 3/4 of the population said “See, scientists can’t make up their minds. They said ice age in the 70s, then global warming, now ice age again. They’re just guessing!”
Powers &8^]
Of course they’re just guessing, we’re not very good guessing four days out, let alone 4,000 years out …
The problem here is that this is silly because in reality the majority of experts did predict that warming was coming, even if aerosols were cooling the atmosphere back then.
As pointed many times before, the models of modern scientists (and it has to be pointed out that models are not the only reason why scientists are telling us what the excess of CO2 in the atmosphere is bound to do) like James E. Hansen came close to what took place, there was a lot of unwarranted criticism of “not being accurate enough” for deniers to dismiss the evidence. But the problem for deniers out there is that the guess was indeed a bit wrong about the most likely sensibility of how CO2 and other global warming gases was. Once the most likely sensibility was applied to the model it was found that Hansen would had predicted the current temperatures even better.
And that is why scientists like Hansen got the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and misrepresenters and small numbered contrarian scientists like Pat Michaels get bupkis.
This is the Straight Dope, as Chronos pointed out, we won’t know for sure what the average global temperature will be in 100 years for another 100 years.
But we will still be arguing about it.
Sticking with the context, what I have found is that in reality predicting solar activity is not a reliable enterprise, some scientists at NASA thought that they had it with a new theory, but they missed the mark. Now here is where the item from Zharkova (that once again she is not a climate scientist) gets silly.
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Since predictions of solar activity are not reliable it is really not reassuring that we should expect a big reduction in the solar activity on the next cycle.
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The slowdown in solar activity was pointed before as one of the important bits of evidence that points at CO2 and other greenhouse gases as the reason why we are observing the current increase in temperatures. (In other words the sun is not driving the observed increases now)
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But the most important item stands: Others that investigated how big this factor will affect the temperature of the earth reported many times before that it will not change things much.
We can not depend on an unreliable factor that is not going to change things much **if **it appears to save us from what we need to do. We have to control our emissions and we will have to spend a bit in adaptation.