Articles have been going around touting a possible "mini ice age" coming in 2030. The premise is that scientists have predicted a significant drop in "sun activity" (which I think means the number of spots, which are essentially tides of fire), leading to a condition known as the Maunder Minimum, which will therefore lead to significant drops of temperature on Earth, as evidenced by the rare freezing of the Thames river in the late 1600s which coincided with the last Maunder Minimum.
It doesn't help that news outlets are titling their articles with hyperbolae like "the sun will 'go to sleep' in 2030" or "the sun will become inactive" and so on. Climate skeptics have already rallied around this, pointing out things like "the Sun is also part of the climate" and "no wonder they renamed it from warming to change", and so on. Are they right? As usual, they are not.
For one, the freezing of the Thames river was a local condition. While it's true that didn't happen often and didn't happen again after, the flow of the river was altered (sped up) by the replacement of structures in the water about a century later. In other words, we removed the conditions under which the river could freeze. Summers were not any cooler (which we'd expect if the sun is emitting significantly less energy), nor were overall temperatures affected elsewhere in the world. Furthermore, the Maunder Minimum purportedly at fault started 50 years before the Thames froze. So, either it was unrelated, or it took 50 years for the effects to catch up. Either way, we're not gonna see an ice age in 2030 as a result of this.
Suppose for a second that global temperatures will drop significantly as a result of reduced sun activity. What then? if we continue to blanket the Earth in greenhouse gases, we'll roast that much more when the sun becomes "active" again. If we truly believe temperatures will drop, it's even more incentive to get our clean air acts together and use that as a boost towards mitigating climate change damage.
It doesn't help that news outlets are titling their articles with hyperbolae like "the sun will 'go to sleep' in 2030" or "the sun will become inactive" and so on. Climate skeptics have already rallied around this, pointing out things like "the Sun is also part of the climate" and "no wonder they renamed it from warming to change", and so on. Are they right? As usual, they are not.
For one, the freezing of the Thames river was a local condition. While it's true that didn't happen often and didn't happen again after, the flow of the river was altered (sped up) by the replacement of structures in the water about a century later. In other words, we removed the conditions under which the river could freeze. Summers were not any cooler (which we'd expect if the sun is emitting significantly less energy), nor were overall temperatures affected elsewhere in the world. Furthermore, the Maunder Minimum purportedly at fault started 50 years before the Thames froze. So, either it was unrelated, or it took 50 years for the effects to catch up. Either way, we're not gonna see an ice age in 2030 as a result of this.
Suppose for a second that global temperatures will drop significantly as a result of reduced sun activity. What then? if we continue to blanket the Earth in greenhouse gases, we'll roast that much more when the sun becomes "active" again. If we truly believe temperatures will drop, it's even more incentive to get our clean air acts together and use that as a boost towards mitigating climate change damage.
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