The Death of the Global Warming Myth

[American Patriot]

OMG! We're ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!

LOL

[MinutemanCO]

The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/eart...ndal-ever.html
New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institutefor Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea iceyears” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.

One of the first examples of these “adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in 1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate activist) who for many years ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than at anytime since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog post, “Temperature adjustments transform Arctic history”, Giss has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures from that time have been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed by those of the past 20 years.

Homewood’s interest in the Arctic is partly because the“vanishing” of its polar ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.

Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

[American Patriot]

Ok...

let's ask some questions.

1) Who had access to the data?

2) What are their connections to Left or Right politically?

3) What did they have to GAIN from making adjustments?

4) Are they STILL working for the US Government? (If so, what offices?)

5) Do they still have access to data to change it?

6) Were they paid to do this? (If so, by whom?)

7) Time to prosecute the offenders.

[American Patriot]

24 February 2015 Last updated at 12:25

Profile: Climate chief Rajendra Pachauri

Dr Pachauri has chaired the UN's climate panel since 2002
Continue reading the main story

Rajendra Pachauri has stepped down as the chairman of the UN's panel on climate change, a position he has held since 2002. He had to pull out of a meeting in Kenya this week amid sexual harassment allegations he denies.


Dr Pachauri was born on 20 August 1940 in the Nainital district of India.


Privately educated in Lucknow, he went on to study mechanical engineering. After working in management at an Indian railway company, he pursued an academic career in the US, where he held teaching posts.


In the 1990s, Dr Pachauri began working in various capacities for the United Nations (UN) and helped with the research that led to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.


By 2002, he had been elected to chair the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the world's authority on climate science - replacing the British scientist Robert Watson.
Dr Pachauri was the favoured candidate of the US Bush administration, which reportedly disliked Dr Watson's willingness to tell governments what he believed to be the unvarnished truth - that human activities were contributing dangerously to climate change.
Honours and awards The Indian chairman has been honoured for his work on climate change with state awards in India and France.
And in 2007, he collected the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded jointly to the IPCC and Al Gore.
He was re-elected to the chairman's role in 2008 and presided over the panel's landmark fifth assessment of climate risks and causes in 2013 and 2014.
He had already been due to stand down in October this year - before the allegations surfaced.
His biography says he relaxes by composing poetry and playing cricket.
But despite the plaudits for the UN panel's work, Dr Pachauri's tenure has been marked by periods of controversy.
A prolific writer of academic reports, he raised eyebrows in January 2010 with the publication of a steamy novel about an Indian climate expert's life and times in India, Peru and the US.
In 2010, he faced calls to resign over a mistaken claim in one of the IPCC's assessments that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.
Learning from mistakes The error came to light amid the "Climategate" affair, in which hacked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit were released on to the web.
Following the controversy, he said the organisation had to learn from recent criticisms and modernise its workings.
"We have to listen and learn all the time and evolve in a manner that meets the needs of society across the world," Dr Pachauri said.
However, he stood by the panel's basic conclusions and denied that the controversy surrounding his position was distracting from the IPCC's work.
Dr Pachauri also dismissed UK press allegations that he has made a fortune from carbon trading thanks to links between private companies and the Delhi-based think-tank Teri, of which he was chief executive.
Any money he earned from advising companies went to Teri, he said, adding: "Not a single penny goes into my pocket."

[American Patriot]

This could be called "How to lie about Global Warming"

How to talk about climate change

Event to address communication challenges — and opportunities for MIT to help overcome them.

Jessica Fujimori | MIT News correspondent
March 30, 2015



On Tuesday, March 31, MIT students, faculty, staff, and administrators will gather for an interactive panel discussion about challenges in communication around climate change.


The event, titled “Getting Through on Global Warming: How to Rewire Climate Change Communication,” will be held from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in Room E51-115, and will be webcast live. It is the third of four open-forum spring events that are part of the MIT Climate Change Conversation, and the first to focus specifically on communication.


“It has become clear that a major bottleneck in the current inability to make progress in attacking climate change has to do with communication,” says Roman Stocker, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and chair of the Committee on the MIT Climate Change Conversation.

“The input we obtained from the MIT community identified this topic as a priority and highlighted the need for better communication at multiple levels.”


Tuesday’s conversation will center on perceptions about climate change, how the subject is discussed, and how changes to the way it’s discussed could inspire action.


“There’s a consensus that this is a serious issue, that the climate change threat is significant, but there’s a lot of inattention, or apathy, or division around this topic in general,” says Anne Slinn, the executive director for research at the MIT Center for Global Change Science and a member of the Committee on the MIT Climate Change Conversation. “Really what we’re looking at is: What can MIT as an institution do? How can we advance the level of discussion around this topic, locally and nationwide?”


The event will feature a panel discussion followed by a discussion with the audience, wherein participants can ask questions of panelists and give input via email or text message.


Panelists at the Tuesday event will include MIT professors Kerry Emmanuel (Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences), Judy Layzer (Department of Urban Studies and Planning), Tom Levenson (Comparative Media Studies / Writing), and Drazen Prelec (MIT Sloan School of Management).

Joining the conversation from outside the Institute are Chris Mooney, a journalist for who writes about global warming for the Washington Post, and Susan Hassol, director of the organization Climate Communication, which works with scientists and journalists to make climate science more accessible to the public. The discussion will be moderated by John Durant, director of the MIT Museum.


The committee encourages community members to submit questions and topics of discussion prior to the event by emailing climatechange@mit.edu. Participants can also send questions and comments via email and text message during the event.


From Tuesday’s event, the committee hopes that attendees leave with “an awareness, but also hope, in the sense that there is a way around the issue: If we recognize the problem, we can come up with solutions,” Slinn says. “Some [solutions] might be as easy as saying things in different ways — if we focus on things we have in common, as opposed to what pushes us apart.”

[MinutemanCO]

“It has become clear that a major bottleneck in the current inability to make progress in attacking climate change has to do with communication,” says Roman Stocker, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and chair of the Committee on the MIT Climate Change Conversation.

No. It has everything to do with the fact that the theory is utter nonsense and without foundation.

I guess that's never stopped a lefty in the past. Why would a lack of proof slow them down now?

[American Patriot]

That's always been my problem with this whole thing.

Even when I was a young kid in school in the 1970s and they had this whole "global cooling" mantra going on I questioned it.

When the flip flop occurred - I think it was in the 80s, but honestly, I can't remember now - I think I noticed it right after joining the military, there was no fan fare.

It just happened.

Either way, I've always questioned this "science" and how they come up with explaining some of the crap.

I have always studied science, all of it. Earth sciences, meteorology, geology, astronomy, and on and on. What I find amazing and stupid is that there are "experts" in this or that field who have little clue about other fields.

So.... if you don't understand astrophysics and know the sun does what it does, this makes it difficult to equate the changes occurring with the sun, which then affect the Earth with how the ozone "hole" gets bigger and smaller.

The very FACT that someone doctored some notes, made some changes to some data and presented it as fact completely nullifies ANY findings from the last 3 decades when it comes to "global warming" and temp changes.

No, it's not about communication. He is hiding his real thinking and should have just said, "We're not lying properly".

[MinutemanCO]

What amazes me (and is ceasing to amaze me as time goes by with the public exemplifying absolutely idiotic, ignorant behavior over and over again) is that the populace eats this stuff up without lifting one finger to verify the science. Rather than realizing that like any dynamic system, albeit very complex, temperatures fluctuate globally with the application of various physical influences. Temps have been doing it since the initiation of recorded history with no help from non-point-source, human-caused pollution and are provable through millennia.

[American Patriot]

In addition to what you said, we've had volcanic activity that causes global fluctuations throughout history as well. Those are mostly proven facts.

As far as education goes... look at the source. Public school systems that have been taken over by left leaning, Progressive-Marxists who feel it best to indoctrinate the children into a Socialist behavior pattern instead of teaching them how to truly think for themselves.

Instead, they indoctrinate children into believing in "global warming" and "Republicans are inherently evil because they discriminate" or "caused slavery". Remember, we're talking about youngsters whose minds are pliable and willing to suck up any information they are given. If given the wrong data over and over it becomes "fact" to them.

When I was in HS I remember a specific teach RAILING against religion. I remember another who was an absolute believer in the Socialistic methods. In fact, that very teach essentially forced me to write on the virtues of Socialism (we each had a paper to do, I happened to miss that particular day the assignment was given and everyone else got to choose their topic. I was GIVEN Socialism, do it or fail...).

So, I wrote the paper extolling the virtues of Socialism. It was a 10 page paper. On the last three paragraphs I ripped APART Socialism and concluded that on the surface Socialism appeared to be the best of all economic systems, except for these things; and I listed a dozen problems with it.

I got an F on the paper. I did, eventually get the grade reversed, but it took going to the school board to do so. The final grade was upped to an A "due to the concise argument in comparison and contrasting Socialism's pros and cons" (Or words to that effect). lol

I guess what I am getting at is we're doomed as a nation. NOT because we're white, Republican, religious, discriminating (or not), exceptional (or not). We're DOOMED as a nation because we've allowed an evil to permeate our political offices all the way to the Presidency. We are weak in not removing those too weak to lead. We are broken because the children (and those who are under 40 actually) have been, essentially, brainwashed to believe they are OWED something by society (Society being white, middle class tax payers, the rich and corporations).

Our children are lost.

Those who stand up to the nonsense are beaten up in public, whether by real fists or the fists of words, by verbal bullies.

There is little to do but watch as the village burns and the evil rapes and pillages what's left.

We can't save the children. We can't save ourselves from leaders who are wrong and weak. We can't save America from doom because it requires a response that is akin to the Evil itself, and most do not have it in themselves to stand up and fight.

We fight the little things, like this nonsense of global warming, where we can use logic and reason to assist us. But the evil in the offices?

I'll leave others to find that answer.....

[Ryan Ruck]

Scientists Say New Study Is A ‘Death Blow’ To Global Warming Hysteria

March 31, 2015

A new study out of Germany casts further doubt on the so-called global warming “consensus” by suggesting the atmosphere may be less sensitive to increases in carbon dioxide emissions than most scientists think.

A study by scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology found that man-made aerosols had a much smaller cooling effect on the atmosphere during the 20th Century than was previously thought. Why is this big news? It means increases in carbon dioxide emissions likely cause less warming than most climate models suggest.

What do aerosols have to do with anything? Well, aerosols are created from human activities like burning coal, driving cars or from fires. There are also natural aerosols like clouds and fog. Aerosols tend to reflect solar energy back into space, giving them a cooling effect that somewhat offsets warming from increased CO2 emissions.

The Max Planck study suggests “that aerosol radiative forcing is less negative and more certain than is commonly believed.” In layman’s terms, aerosols are offsetting less global warming than was previously thought. And if aerosols aren’t causing as much cooling, it must mean carbon dioxide must be causing less warming than climate models predict.

“Going forward we should expect less warming from future greenhouse gas emissions than climate models are projecting,” write climate scientists Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger with the libertarian Cato Institute, adding that this study could be a “death blow” to global warming hysteria.

Independent climate researcher Nick Lewis put out a study last year with Georgia Tech’s Dr. Judith Curry that found that the climate’s response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels — a measurement called “climate sensitivity” was 1.64 degrees Celsius.

Lewis revised his findings based on the Max Planck aerosol study and found something astounding: climate sensitivity drops dramatically. Lewis also looked at climate sensitivity estimates given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — often regarded as the world’s top authority on global warming.

The IPCC’s latest assessment put climate sensitivity between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius. The IPCC says that despite “the large uncertainty range, there is a high confidence that aerosols have offset a substantial portion of [greenhouse gas] global mean forcing.”

Basically, the IPCC says aerosols deflect a lot of warming — the opposite of the Max Planck study’s finding.

But incorporating the results from the Max Planck study dramatically reduces the upper bound estimate of climate sensitivity from 4.5 degrees to 1.8 degrees Celsius.

To put this into perspective, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 currently stand at around 400 parts per million, if this were to double, according to the IPCC’s estimates temperatures could rise as high as 4.5 degrees Celsius.

But incorporate the Max Planck study results and warming would only be as high as 1.8 degrees Celsius — less than half what the IPCC originally predicted.

Michaels and Knappenberger say Lewis’s findings basically eliminate “the possibility of catastrophic climate change—that is, climate change that proceeds at a rate that exceeds our ability to keep up.”

“Such a result will also necessarily drive down estimates of social cost of carbon thereby undermining a key argument use by federal agencies to support increasingly burdensome regulations which seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” write Michaels and Knappenberger.

[American Patriot]

Huh! Imagine that.... Globullshit Warming isn't real.

Climate CHANGE is real, but it ain't global warming.

Climate change is caused by.... THE SUN. Morons.

[Ryan Ruck]

There's so much global warming it's 46 outside right now and I just had to turn on the furnace.

There's a frost advisory and forecast low is going to be 29!

It's almost May... Oh well, guess this will help kill off some insects!

Interestingly I haven't seen any planting going on in the fields around my place. Don't know if it's because the soil is too wet or the ground temperature is too cold, or a combination of both.

[American Patriot]

[American Patriot]

[Ryan Ruck]

Freeze warning for us tonight.

[Ryan Ruck]

June 1st and it is currently 58 degrees outside in the middle of the afternoon. A low of 49 predicted tonight.

So how's that global warming stuff work again?

[Ryan Ruck]

A Taste of Winter on Memorial Day Weekend

May 23, 2015

The start to the Memorial Day weekend, which is the traditional start to summer, was greeted with a reminder of winter in some areas of northern New England.

Snow came down heavy at times Saturday morning in northern New England. Visibility dropped to a quarter mile at times due to the heavy snow.

The snow was due to a cold upper-level low that moved through the region. Light rain changed to snow in spots early Saturday morning as temperatures continued to plummet. High temperatures on Friday afternoon reached the 50s and 60s but dropped to the 30s and 40s by sunrise on Saturday.

Below is a picture from Portage Lake, in northern Maine, from Saturday morning.

Portage Lake, ME right now. Even for Maine this is kinda messed up. #MemorialDayWeekend (HT @TomMooreTWC) pic.twitter.com/F4ljI6fjoT

— Keith Carson (@KeithCarson) May 23, 2015

One inch of snow accumulated in Presque Isle, Maine and 5.2 inches was reported near Portage, Maine.

The snow this morning is the second latest measurable snow on record in Caribou, Maine. The latest measurable snowfall in Caribou is 0.2 inches on May 25, 1974.

The snow is getting heavier! Hard to believe it is the start of Memorial Day Weekend. #mewx #snow pic.twitter.com/YpX3FNYFaf

— NWS Caribou (@NWSCaribou) May 23, 2015

Chilly Start to the Holiday Weekend

Temperatures dropped into the 30s for parts of northern New England and Upstate New York on Saturday morning as high pressure moved into the region from Canada. Frost and freeze warnings were issued for Friday night and Saturday morning across portions of the Northeast.

A record low was even set in Glens Falls, New York when the temperature fell to 31 degrees.

It was even colder on Mount Washington in New Hampshire where temperatures bottomed out at 10 degrees with a wind chill of 18 degrees below zero when a wind gust of 68 mph was reported. Snow was also reported here overnight.

It will remain cool during the afternoon, with high temperatures up to 10 degrees below where they should be for this time of year. Winds will be gusty at times which will make if feel even cooler.

The good news is that this will not last long as a significant warming trend is on the way. Northern New England will go from winter on Saturday morning to summer by Monday.

Skiing for Memorial Day

If you are not quite ready for summer activities yet and have not put your skis away then you may be in luck. Parts of the Rockies and Sierra Mountains have also seen snow recently, which is allowing a few resorts to stay open for skiing this holiday weekend.

Arapahoe Basin in Colorado is open this Memorial Day weekend and has more base to ski on than they did in March. They also reported some fresh snow on Saturday morning.

Mammoth Mountain in California will also be open this Memorial Day weekend due to snow that fell last week. They are offering a ski, bike and golf package.

[Ryan Ruck]

NOAA Fiddles With Climate Data To Erase The 15-Year Global Warming ‘Hiatus’

June 4, 2015

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists have found a solution to the 15-year “pause” in global warming: They “adjusted” the hiatus in warming out of the temperature record.

New climate data by NOAA scientists doubles the warming trend since the late 1990s by adjusting pre-hiatus temperatures downward and inflating temperatures in more recent years.

“Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s [National Centers for Environmental Information] do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus,'” wrote NOAA scientists in their study presenting newly adjusted climate data.

To increase the rate in warming, NOAA scientists put more weight on certain ocean buoy arrays, adjusted ship-based temperature readings upward, and slightly raised land-based temperatures as well. Scientists said adjusted ship-based temperature data “had the largest impact on trends for the 2000-2014 time period, accounting for 0.030°C of the 0.064°C trend difference.” They added that the “buoy offset correction contributed 0.014°C… to the difference, and the additional weight given to the buoys because of their greater accuracy contributed 0.012°C.”

NOAA says for the years 1998 to 2012, the “new analysis exhibits more than twice as much warming as the old analysis at the global scale,” at 0.086 degrees Celsius per decade compared to 0.039 degrees per decade.

“This is clearly attributable to the new [Sea Surface Temperature] analysis, which itself has much higher trends,” scientists noted in their study. “In contrast, trends in the new [land surface temperature] analysis are only slightly higher.”

Global surface temperature data shows a lack of statistically significant warming over the last 15 years — a development that has baffled climate scientists. Dozens of explanations have been offered to explain the hiatus in warming, but those theories may be rendered moot by NOOA’s new study.

NOAA’s study, however, notes the overall warming trend since 1880 has not been significantly changed. What’s increased is the warming trend in recent decades.

“Our new analysis now shows the trend over the period 1950-1999, a time widely agreed as having significant anthropogenic global warming, is 0.113 [degrees Celsius per decade], which is virtually indistinguishable with the trend over the period 2000-2014″ of 0.116 degrees per decade, according to the study.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “statement of two years ago — that the global surface temperature has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years’ — is no longer valid,” the study claims.

But that’s not all NOAA did to increase the warming trend in recent decades. Climate expert Bob Tisdale and meteorologist Anthony Watts noted that to “manufacture warming during the hiatus, NOAA adjusted the pre-hiatus data downward.”

“If we subtract the [old] data from the [new] data… we can see that that is exactly what NOAA did,” Tisdale and Watts wrote on the science blog Watts Up With That.

“It’s the same story all over again; the adjustments go towards cooling the past and thus increasing the slope of temperature rise,” Tisdale and Watts added. “Their intent and methods are so obvious they’re laughable.”

NOAA’s updated data was also criticized by climate scientists with the libertarian Cato Institute. Scientists Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger argue the adjustments made by NOAA were “guaranteed to put a warming trend in recent data.”

Cato scientists also argued that NOAA’s new data is an outlier compared to other global temperature records, which overwhelmingly show a hiatus in warming.

It “would seem more logical to seriously question the [NOAA] result in light of the fact that, compared to those bulk temperatures, it is an outlier, showing a recent warming trend that is not in these other global records,” the three scientists wrote.

“Adjusting good data upwards to match bad data seems questionable, and the fact that the buoy network becomes increasingly dense in the last two decades means that this adjustment must put a warming trend in the data,” wrote Michaels, Knappenberger and Lindzen, who is a top climatologist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists and climate experts skeptical of man-made global warming have become increasingly critical of temperature adjustments made by government climate agencies like NASA and NOAA. Skeptics charge that agencies like NOAA have been tampering with past temperatures to make the warming trend look much more severe than is shown in the raw data.

“It is important to recognize that the central issue of human-caused climate change is not a question of whether it is warming or not, but rather a question of how much,” they wrote. “And to this relevant question, the answer has been, and remains, that the warming is taking place at a much slower rate than is being projected.”

Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry also chimed in, arguing that NOAA excluded extremely accurate sea buoy data in order to erase the hiatus in warming. Curry wrote that it “seems rather ironic, since this is the period where there is the greatest coverage of data with the highest quality of measurements — ARGO buoys and satellites don’t show a warming trend.”

“Nevertheless, the NOAA team finds a substantial increase in the ocean surface temperature anomaly trend since 1998,” she wrote. “This short paper in Science is not adequate to explain and explore the very large changes that have been made to the NOAA data set. The global surface temperature datasets are clearly a moving target. So while I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.”

[Malsua]

When they outright have to just change the numbers, the game is over. Inertia will drive this forward for some time but their cause is not science but pure science fiction.

[Ryan Ruck]

Weak Sun Could Offset Some Global Warming In Europe And US – Study

Regional impact of a weaker solar cycle likely to be larger than global effect, with only minimal impact on worldwide temperature rises caused by climate change

June 23, 2015

Global warming in northern Europe and the eastern US could be partially offset in future winters because of the sun entering a weaker cycle similar to the one which enabled frost fairs to take place on the river Thames in the 17th and 18th century, according to new research.

However, the study said any potential weakening in solar activity would have only a small effect on temperature rises at a worldwide level, delaying the warming caused by emissions from cars, factories and power plants by around two years.

The sun has been in a period of high activity for the past few decades. But scientists believe there is now as much as a 20% chance of a weaker period of activity, known as a grand solar minimum, occurring in the next 40 years.

“Even if you do go into Maunder minimum conditions it’s not going to combat global warming, the sun’s not going to save us,” said lead author Sarah Ineson at the Met Office. The Maunder minimum is the name for the sun’s weak period during 1645-1715, when the Thames froze solidly enough for eyewitnesses to report horse-driven carriages crossing it.

Climate change means such sights in the second half of the century would not occur, since the sun’s cooling effect would only reduce manmade temperature rises in northern Europe and the eastern US by 0.4-0.8C. Such offsetting was not a “large signal”, Ineson said, although the study found there would be more frosty days in those regions than there would be without the weaker solar activity.

Solar Minimum Effect

What a grand solar minimum means for climate change in Europe
Temperature change relative to 1971 – 2000, °C

Warming under a business-as-usual scenario without big carbon cuts
Warming with the lowest level of cooling if weaker solar activity occurs and
no big carbon cuts
Warming with the highest level of cooling if weaker solar activity occurs and
no big carbon cuts




Northern Europe and the eastern US would experience a much stronger cooling effect from a weaker period of the sun’s activity than other areas because less ultraviolet solar energy at the top of the stratosphere would cause a chain reaction which would affect the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The NAO is a climate phenomenon which plays a key role in influencing winter weather on both sides of the Atlantic.

Another consequence of a changing NAO would be to make storms more southerly, bringing more rainfall to southern Europe and slightly lessening the drying trend the region is set to experience because of climate change. However, the effect is expected to be relatively small.

Globally, a grand solar minimum would reduce temperatures by just 0.1C between 2050 and 2099. Manmade climate change, by contrast, is expected to bring temperature rises of up to 6.6C in the same period if drastic action is not taken to cut carbon emissions.

Such a high level of warming would bring grave consequences as seas rise, drought threatens water supplies and food production suffers, scientists have warned previously.

“This research shows that the regional impacts of a grand solar minimum are likely to be larger than the global effect, but it’s still nowhere near big enough to override the expected global warming trend due to man-made change,” said Ineson.

Asked if the findings of her study gave European and US political leaders an excuse for weaker action on cutting emissions, Ineson said the reaction should be exactly the opposite, as it did not change the bigger picture on climate change.

The paper, Regional Climate Impacts of a Possible Future Grand Solar Minimum, is by a UK and US team based at Cambridge, Oxford and Reading universities, as well as the Met Office and the University of Colorado in Boulder, and published in the journal Nature Communications.