By Javier Vinos
Fourteen years ago, a new climate myth was born. The solar minima (GSM) being created will not only reverse global warming but will also push the planet into a new Mini Ice Age, surprising those alarmed by warming and causing unnecessary suffering. It’s time to bury that myth.
1. Origins of Mythology
The sun’s deep minimum of 2008-2009 was a complete surprise to solar physicists. They did not know that solar activity could become so low because it did not happen during the time of observing the sun with modern equipment. In 2009, a solar scientist named Habibullo Abdussamatov published a paper in Russian in which he argued that the following years would see severe cooling based on the birth of the new GSM. His proof is
- Low solar cycle (SC) activity is going on then a minimum of 23-24.
- A two-hundred-year cycle in solar activity is thought to have decreased solar activity after 1600 and after 1800
- Pause in global warming since 1998
This prediction reached the West and became very popular, like any dire prediction. Articles about the emergence of GSM are rampant on climate blogs, such as the one on WUWT: ‘Baby Grand’ has arrived.
Other scientists, such as Livingston & Penn and de Jager & Duhau, joined Abdussamatov in 2009 to suggest the emergence of GSM, albeit more cautiously about its climate impacts. It has gone so far as to threaten the story of global warming at a time that is under attack from Pause and the Climate Gateway. Therefore, none other than Stefan Rahmstorf stood up for them saying that according to the models
“The new Maunder-type solar activity minimum cannot compensate for global warming caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.”
(Feulner & Rahmstorf 2010)
2. 2012-2015, the golden years of legends
After 2009, solar activity gradually increased and it is clear that SC24 is a cycle not seen in nearly a century. Many scientists are writing about an SGM, which has gone from hypothesis to serious possibility. Abdussamatov published new articles in English in 2012 and 2013.
In 2011, Swedish sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner published a paper in one of the few journals that still accepts skeptical contributions, Energy & Environment. He begins with a bold statement:
“Around 2040-2050, we will be at a new Solar Minimum. Then a new ‘Little Ice Age’ in the Arctic and northwest Europe can be expected,”
Nils-Axel Morner, 2011
a claim for which he provided no evidence other than extending solar activity based on sunspot records.
Two years later, Nils-Axel invited 18 other researchers to participate in the first issue of the new journal, Pattern Recognition in Physics. It’s a particular matter of how the orbits of the planets can cause solar variations. Include a letter signed by 19 researchers that constitutes a direct attack on the IPCC’s conclusions. Among the signatories were prominent researchers such as Willie Soon, Nicola Scafetta, Ole Humlum, David Archibald, Harald Yndestad and Don Easterbrook, as well as several Internet activists, such as Tallbloke. The predictable result was that its publishers canceled the magazine. The letter ends with a conclusion and two implications agreed upon by the signatories. The second implication is relevant here:
“It is clear that we are on our way to a new great minimum of the solar system. This casts serious doubt on the continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project.”
At that time, numerous papers were published on the upcoming GSM and its possible impact on climate (de Jager & Duhau 2012; Solheim et al. 2012; Anet et al. 2013; Steinhilber & Beer 2013). Many articles on the Internet have made the myth very popular among climate skeptics and alarmists, intrigued by the catastrophic nature of a new ice age.
3. Stars Valentina Zharkova.
It was in July 2015 when this myth appeared in newspapers around the world. A Northumbria University researcher, Valentina Zharkova, presented her solar model at a meeting, and news emphasize that it predicts a “Solar activity drops by 60% in the 2030s, to ‘mini ice age’ levels.”
The climate connection wasn’t made by her, it was made by the people who wrote the press release. Her paper (Zharkova et al. 2015), published that same year, makes no mention of climate. She herself said:
“In the press release, we said nothing about climate change. My guess is that when they heard about the Maunder minimum, they used Wikipedia or something like that to learn more about it.”
Valentina Zharkova
Her research became relevant to climate change and the Little Ice Age only after being covered by the media. However, she said it made sense to her that the connection was made. She likes attention. To this day, she continues to link her research on solar activity to climate impacts. In a 2020 editorial for the magazine Temperature (Zharkova 2020), she writes:
“This, in turn, could lead to a reduction in the Earth’s temperature by up to 1.0°C above current temperatures over the next three cycles (25-27) at a large minimum 1. Temperature the biggest reduction will [occur] in the local minima between the periods 25-26 and 26-27.”
Zharkova, 2020
Irina Kitiashvili, a NASA researcher, also has a model that predicts SC25 will have half the activity of SC24 (Kitiashvili 2020). The problem with the Kitiashvili and Zharkova models is that they are complex linear extrapolations of diminishing solar activity since 1980’s SC21.
4. 2018 turned the tide
A paper by the Zharkova group in 2018 (Popova et al. 2018) pushed their model back 800 years and was harshly criticized by the famous Finnish solar researcher Ilya Usoskin (Usoskin 2018) . He was the reviewer of the article but his review was lost through the publisher’s system and subsequently published as a commentary. Usoskin declares with good reason that:
“It is impossible to make a millennial harmonic prediction based on 35 years of data alone,”
Usoskin, 2018
and that the output of the model contradicts the observations.
While the Maunder Minimum is in its right place, the Spörer Minimum, the largest GSM in millennia, is not working, instead, she mistakenly calls the period 1350-1500 the Warm Age The Middle Ages took place at least 300 years earlier. Zharkova has joined the ranks of climate scientists willing to misrepresent data to further their careers. Zharkova’s model is not worth the computer’s time. This is a sad reality for a lot of models these days.
In 2018, the new solar minimum arrived and climate blogs published many articles about the upcoming GSM. The sun’s minimum is also the point at which the sun’s polar fields reach their maximum values in 11 years, allowing us to predict the magnitude of the upcoming cycle using the polar field precursor method. At a meeting in 2018, Leif Svalgaard publicly made his prediction that the SC25 would perform a little more than the SC24, not less.
5. January 2023 was as active as February 2014.
February 2014 was the most active month in SC24, with 146.1 sunspots and 166.2 solar flux units (sfu) in the 10.7 cm radio band, another way to measure activity of the sun. January 2023 had 143.6 sunspots and 176.6 sfu, consistent with the activity of the most active month in SC24 (Figure 3).
The number of smoothed sunspots is used by SILSO to determine the beginning of the solar cycle, the end of the solar cycle, and the maximum of the sun cycle delayed by 6 months due to the smoothing. However, it consistently shows that SC25 is slightly more active than SC24 at the same distance from the minimum.
There’s still a long way to go until SC25 ends, presumably around 2031-2032, but it can no longer be justified to claim that SC25 will perform much worse than SC24. Thus, the fears that GSM will grow in the next solar cycles will come to an end.
6. Solar spectrum analyzers know it since 2006
Before this whole story begins, before the polar magnetic precursor method gave SC24 predictions, before anyone knew that solar activity was approaching, in 2006, Mark Clilverd, together with other British and Finnish researchers, published a paper titled “Predicting solar cycles 24 and beyond” (Clilverd et al. 2006). In this remarkable paper, they used a spectroscopic method based on secular cycles in sunspot numbers to predict that periods SC24 and 25 would have much lower activity than previous cycles, but then SC26 when activity began to recover (Figure 5).
Recall that in 2006 NASA scientists predict a massive 24 . Sun cyclelarger than SC23.
As the first to predict the current expanding solar minimum is an expansion of only two cycles and give an exact date, it is only fair that this extended solar minimum is called Cilverd minimum.
I also did a simple spectral model of past and future solar activity in 2016 which I posted in a commentary on WUWT. The model was refined in 2018 for my book and appeared in Chapter 13 (21st Century climate change). The modeled variable is the monthly total score in a cycle from start to finish, since maximum activity is a less reliable variable. It cannot predict the length of a cycle, so it assumes an 11-year cycle (Figure 6). If a solar cycle is not exactly 11 years long, the shape of the cycle will be affected, but overall solar activity will not be affected.
The model also predicts in 2016 that no GSM will happen in the 21st century.st century. In fact, it may be two to three centuries before humanity re-experiences GSM. Not a bad result if it’s true, since GSM has a very strong negative climate impact (Vinos 2022).
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