Bishop Hill Hudson on the ice
Oct 28, 2013 Climate: solar 
Ice on the HudsonAfficionados of the "ice age now" hypothesis are going to be cock-a-hoop over Paul Hudson's latest blog post. The BBC man has been looking into the idea that the current very low levels of activity in the sun are going to cause us all to freeze and he seems to have found some support in the somewhat unlikely shape of Mike Lockwood:
I’ve been to see Professor Mike Lockwood to take a look at the work he has been conducting into the possible link between solar activity and climate patterns.
According to Professor Lockwood the late 20th century was a period when the sun was unusually active and a so called ‘grand maximum’ occurred around 1985.
Since then the sun has been getting quieter.
By looking back at certain isotopes in ice cores, he has been able to determine how active the sun has been over thousands of years.
Following analysis of the data, Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years.
Reader Comments (56)
Jack Cowper
It'll only take one Yorkshire lad to sort this lot out!
Lord Beaverborook
Yes indeed. Good on him.
Maunder minimum was regional not global, how can something external to earth be regional - was that explained anywhere?
I'm sorry, please let's dismiss talk about a new little ice age.
Are we to assume that we will have 70 years without sunspots, or nearly so -- as in the Maunder Minimum? That seems a stretch, for now. Perhaps for now we can agree on the shorter Daulton Minimum of the early 19th C?
Even if we were to have a Maunder Minimum, that would cause a drop of about 0.7 degrees C over a few decades, everything else equal. Most readers of this blogs are skeptics but not deniers. Skeptics think that CO2 and black carbon and methane warn the planet, but at about 1/3rd to 2/3rds of the rate that the IPCC thinks. So that is perhaps 1 to 2 degrees for a doubling of CO2 by the end of this century.
So if were were to be in a Maunder Minimum for 70 years, we would pretty much cancel the warming thought by skeptics to be due to GHGs. Kind of a perfect world, maybe, but not a little ice age. Just gives us time to develop new technologies that don't industrialize our countryside.
The full BBC video of Paul Hudson is here.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/bbcs-paul-hudson-on-a-new-maunder-minimum/
Agreed that a comment about the Maunder Minimum being regional is rather puzzling. I suppose that perhaps his comments relate to the Little Ice Age. It's an interesting conundrum, arguing that the LIA is regional when it appears to be just as prevalent in the southern hemisphere as in the northern. So says the IPCC, strooth! http://climateaudit.org/2013/10/28/the-ipcc-southern-hemisphere-reconstructions/