Very important admission from the BBC. “Periods of unusual ‘solar lull’ coincide with bitterly cold winters.”
“Scientists are saying that the Sun is in a phase of ‘solar lull’ – meaning that it has fallen asleep – and it is baffling them.
Following are excerpts from the video:
“Something is happening to the solar activity on the surface of the sun: It’s declining…fast.
Whatever measurement you use, it’s coming down. Solar peaks are coming down.
“Richard Harrison is head of space physics at the Rutherford-Appleton laboratory in Oxfordshire. He says the rate at which solar activity is falling mirrors a period in the 17th century where sunspots virtually disappeared.
“The Maunder Minimum of course was period when we saw almost no sunspots for decades, and it was a really dramatic period when we saw really cold winters in the northern hemisphere, where you had a kind of a mini-ice age.
“Rivers and canals froze across northern Europe….It wasn’t just the Thames that froze over. The Baltic Sea did too.
“Crop failures and famines were widespread across northern Europe.
“The sun does seem to be in a similar phase at it was during the run up to the Maunder Minimum,” says Lucy Green, at the Moloff Space Science Laboratory in the North Downs.
Professor Mike Lockwood says this is the fastest decline in solar activity in 10,000 years. “There’s a 20 percent probability that we could be back in Maunder conditions within 40 years,” says Lockwood.
Less solar activity seems to affect the behavior of the jet stream, says Lockwood. This ends up blocking warm air from reaching northern Europe, causing long, cold winters.
“Right now we’re at a peak of a solar cycle … but this solar cycle is eerily quiet.
“The number of sunspots is a fraction of what scientists expected.
“History suggests that periods of unusual ‘solar lull’ coincide with bitterly cold winters.
Of course, the video ends with a nod to global warming.
Of course.
“On the one hand you’ve got, perhaps, a cooling sun, but on the other had you’ve got human activity that can counter that.”
“So even if the planet as a whole continues to warm, if we enter a Maunder Minimum the future for northern Europe could be cold and frozen winters for decades to come.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25771510
Thanks to Pete Sanders, Marc Morano, Dean Koehler and Stephanie Relfe for this info.
“And this is what they are willing to admit to us,” says Stephanie. “I wonder how bad it really is.”
