Double-Dynamo Model Predicts 60% Fall In Solar Output In The 2030s

sycodon points out reports of a new model of solar dynamics from University of Northumbria professor Valentina Zharkova, predictions from which "suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the 'mini ice age' that began in 1645." Zharkova's model, based on observation of solar magnetism, "draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone." Zharkova’s and her colleages at three other universities believe that this two-layer model "could explain aspects of the solar cycle with much greater accuracy than before — possibly leading to enhanced predictions of future solar behaviour. “We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs; originating in two different layers in the Sun’s interior. They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different [for both] and they are offset in time.”

Comments

Excuse to keep using oil

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is true, clearly we need to be putting MORE CO2 into the atmosphere, not less. That's just science.

Re:Excuse to keep using oil

[TapeCutter]

Bit more complex than that, here's the Carbon 14 proxy data for solar activity since 800AD. Here's the attribution graph of known climate forcings that explains the current overall warming trend.

Solar *activity* not *output*

[rumpledoll]

Not solar output falling 60%, which would lead to completely frozen Earth, but solar activity, i.e. the 11 year sunspot cycle. Predicting levels near or at those found during the Maunder minimum. This does imply some reduced level of solar output.

Re:Solar *activity* not *output*

[Geoffrey.landis]

Not solar output falling 60%, which would lead to completely frozen Earth, but solar activity, i.e. the 11 year sunspot cycle. Predicting levels near or at those found during the Maunder minimum. This does imply some reduced level of solar output.

About plus or minus 0.1% change in total solar irradiance between solar maximum and solar minimum:

http://science.nasa.gov/scienc...

Re:Solar *activity* not *output*

[MightyDrunken]

It is a shame it isn't 60% of solar output, I was looking forward to "room temperature" superconductors.

Re:Solar *activity* not *output*

[catchblue22]

With a 60% reduction in irradiance, I suspect that it would get so cold on Earth that CO2 would freeze solid out of the air. So no more CO2 problem. Yay. But then again, plants need CO2 to make O2. So no more breathing on our part. Doh. That would suck.

Every cycle

[Geoffrey.landis]

Well, except that every solar cycle since I can remember, I've heard somebody predicting that the next solar cycle is about the start a new Maunder minimum, and it will mean mini ice age. Every one.
This one is a prediction based on fitting a model only to the last three cycles. i'm not impressed.
For reference, here's the MSFC page on solar cycle modelling: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa....

Maunder minimum and climate

[Geoffrey.landis]

It sounds like there's somewhat of a correlation though, if the last time this was seen was before a "mini ice age".

Well, except nobody knowns whether the Maunder minimum even had anything to do with the little ice age, except for the coincidence of timing. The best understanding at the moment is that the little ice age was due to volcanic eruptions: http://news.agu.org/press-rele...

It sounds like there's somewhat of a correlation though, if the last time this was seen was before a "mini ice age". Do the electromagnetic bursts from the sunspots also have something to do with the regulation of earth's temperature?

People have been looking for a solar cycle-weather connection for years, but not really finding one.

University of Northumbria

[PopeRatzo]

Is Northumbria somewhere in Middle Earth?

A quick search on Wikipedia shows that it's actually in Newcastle upon Tyne, which is just a short drive North from Dog Snogging. The chancellor of the University of Northumbria (and I'm not making this up), is Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, which is a name I wish I had.

Seriously, it all sounds like something out of a Christopher Moore novel.

Re:Epicycles upon epicycles

[nine-times]

Well we don't know what our climate is going to do, ultimately. We do know, however, that we're dumping CO2 into our atmosphere, enough to screw up our environment in various ways, including creating a greenhouse effect in our atmosphere and add to the acidification of our oceans. That's in addition to a crap ton of other stupid things we're doing, e.g. overfishing, dumping toxins into our water supply, deforestation.

So do we know if we're going to get a mini ice age soon due to natural causes? No, we really don't know. Do we know that we're damaging our own ecosystem, metaphorically poisoning our own well? Yes, we know that with a large degree of certainty.

Re:Let me guess.

[MillionthMonkey]

OK, I looked into it a bit longer than sycodon and timothy apparently did, and I take that back. It doesn't appear that Valentina Zharkova is being funded by the Koch brothers or anything like that. Rather, these two misinterpreted her work to suggest that a 60% fall in magnetic solar activity means the sun's brightness will fall by 60%. Which is somewhat ironic for the following reasons-

1. The sun actually gets slightly brighter when solar magnetic activity falls, because of the lack of sunspots.
2. Carbon dioxide has an atmospheric half-life of about 10,000 years, so a "60% fall in solar output" over a timescale of decades won't mean much for long.
3. The core isn't powering down (which would take approx. one million years to become evident at the surface, because the radiosphere is fully ionized and doesn't undergo convection, which means photons reach the radiopause via a random walk process). Any variation in solar output will be tempered by the stability of the heat entering the convective zone.
4. A fall in solar output by 60% would guarantee a following rise afterwards, because of the conservation of energy, and ignoring a rise in CO2 for this reason would eventually backfire.

So this is probably decent research, but unfortunately every right wing nut job out there is going to desperately sink their fingernails into this and deny that rising CO2 is a problem. From reading the comments of the submitter, it doesn't seem that we're dealing with a scientific genius here.

Little Ice Age [Re:Maunder minimum and climate]

[Geoffrey.landis]

And when you dismiss all data that doesn't agree with you-- which is what you're doing-- then it is completely impossible to ever overturn your conspiracy theory that all the science ever done on climate happens to be wrong.

In fact, it's not. This is currently the best hypothesis that fits the data, including the dates. There may be a better hypothesis later. This is the way science is done; you gather data, make a hypothesis that fits the data, and see if later work confirms or overturns the hypothesis.

Paleoclimate resesearch, and most specifically modelling the climate variations in the late middle ages is indeed difficult, because not only don't we have contemporary measurements of all the input parameters, we don't have good measurements of the temperature, either. (Modelling contemporary climate is much more accurate-- we have lots of data on both the input (the solar output is well measured) and the climate (not just average temperatures, but diurnal variation, seasonal variation, latitude and longitude variation, etc. all of which must fit the modelling, although the AGW debaters only ever look at the year-by-year changes.)

The paper referenced, however does use a pretty convincing proxy for temperature change in the little ice age: they looked at the dead flora preserved in the Arctic ice cap. This dates the little ice age to a start in 1375-1400, with a second cooling period around 1450 AD. That is about the time when the Vikings abandoned their settlements in Greenland (they kept Church records; the last document in Greenland (a marriage certificate) was dated 1408.)

Unfortunately, this is THREE HUNDRED YEARS before the Maunder minimum. So it's really hard to think that the Maunder minimum caused the little ice age.

So, here's the summary.
1. There is no well-understood mechanism connecting sunspot numbers to climate.
2. The only connection between the Maunder minimum and the little ice age is a rough coincidence in timing.
3. But the more detailed examination of timing shows that the little ice age started much earlier.