Nils-Axel Mörner: Arctic Environment by the Middle of this Century

Guest Post by Ric Werme

Nils-Axel Mörner, best known for his career of studying sea level and sea level records, reported in the April 2011 issue of the journal Energy & Environment that:

At around 2040-2050 we will be in a new major Solar Minimum. It is to be expected that we will then have a new “Little Ice Age” over the Arctic and NW Europe. The past Solar Minima were linked to a general speeding-up of the Earth’s rate of rotation. This affected the surface currents and southward penetration of Arctic water in the North Atlantic causing “Little Ice Ages” over northwestern Europe and the Arctic.

At the time I thought this was a bit of a reach, and still do, but it fits in well with:

• today’s earlier post, Study: solar activity lull increases chances of cold UK winters
• discussions at ICCC #6 about more coming cold winters and realizing that some people were quite familiar with the paper, e.g. Nicola Scafetta but some were not (I gave Bill Gray my copy) and
• a “flurry” of reports from the southern hemisphere and July skiing in the northern hemisphere.

Mörner claims

During the Spörer, Maunder and Dalton Solar Minima, Arctic water was forced southwards all the way down to Mid-Portugal and the adjacent land areas experienced “Little Ice Ages” (Mörner, 1995, 2010). At the same time, however, the Gibraltar and NW Africa experienced warm events. This North-South opposed climate conditions are well understood in terms of differential distribution of current flow-masses along the northern and southern branches, respectively, of the Gulf Stream (Mörner, 1995, 2010).

While he mentions Svensmark’s “brilliant new theory,” Mörner refers to changes in the Earth’s rotation rate due to changes in the solar wind. I have a lot of trouble with that. I’m more comfortable with changing rates due to build up of seasonal snow and ice at high latitudes. Nevertheless, Mörner explains:

Due to the changes in rotation, the oceanic surface current system is forced to respond (Figure 1). As a function of this, the Gulf Stream alters its main distribution of water along the northern and southern branches, and simultaneously cold Arctic water can, at the speeding-up phases of Solar Minima, penetrate far down along the west coasts of Europe creating Little Ice Age environmental conditions (Figure 2).

Note this is a regional change, any global effects will like be much milder.

As for the timing of all this:

The date of the New Solar Minimum has been assigned at around 2040 by Mörner et al. (2003), at 2030-2040 by Harrara (2010), at 2042 ±11 by Abdassamatov (2010) and at 2030-2040 by Scafetta (2010), implying a fairly congruent picture despite somewhat different ways of transferring past signals into future predictions.

The onset of the associated cooling has been given at 2010 by Easterbrook (2010) and Herrara (2010), and at “approximately 2014” by Abdassamatov (2010). Easterbrook (2010) backs up his claim that the cooling has already commenced by geological observations facts.

At any rate, from a Solar-Terrestrial point of view, we will, by the middle of this century, be in a New Solar Minimum and in a New Little Ice Age. This conclusion is completely opposite to the scenarios presented by IPCC (2001, 2007) as illustrated in Figure 3. With “the Sun in the centre”, no other conclusion can be drawn, however.

While the official home for the article is at Energy & Environment, a non pay-walled version is at eike-klima-energie.eu

H/t to David L. Hagen