Russian Scientists say period of global cooling ahead due to changes in the sun

From Radio Voice of Russia:

Russia’s Pulkovo Observatory: “we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years”

Scientists at Russia’s famous Pulkovo Observatory are convinced that the world is in for a period of global cooling.

archibald_1749_2049_projected_solar_cycle

Graph by David Archibald

Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless. Some experts warn that a change in the climate may affect the ambitious projects for the exploration of the Arctic that have been launched by many countries.

Just recently, experts said that the Arctic ice cover was becoming thinner while journalists warned that the oncoming global warming would make it possible to grow oranges in the north of Siberia. Now, they say a cold spell will set in. Apparently, this will not occur overnight, Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory, says.

“Journalists say the entire process is very simple: once solar activity declines, the temperature drops. But besides solar activity, the climate is influenced by other factors, including the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the ocean, the glaciers. The share of solar activity in climate change is only 20%. This means that sun’s activity could trigger certain changes whereas the actual climate changing process takes place on the Earth”.

Solar activity follows different cycles, including an 11-year cycle, a 90-year cycle and a 200-year cycle. Yuri Nagovitsyn comments.

“Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years. The period of low solar activity could start in 2030-2040 but it won’t be as pervasive as in the late 17th century”.

Even though pessimists say global cooling will hamper exploration of the Arctic, experts say it won’t. Climate change and the resulting increase in the thickness of the Arctic ice cover pose no obstacles to the extraction of oil and gas on the Arctic shelf. As oil and gas reserves of the Arctic sea shelf are estimated to be billions of tons, countries are demonstrating more interest in the development of the Arctic. Climate change will also have no impact on the Northern Sea Route, which makes it possible to cut trade routes between Europe, Asia and America. Professor Igor Davidenko comments.

“The Northern Sea Route has never opened so early or closed so late over the past 30 years. Last year saw a cargo transit record – more than five million tons. The first Chinese icebreaker sailed along the Northern Sea Route in 2012. China plans it to handle up to 15% of its exports”.

As Russia steps up efforts to upgrade its icebreaker fleet, new-generation icebreakers are set to arrive in the years to come. No climate changes will thus be able to impede an increase in shipping traffic via the Northern Sea Route.

Read more: http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_04_22/Cooling-in-the-Arctic-what-to-expect/

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RoHa
April 29, 2013 6:36 pm

Global cooling?
We’re doomed!

RockyRoad
April 29, 2013 7:07 pm

Pamela Gray says:
April 29, 2013 at 6:25 pm

In fact the entire set of natural intrinsic systems from the top of the atmosphere down is a teleconnected yet highly variable group of not very well behaved teenagers. Figuring out what it is going to do next, down to the .5 decimal place, is like herding cats.

Both cats and teenagers are easy to herd, Pamela–simply keep them hungry and lead (herd) them with food.
Easy as pie.
You’re not saying it should warm up if the sun goes quiet or it will cool down if the sun gets more active, are you? That’s like thinking without food.

Paul Hanlon
April 29, 2013 7:14 pm

Wow, only yesterday, I commented that IF the sun remains quiet, in fifteen years people will be telling us we’ll be in an imminent Ice Age. It seems I didn’t have to wait that long.
I think anybody expecting this to happen are going to be severely disappointed. The Dalton and Maunder minima happened when the LIA was already bumping along at the bottom, whereas we are still around the peak for this cycle.
Three years ago, I made this prediction on reddit, which I used to frequent then:-

What worries me is what happens if the planet continues cooling. I don’t believe we’re going into another ice age, but that won’t stop the MSM from speculating about it. And people have been so brainwashed into thinking that CO2 causes catastrophic warming, we could see them leaving their car running in the driveway, to help “warm” the planet. You’ll get others who will protest over windfarms, because it will exacerbate the cooling. You might even get some nutjobs ripping the solar panel off people’s houses, if it cools down enough.

I wonder how long will it take before that prediction comes to fruition.

Eugene WR Gallun
April 29, 2013 7:31 pm

Bruce Cobb
April 29, 4:10pm
People who deny the Medieval and Roman warm periods also deny we landed on the moon?
Got to live it!
Eugene WR Gallun

Eugene WR Gallun
April 29, 2013 7:32 pm

Love it

April 29, 2013 8:19 pm

rabbit says:
April 29, 2013 at 9:50 am
Cold weather is a boon to arctic petroleum exploration. Much arctic land is saturated with water in the form of muskeg, small lakes, and so on. Only in the cold is such terrain traversable.
—————
Very true – Exploratory drilling on the North Slope of Alaska is only allowed when everything is frozen as to minimize impact on the tundra. FWIW, exploratory rigs are usually all off the ice by Apr 15 at the latest; This year, there are still a couple out on the ice as of Apr 29. Why ? – unusually cold weather & the ice is sticking around longer than normal …… just sayin’ :))

dynam01
April 29, 2013 8:40 pm

Warming, cooling, warming, cooling … wither way we’re screwed, either way shady scientists make some serious coin. Am I missing anything?

April 29, 2013 8:42 pm

About time! It was getting far too hot 😛

Darren
April 29, 2013 8:44 pm

new mantra – current actions lead to an impending future (of some sort)

April 29, 2013 8:50 pm

@stas peterson
Fusion as an answer to our energy problems is a pipe dream. ITER is a project that outlived its usefulness a decade ago. It is a political effort. Fusion is 20 years away, as it has been for over 60 years now. We mostly proved the physics in the mid-90s with the Princeton tokamak. Do you understand that these machines work on D-T fusion? Do you know what a 14-MeV neutron does to solid walls, the walls used to extract the energy from the vacuum inside the magnetic bottle? 14-MeV neutrons do unimaginable things to solid materials. Note that the Princeton reactor ran full D-T fusion for only several seconds total. It was two years before the radiation subsided enough to go in and clean it up.
ITER will not usher in large scale fusion. Tokamaks just might never make it. D-T fusion might never make it. Don’t get me wrong, fusion power generation is inevitable. It will be the primary (practically only) power generation eventually, but we just may burn all the coal first. We may even be worried about uranium and thorium stores by the time we get fusion commercially viable. Of course, I may be pessimistic. Centuries may be too long for my forecast, but four decades is unreasonable, unless there is a genius breakthrough, a true paradigm shifting discovery in materials or fusion processes. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. I wouldn’t bet the farm against a new little ice-age either.

lancifer
April 29, 2013 10:06 pm

Mechanisms anyone? At least the carbonphobes have the absorption spectra of a trace gas to cling to.
Let’s try to rise above their curve fitting excesses.

Jon
April 29, 2013 10:18 pm

Steve samd; “If we enter a cooling period, it will be hard to not see it as the end of the Holocene. It is about time.”
Holocene Optimum was for Sahara about 10.000 – 5.000 years ago, since it has turned dry. Norway had its Optimum 8.000 – 5.000 ago with mostly all glaciers gone, since the glaciers have returned with a maximum around 1750s AD.
We have been on the way towards the next ice age for about 5.000 years?

April 29, 2013 10:49 pm

Last week on UK TV this documentary about Icelandic volcanoes stated that we’re way overdue for a much bigger eruption than Ejya: http://www.channel5.com/shows/iceland-ashcloud-apocalypse/episodes/iceland-ashcloud-apocalypse (also at http://youtu.be/-9v26zFU2UY I believe).
An interesting statement was made that the last time the largest Icelandic volcano erupted (some time in the 1700s I think) it reduced global temperatures by 2degC. We really could do with some more AGW to keep us warm!

April 29, 2013 11:09 pm

0K – I saw one comment on it, maybe there were others but I have been wondering for years with all those icebreakers up in the Arctic (and Antarctic for that matter), and with ice being notch sensitive, how much impact do all those icebreaker tracks have on the icepack? Who tracks all those ships from a multitude of countries and what do those tracks look like – going around the edges, following leads, or crushing there way in transverse circuits? Maybe the impact is infinitesimally small but having watched small cracks on large lakes turn into large open areas of water, I wonder, and I wonder. If China and Russia are making shipping lanes, how much impact does that have. None? Some? And if the polar vortices happen to be blowing the right way?

April 29, 2013 11:12 pm

Reblogged this on yasarnorman.

Smithy
April 29, 2013 11:12 pm

Pamela-
Gotta disagree. Try this thought experiment – a small ball is floating in cold space and the primary heat source is a single heater. Small changes in the primary source are thus the primary drivers. Our primary heat source, with by far the largest effect on climate is the sun.

Agnostic
April 29, 2013 11:38 pm

@lonnie Schubert
I agree ITER is not a practical means of fusion, but it is not the only game on town. One of the most promising fusion projects is Bussards Polywell Electrostatic inertial system, which ultimately will fuse boron and hydrogen leaving no neutron waste at all. One of the reasons you haven’t heard of it and that the research has been underfunded is unfortunately due to the ITER tokamak design, which Bussard initially championed and worked on its initial stages.
I don’t think that means there is no reason to develop thorium however. Thorium is “easier” and better established technology, and would suit current infrastructure a little better. It will ultimately be superseded by fusion, and on our lifetimes for sure. More info on Polywell fusion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

nzrobin
April 30, 2013 12:21 am

@Harold Ambler,
I have my copy your book. I will bring it to the attention of some folk at a meeting tomorrow night.
Maybe you’ll sell a few more copies.
Cheers
nzrobin

richard verney
April 30, 2013 1:02 am

pochas says:
April 29, 2013 at 2:06 pm
///////////////////////////////
Pochas
About 9 months ago, I saw a programme on ancient Egypt which discussed droughts and grain production, and put those natural cycles at 1100 to 1150 years. This was backed up not only from historical (written and archaelogical) evidence in and around the mediterranean but also by a Nordic scientist discussing ice cores and other sediments.

sophocles
April 30, 2013 1:25 am

Ok, who has the SRC? (Solar Remote Control). Stop fiddling with it and put it back on “warm.”

HarveyS
April 30, 2013 1:42 am

Is MSM turning, i know this subject has been discussed in other articles on here. But this story is been repeated here
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2316898/The-big-freeze-250-years-Experts-say-Suns-activity-wanes-200-years–cooling-period-2040.html#comments
I also sense that UK population is also starting to arise from its slumber in believing the garbage about climate change .If we have not a good summer and another cold winter things could get interesting, especially around 2015.

kadaka (KD Knoebel)
April 30, 2013 1:53 am

sophocles said on April 30, 2013 at 1:25 am:

Ok, who has the SRC? (Solar Remote Control). Stop fiddling with it and put it back on “warm.”

Sorry about that. Here, I left it just inside the door of the TARDIS…
Oh crap. Now where did I put the TARDIS recall remote?

William Astley
April 30, 2013 2:32 am

In reply to:
Elliot Kennel says:
April 29, 2013 at 7:50 am
Is there a publication that makes this prediction, or is this just an opinion expressed by the scientist?
William,
There are hundreds of individual published papers that layout the theory (there is cyclic climate change in the paleo record and each and every time the climate changes there is an accompanying change to the solar magnetic cycle) and the mechanisms (by which solar magnetic cycle changes modulate planetary climate), however, there is a very vocal group that are stating catastrophic warming at a volume and consistency that drowns out or intimidates anyone connecting the dots to predict global cooling.
The paleoclimatic record shows cycles of warming followed by cooling Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and the more sever Heinrich events. The D-O cycles have a periodicity of 1450 years plus or minus a discrete change of 500 years (i.e. 950 years, 1450 years, and 1950 years).
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper.
The late Gerald Bond has able to track 23 of the D-O cycles/Heinrich events through the current interglacial and into the last glacial phase.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
http://rivernet.ncsu.edu/courselocker/PaleoClimate/Bond%20et%20al.,%201997%20Millenial%20Scale%20Holocene%20Change.pdf
A Pervasive Millennial-Scale Cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and Glacial Climates
http://rivernet.ncsu.edu/courselocker/PaleoClimate/Bond%20et%20al%201999%20%20N.%20Atlantic%201-2.PDF
http://www.climate4you.com/
William: This paper provides the observational evidence to support the assertion that the last Heinrich event 12,900 years before present at which time the planet went from interglacial warm to glacial cold when insolation at latitude N65 in June and July was at maximum with 90% of the cooling occurring in less than a decade correlates with an unknown massive change in C14 which correlates with a solar magnetic cycle change.
Reduced solar activity as a trigger for the start of the Younger Dryas?
http://www.falw.vu/~renh/pdf/Renssen-etal-QI-2000.pdf
William: The following is more information concerning how unusual the 20th century period of high solar activity was and what to possibly expect if the sun moves abruptly into a deep minimum.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0385
Grand minima and maxima of solar activity: New observational constraints I.G. Usoskin, S.K. Solanki, and G.A. Kovaltsov
…We present an updated reconstruction of sunspot number over multiple millennia, from 14C data by means of a physics-based model, using an updated model of the evolution of the solar open magnetic flux. A list of grand minima and maxima of solar activity is presented for the Holocene (since 9500 BC) and the statistics of both the length of individual events as well as the waiting time between them are analyzed…. …Solar activity on multi-millenial time scales has been recently reconstructed using a physics-based model from measurements of 14C in tree rings (see full details in Solanki et al. 2004, Usoskin et al. 2006a). The validity of the model results for the last centennia has been proven by independent data on measurements of 44Ti in stony meteorites (Usoskin et al. 2006b). The reconstruction depends on the knowledge of temporal changes of the geomagnetic dipole field, which must be estimated independently by paleomagnetic methods. Here we compare two solar activity reconstructions, which … …the more recent work of Korte & Constable (2005) may underestimate it. Thus we consider both models as they bound a realistic case. We note that the Yang et al. (2000) data run more than 4000 years longer and give a more conservative estimate of the grand maxima. See figure 3 in this paper. It shows that solar activity in 20th century particularly in the last half of the 20th century was the highest in 12,000 years and more importantly the duration of the high period was the longest in 12,000 years.
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years by S. K. Solanki, I. G. Usoskin, B. Kromer, M. Schussler & J. Beer
Here we report a reconstruction of the sunspot number covering the past 11,400 years, based on dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations. We combine physics-based models for each of the processes connecting the radiocarbon concentration with sunspot number. According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode. Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades. (William: The authors considered total solar irradiation TSI which is not the major mechanism by which the sun modulate planetary temperature. The mechanism is modulation of low level and high level clouds. During both Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle and the Heinrich events the mechanism is inhibited as the solar magnetic cycle is interrupted. (i.e. Galactic cosmic rays increase however there is not an increase in planetary clouds.))
William: This paper notes that roughly 10 years ago the magnetic field strength on newly formed sunspots started to decay linearly. Based on Eugene Parker’s analysis the magnetic ropes – the magnetic ropes are hypothesized to form at the solar tachocline and then rise up through the convection zone to form sunspots on the surface of the sun – require a minimum field strength to avoid being torn apart in by turbulence in the convection zone. The authors of this paper note there are no sunspots on the surface of the sun that have a magnetic field strength that is less than 1500 gauss. It the trend continues the sun will have no sunspots in around 2017.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1
Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field
strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the
NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope. … …This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25.
We reported in Penn & Livingston (2006) that a time series of this magnetic field data showed a decrease in the umbral magnetic field strength which was independent of the normal sunspot cycle. Also, the measurements revealed a threshold magnetic field strength of about 1500 Gauss, below which no dark pores formed. A linear extrapolation of the magnetic field trend suggested that the mean field strength would reach this threshold 1500 Gauss value in the year 2017.
William: This paper explains two of the mechanisms ion mediated cloud nucleation (changes to the strength and angle of the solar heliosphere modulate GCR. GCR strike the earth’s atmosphere and create ions) and electroscavenging (solar wind creates a space charge differential in the ionosphere which removes cloud forming ions).
http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/pdf/Atmos_060302.pdf
Atmospheric Ionization and Clouds as Links Between Solar Activity
and Climate by Brian A. Tinsley and Fangqun Yu
The ionization at cloud level that determines the rate of electroscavenging and IMN is influenced by space particle fluxes as illustrated in Figure 3.1. These inputs are in the form of GCR; MeV electrons precipitating from the radiation belts with associated X-ray bremsstrahlung; the bulk solar wind plasma with its embedded magnetic fields that determines the horizontal distribution of potential across the polar cap ionospheres; and occasional energetic solar proton events. The latter occur too infrequently to have a significant effect on climate, and are not illustrated. The GCR flux is responsible for almost all of the production of ionization below 15 km altitude, that determines the conductivity in that region. The MeV electrons and their associated X-rays produce ionization in the stratosphere, and affect the conductivity there.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
Sudden climate transitions during the Quaternary
According to the marine records, the Eemian interglacial ended with a rapid cooling event about 110,000 years ago (e.g., Imbrie et al., 1984; Martinson et al., 1987), which also shows up in ice cores and pollen records from across Eurasia. From a relatively high resolution core in the North Atlantic. Adkins et al. (1997) suggested that the final cooling event took less than 400 years, and it might have been much more rapid. … …The event at 8200 ka is the most striking sudden cooling event during the Holocene, giving widespread cool, dry conditions lasting perhaps 200 years before a rapid return to climates warmer and generally moister than the present. This event is clearly detectable in the Greenland ice cores, where the cooling seems to have been about half-way as severe as the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene difference (Alley et al., 1997; Mayewski et al., 1997). No detailed assessment of the speed of change involved seems to have been made within the literature (though it should be possible to make such assessments from the ice core record), but the short duration of these events at least suggests changes that took only a few decades or less to occur.

April 30, 2013 3:12 am

As a casual observer in central Louisiana (USA), I saw my first Ruby Throated Humming bird two days ago, and the black berries (I love blackberry cobbler) are a couple of weeks late in ripening. Warmest days are running about the local average while the cooler days are down ten or so degrees F low. The lows in the next few days may approach/break record lows… How about some of the rest of you weighing in with facts instead of speculation.

Sharpshooter
April 30, 2013 3:50 am

Quote: “Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger…the best place to start is with a carbon tax. A phased-in carbon tax of $20 to $25 a ton could raise around $1 trillion over 10 years, as we each pay a few more dimes and quarters for every gallon of gasoline…It’s the only way to revive the country and a moribund Republican Party.” NYSlimes columnist Thomas Friedman, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-put-america-back-together-again.html
‘Nuff said?