Hey DEMS: Experts Suggest Solar ‘Hibernation’ Could Trigger Another ‘Mini Ice Age’ … Is That News?
Does anything in your Green New Deal solve the problem of significant Solar-related cooling periods? Because that could be on the horizon.
While AOC and others paint catastrophic pictures of a submerged New York City and a world in which we cannot raise children, scientists watching the sun have raised a different problem.
A problem we’ve actually seen before in human history. Sun-related global cooling.
And when it happens, things really begin to suck for a lot of people… starting with crop failures.
Sunspot activity on the surface of the Sun follows a well-known but little understood 11 year cycle. Activity rises and falls creating the so-called solar maximum and then solar minimum. During a solar maximum, the Sun is more powerful and is littered with sunspots.
Conversely when the Sun enters a solar minimum – which it did about two years ago – energy from our host star begins to lessen.
However, one expert has warned that the Sun will enter a period of “hibernation” this year, in what as known as a Grand Solar Minimum (GSM).
Prof Valentina Zharkova, from the department of mathematics, physics and electrical engineering at Northumbria University, warned this could cause global temperatures to drop by one degrees Celsius.
Source: Express
While that sounds like an insignificant drop, it could have major ramifications for the planet, including a slow down in agricultural production.
And this ‘solar hibernation’ isn’t a short-term event, either. It is just beginning and would be expected to drag on for another 33 years or so.
The last GSM, which comes around roughly every 400 years, came in the 17th century.
Research produced by NASA indicated during this last prolonged solar minimum the cooling temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were indeed exacerbated by that Maunder minimum.
In 2006, NASA said: “From 1650 to 1710, temperatures across much of the Northern Hemisphere plunged when the Sun entered a quiet phase now called the Maunder Minimum.
… “During this period, very few sunspots appeared on the surface of the Sun, and the overall brightness of the Sun decreased slightly.
“Already in the midst of a colder-than-average period called the Little Ice Age, Europe and North America went into a deep freeze: alpine glaciers extended over valley farmland; sea ice crept south from the Arctic; and the famous canals in the Netherlands froze regularly—an event that is rare today.”
…“This would dramatically affect food harvests in middle latitudes, because the vegetables and fruits will not have enough time for harvesting.
“So it could lead to a food deficit for people and animals, as we seen in the past couple of years when the snow in Spain and Greece in April and May demolished they veggie fields, and the UK had a deficit of broccoli, and other fruits and veggies.”
Source: Express