The recent revelation by
the UK Met Office and Climate Research Unit (CRU), East Anglia that the globe
had not warmed for the last 16 years is just a precursor to their expected
admission shortly that the world is plunging to a Grand Minimum as the sun
heads for hibernation that usually lasts at least a century. The Met Office-CRU
global temperature dataset is used as the gold standard of the UN
Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their reports.
Now a renowned climatologist,
David Archibald in a newly published paper has predicted that global cooling is
here and we would be heading into a Grand Minimum - the Little Ice Age by
2040s.
(JoNova)
David Archibald, polymath, makes a bold prediction that temperatures are about
to dive sharply (in the decadal sense). He took the forgotten correlation
that as solar cycles lengthen and weaken, the world gets cooler. He refined it
into a predictive tool, tested it and published in 2007. His paper has been
expanded on recently by Prof Solheim in Norway, who predicts a 1.5°C drop in
Central Norway over the next ten years.
Our
knowledge of the solar dynamo is improving, and David adds the predicted solar
activity ’til 2040 to the analysis. Normal solar cycles are 11 years long, but
the current one (cycle 24) is shaping up to be 17 years (unusually long), and
using historical data from the US, David predicts a 2.1°C decline over
Solar Cycle 24 followed by a further 2.8°C over Solar Cycle 25. That adds up to
a whopping 4.9°C fall in temperate latitudes over the next 20 years. We can
only hope he’s wrong. As David says
”The
center of the Corn Belt, now in Iowa, will move south to Kansas.”
He
also predicts continuing drought in Africa for another 14 years, with droughts
likely in South America too.
If
he’s right, it’s awful and excellent at the same time. Cold hurts, but wouldn’t
it be something if we understood our climate well enough to plan ahead?
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