Now that the global temperature has not risen in 15 years, part of the German media is actually beginning to take a serious new look at the possibility of global cooling and are slowly questioning the alarmist assertion that the sun played little or no role in the climate change of the last 100 years.
Solar flare on an active sun. Photo credit: NASA (public domain)
Yesterday the online FOCUS magazine published a piece called: Scientists fear new little ice age.
What’s a bit surprising is that the article is written by typically warmist journalist Michael Odenwald.
In the FOCUS article Odenwald describes how solar cycle 24 started unusually slowly in 2008 and quotes David Hathaway of NASA: “It is not only the weakest cycle in the modern space age, but also the weakest in the last 100 years.“ Odenwald also tells readers how solar sunspots are driven by the solar dynamo, which also generates the sun’s magnetic field.
In Part 2 of Odenwald’s article, he points out that historical records suggest solar cycle 25 will very likely also be a weak cycle. In the recent past, alarmist climate scientists dismissed, or even scoffed at, the notion that weak solar activity could have a significant impact on the earth’s climate – a dismissal that flies in the face of a mountain of data showing a strong correlation between weak solar activity and cold periods.
Recently a growing number of scientists from the USA, Europe, and Russia have been warning of a potential approaching cooling period because of low solar activity, and the media are now taking more notice than ever. FOCUS quotes Hathaway’s colleague Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory (translated from the German):
Should this trend continue, then solar cycle 25 will have hardly any sunspots at all. Then we could reach a new Maunder Minimum.”
The Maunder Minimum, Odenwald writes, was an especially cold period during the Little Ice Age.
Still, Odenwald is hardly ready to give up believing that CO2 a major player in the overall climate scheme, insisting that a new grand solar minimum would not necessarily cool the planet. Odenwald cites that the Little Ice Age may in fact have been precipitated by a “giant volcanic eruption that supposedly occurred in the year 1257 in Indonesia“.
But to his credit, Odenwald concedes that solar activity could very well have a major role on climate:
It’s possible that the reduced solar activity may bring some good, which the scientists gathered at the AAS conference indicated. It could counter the global warming that man is causing with the continuously rising emissions of climate-impacting greenhouse gases.
Good to see responsible German warmist journalists opening their minds to alternatives theories. Give it a few more years.