Global Warming

Prediction of Mini Ice Age for the 2030s Challenged

Climate experts slammed a highly publicised report by a U.K. math professor that suggests Earth will experience a “mini ice age” during the 2030s due to an astounding 60 percent decline in solar activity.

Valentina Zharkova’s study, published last year in the The Astrophysical Journal and highlighted after a recent science conference in Wales, says the magnetic waves that cause sunspots exist in two divergent, and competing frequencies.

Zharkova wrote that the frequencies will cancel each other out within 15 years, leading to a significant reduction in the level of solar radiation that reaches the Earth.

She argues that the quieter sun is on track to cause a drop in global temperatures, similar to a mini ice age from 1645 to 1715 known as the Maunder Minimum.

Climate experts quickly pointed out that the brief cooling was pretty much limited to Europe and to a large extent due to a surge in volcanic eruptions, which caused ash and gas to filter the sun’s rays.

“Any reduction in global mean near-surface temperature due to a future decline in solar activity is likely to be a small fraction of projected anthropogenic (manmade) warming,” scientists wrote in a study published June 23 in the journal Nature.

"The effect is a drop in the bucket, a barely detectable blip, on the overall warming trajectory we can expect over the next several decades from greenhouse warming," Michael Mann, professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, told The Washington Post.

Zharkova is openly skeptical that human activity is the driving force behind the recent warming of the planet.