The climate is warming! No, the climate is cooling! We’re all gonna die! The answer is…all true. Folks just need to chill out and understand that climate’s gonna climate, and that’s all there is to it.
The sun is a very steady oscillator says Prof. Valentina Zharkova, of Northumbria University. I have followed her work with great interest since watching her presentation at the Global Warming Policy Forum in 2018. She confidently predicted a Modern Grand Solar Minimum (GSM) running from 2020 through 2053, about half as long as the previous Maunder Minimum but just as intense. Controversial at first, now even U.S. agencies have adopted the science and speak of the current modern GSM.
It’s complex science. Simply put, in 2003 the EU asked Dr. Zharkova and her team to produce a catalog of solar activity. Once the data was compiled, they investigated what they could learn from it. Building on previous research and incorporating contemporaneous works, they developed a formula that accurately identified past sunspot activity and could be used to predict future events.
We know about the 11-year solar cycles. They start at the minimum point of solar activity, build over five or six years to maximum activity, then decrease again to a minimum. Solar cycle 25 began in December 2019.
Grand solar minimums, where maximum solar activity is dramatically subdued over several cycles, occur every 350 to 400 years. Astrophysics wonks must be over the moon to be living through one.
Fear mongering
Solar activity determines our temperatures not human activity