Grand Solar Minimum Delayed Or Cancelled
It looks like reports of the imminent demise of solar activity and a possible new 'little ice age' were wrong.
I bought into the Grand Solar Minimum predictions, I must admit. I took very seriously Prof Valentina Zharkova’s prediction of a Grand Solar Minimum 2020-2053 based on the physics of a solar dynamo model with two out of phase principal component magnetic fields whose predictable wave-like interactions determine the strength of the solar background magnetic field and thus the amount of sunspot activity on the surface of the sun. Let’s face it, a new ‘Maunder Minimum’, which last time corresponded with the coolest 65 year period of the chilly Little Ice Age, would shut the global warming fanatics up once and for all, surely, and prove that the Sun was the main driver of climate on this planet, not man-made CO2. It was an alluring prospect to get these hysterical cult-members off our backs and stop them destroying western civilisation and technological progress with their ridiculous Medieval ‘renewable energy’ scams.
Zharkova’s two principle magnetic components are depicted here:
You can see that during the high solar activity in the 1980s and early into the 21st century, the two components were more in phase and reinforced one another. But then starting just before 2020, they start to go out of phase and cancel one another, leading to a weak SBMF and much reduced sunspot activity. The conclusion was that solar cycles 24-27 would be weak, getting progressively weaker through 25, then 26, where very few sunspots would occur, slowly recovering in solar cycle 27. The upshot would be a new Grand Solar Minimum lasting from 2020-2053. This is what the forthcoming grand solar minimum was supposed to look like:
Solar cycle 25 was supposed to be much weaker than 24. It hasn’t turned out that way though:
SC25 is currently trending above predictions (blue curve) and if the near term forecast of activity is correct (red curve), solar maximum will arrive early and peak even higher than SC24. It seems unlikely that SC26 will then be as weak as previously forecast by Zharkova and others, but we shouldn’t rule out the possibility. However, no grand solar minimum for the foreseeable future. The Sun does influence the climate here on earth, quite significantly, via a complex web of interactions involving not least the ENSO cycle (alternating tropical Pacific El Ninos and La Ninas), plus the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), so if solar activity picks up again, we might see more warming. The rare ‘triple dip’ La Nina, which has seen temperatures in the Pacific cool significantly, is now ending and an El Nino is forecast this autumn/winter which, depending on its strength, will bump up global temperatures. So expect a climate alarmist feeding frenzy in the coming year. Shame, these pests will jump on any evidence of natural warming to claim the imminence of man-made Thermageddon, but a grand solar minimum wasn’t really good news anyway. The last one certainly wasn’t.
Addendum
Here is the latest sunspot numbers for SC25. As you can see, they are really picking up:
Source: https://www.solen.info/solar/
Very interesting, but I'm not sure that we're out of the woods yet. SC25 was never going to be the start of a Grand Solar Minimum (i.e. no-one was forecasting it was going to be a big fat zero), but it could have heralded the start of one! While things are looking fiery at the minute, the actual cycle in approaching max and so tapering could happen quickly. If ths happens (not inconsistent with the trend), then who knows? The butterfly diagram (sunspot latitude diagram) is not ruling anything out: https://twitter.com/AlexStarling77/status/1642284195006251011.
Until a "model" can be made that accurately forecasts the next week/month/year everything else is just silicomasturbation.