Cold sun= cold earth... who'd have thought?

From Wattsupwiththat.com

Solar Science Bipolar Disorder

Guest post by Steven Goddard

About once every 11 years, the sun’s magnetic poles reverse. However some high profile solar scientists reverse their own polarity more frequently.

England Scotland and Wales Covered With Snow in 2010

The BBC reported Wednesday that Mike Lockwood at the University of Reading has established a statistical link between cold weather and low solar activity.

The UK and continental Europe could be gripped by more frequent cold winters in the future as a result of low solar activity, say researchers.

“By recent standards, we have just had what could be called a very cold winter and I wanted to see if this was just another coincidence or statistically robust,” said lead author Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading, UK.

To examine whether there was a link, Professor Lockwood and his co-authors compared past levels of solar activity with the Central England Temperature (CET) record, which is the world’s longest continuous instrumental record of such data.

The researchers used the 351-year CET record because it provided data that went back to the beginning of the Maunder Minimum, a prolonged period of very low activity on the Sun that lasted about half a century.

The Maunder Minimum occurred in the latter half of the 17th Century – a period when Europe experienced a series of harsh winters, which has been dubbed by some as the Little Ice Age. Following this, there was a gradual increase in solar activity that lasted 300 years.

Professor Lockwood explained that studies of activity on the Sun, which provides data stretching back over 9,000 years, showed that it tended to “ramp up quite slowly over about a 300-year period, then drop quite quickly over about a 100-year period”.

He said the present decline started in 1985 and was currently about “half way back to a Maunder Minimum condition”. More at the BBC

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His study was basically a rehash of what many others have done previously over the past few centuries, but he has the BBC’s ear – because in 2007 he prominently claimed just the opposite.

No Sun link’ to climate change

Tuesday, 10 July 2007

“This should settle the debate,” said Mike Lockwood

Similarly, in 2006 David Hathaway at NASA reported that the Sun’s conveyor belt had “slowed to a record low.”

May 10, 2006: The Sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl, according to research by NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. “It’s off the bottom of the charts,” he says. “This has important repercussions for future solar activity.”

Then on March 12, 2010 he reported the exact opposite:

March 12, 2010: In today’s issue of Science, NASA solar physicist David Hathaway reports that the top of the sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years.

In 1810, the great English astronomer William Herschel established a link between sunspot activity and the price of grain in Europe - a proxy for climate. As far as we know, he never reversed polarity on that belief.

Modern solar science is just coming around to what Herschel hypothesized 200 years ago.