Journalists link solar science news to climate—and to the climate controversy
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8127
The Royal Astronomical Society press release “Irregular heartbeat of the Sun driven by double dynamo” explains that at the recent National Astronomy Meeting in Wales, Northumbria University astrophysicist and mathematics professor Valentina Zharkova reported on a new model of the Sun’s solar cycle. The model suggests that “solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645.” The resulting media stir merits notice.
No doubt this solar science news, bearing as it does on a topic important to everyone—weather—would have inspired international press attention even in the absence of a flourishing controversy over something else related to weather, human-caused climate disruption. In any case, the press attention includes plenty of what’s predictable: not just linkage of the solar-causation and human-causation realms, but outright confusion of the two as well.
An unconfused Daily Mail summarized the solar news and the weather implications with one of its multiple-subhead headlines :
Is a mini ICE AGE on the way? Scientists warn the sun will ‘go to sleep’ in 2030 and could cause temperatures to plummet
• New study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles
• Says that between 2030 and 2040 solar cycles will cancel each other out
• Could lead to ‘Maunder minimum’ effect that saw River Thames freeze over
The Royal Astronomical Society release links to a Wikipedia entry defining the Maunder minimum as the “prolonged sunspot minimum” period from about 1645 to about 1715 “when sunspots became exceedingly rare.” Wikipedia notes that it “coincided with a period of lower-than-average European temperatures.”
The solar news article at the UK’s Mirror—headlined “Planet Earth set to shiver through ‘mini ice age': Will it save humanity from global warming?"—eventually gives an answer to its headlined question: No. The article reports on the abstract from the 2010 Geophysical Research Letters paper “On the effect of a new grand minimum of solar activity on the future climate on Earth,” by Georg Feulner and Stefan Rahmstorf. That paper ends by declaring that “a new Maunder-type solar activity minimum cannot offset the global warming caused by human greenhouse gas emissions” and by adding that moreover, “any offset of global warming due to a grand minimum of solar activity would be merely a temporary effect, since the distinct solar minima during the last millennium typically lasted for only several decades or a century at most.”
Haaretz in Israel, also anticipating the inevitable public linkage and confusion, noted that Zharkova’s “prediction has nothing whatsoever to do with the phenomenon of human-driven climate change.” An anecdotal sampling of the coverage shows that many journalists played the story straight, just as the Daily Mail did.
But the subhead on the Register‘s article classifies the solar-science news as fitting into the “climate/solar debate.” And indeed that’s where many journalists have placed it. First on the “Read More” list following Huffington Post UK‘s article is a link to a piece headlined “Global warming ‘is delaying the next ice age.’” The Telegraph interrupts its online report after five sentences with this note irrelevantly directing readers to a diatribe alleging politically motivated scientific malfeasance: “Fiddling with temperature data is biggest science scandal ever (31,000 comments) .” The Examiner ends a solar news report with this:
What does this mean for global warming activists? It is too soon to tell, but the “Little Ice Age,” which occurred between 1300 and 1850 (per Britannica.com), was a period of mostly decreased solar activity divided by intervals of increased solar activity. It is as yet unknown whether the overall increase of temperatures on Earth in the past century will in some way offset a prolonged sunspot minimum, if and when the next one occurs.
An Examiner commentary on the solar news begins by reporting, “Some climate scientists are so worried sick about global warming that they are showing signs of psychological stress, Esquire informs us. UPI has some good news and some bad news concerning climate change on Saturday.” In fact the cited brief UPI article never mentions climate or climate change, though maybe it’s technically truthful to use that language about a decade- or decades-long cold period. The opening paragraph continues:
The good news is that global warming is not going to happen after all, at least for a long while. The bad news is that we’re in for a mini-ice age starting about 2030. The culprit is an engine that affects climate far more powerful than anything humanity can devise. That engine is the sun.
The commentary ends with this:
The prediction suggests that far from wanting to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions, the world community might want to consider increasing them instead. A little greenhouse effect might go a long way toward mitigating the frigid future that yet another group of scientists say is in store for us. On the other hand, the dueling predictions suggests [sic] that some caution and no little flexibility might be in order where policies related to global warming or global cooling or whatever constitutes climate change is this week.
The American Thinker commentary “Scientists warning of global cooling once again!” confuses the predicted brief period with global cooling, recycles the 1970s “global cooling” argument that Inside Science News Service has debunked , confuses climatology with weather prediction (“climatologists can’t predict the weather a week ahead,” it sneers), calls the solar prediction the “new political viewpoint of the environmental commissars,” and proposes that the finding “raises a big question about global warming. Will the two cancel each other out?”
In one of the online discussions, a reader cited a Skeptical Science write-up concluding that “science is quite clear that the human influence on climate change has become bigger than the sun’s.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.