Scientists dispute 'ice age' warnings

Tyler Pager | USA TODAY

No one is more surprised than Valentina Zharkova that her research prompted a worldwide media storm over the next ice age.

That's because her research never even mentioned an ice age.

Zharkova, a professor of mathematics at Northumbria University in England, argued at Royal Astronomical Society’s national meeting last week that solar activity will decline drastically in the 2030s. She posited that the sun's activity will be comparable to a period in the 17th century known as the Maunder minimum. The period coincided with the “Little Ice Age,” when a cold spell fell over Europe and parts of North America.

Media outlets got wind of her research and some concluded it suggested the 2030s would be the world’s next ice age because of the drop in solar activity.

“In the press release, we didn’t say anything about climate change,” she told USA TODAY. “My guess is when they heard about Maunder minimum, they used Wikipedia or something to find out more about it.”

So her academic theory, to her surprise, began trending on social media and went viral. Scientists, however, are pushing back against the ice age warnings.

“It’s complete garbage,” said Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “(The research is) not uninteresting, but it’s like people worrying about the cost of their latte when they can’t pay their mortgage payments."

Jason Funk, a senior climate scientist for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the ice age premise flies in the face of a much more compelling body of scientific evidence: global warming.

“We’re living in a time when human activity has created so many emissions of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere that that effect is now swamping the effects of these cycles of sun energy hitting the earth,” he said. “Because of the human-driven effect on the climate we’ve seeing now, the importance of the sun dynamic is somewhat diminished relative to what people are doing to the climate system.”

Zharkova disagreed with the global warming argument. She said that although she did not intend to suggest an ice age is coming, she doesn't dispute it. She maintains the decline in solar activity will reduce solar irradiance, which heats the sun.