Mini Ice-Age or global warming: Why can't they make their minds up?

'Britain heading for Mini-Ice Age!' has elbowed out ‘we are all going to fry!' as the latest doom-laden prediction from the climate scientists.

After two chilly winters in northwest Europe researchers have pointed to changes in Solar Activity and the complexities of the grand currents that govern the weather systems over the Pacific and concluded that there may be links to the weather in our little archipelago, specifically that we should put in our orders for extra-strong antifreeze and winter tyres right now.

But, you will be saying, I thought the science of climate change was, as Ed Milliband said, ‘settled’?



Big Ben, London, veiled by snow: is Britain really heading for a mini ice-age?

We are burning fossil fuels; this makes carbon dioxide, which in turn acts as a gigantic pair of thermals around our planet causing it to warm up. What’s all this ice-age nonsense?

In short, it is complicated. I don’t mean that in a patronising way – I understand this and you do not – but because no one, not the scientists and certainly not me, grasps fully the dynamics of the Earth’s weather, a system so devilishly complex it makes the workings of the Large Hadron Collider look like a set of Meccano.

The mathematics of it all is literally so complicated that no human can possibly hope to grasp what is going on, and the Met Office uses some of the most powerful computers ever made to do the sums.

That said, there are some truths which are simpler to grasp. First, weather vs climate. ‘Weather’ is what clothes you pick to wear today. ‘Climate’ is the contents of your wardrobe.

‘Climate change’ means a change in the latter not, necessarily, the former. Thus, in a warmer world it will still be possible to have freezing winters, even record-breaking freezing winters, although we should expect the frequency of such events to decline.

Similarly, there were heat waves even during the last ‘real’ mini ice-age in the 13th-18th Centuries, which of course saw summers, springs and autumns as well as those terrible winters when they had jolly frost fairs on the Thames.



Climate change of the sort the scientific consensus insists is upon us is change of a slow, relentless two-steps-forward-one-step-back sort, not a sudden jerk into a greenhouse world with no ice and London under water.

So what about this ice-age stuff? That sounds more like ‘climate’ than ‘weather’, surely? Well, again yes and no. One of the great foolishnesses of the climate change advocates has been a more-or-less deliberate and conscious attempt over the years to write the Sun out of the equation.



That is daft because of course without the Sun there would be no climate or weather at all; the seas and even the atmosphere would freeze solid.



At least, with a wholly stable Sun you can at least ignore it when it comes to change in climate.



But, as we have known for a long time (since the 18th Century actually) the Sun is not wholly stable. There are stars out there which literally change colour from one week to the next.



It was foolish for the environmentalists to pretend that climate change is simple and to start blaming individual weather events on it.

Our Sun is not that capricious. But it does seem to go through a series of cycles one of which is the 11-year variation between maximum and minimum activity on its surface, in terms of sunspots and solar flares.

Its overall output varies by a factor of about one part in a thousand, which does not sound like much but it is probably enough to cause quite noticeable changes here on Earth.

A few weeks ago we had a study showing that there may be links between this 11-year cycle and cosmic ray intensity and, in turn, cloud formation and temperatures. Now it seems there may be another effect.



This week, in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists from the Met Office have demonstrated that changes in the intensity of Solar ultraviolet radiation have quite dramatic effects on the upper atmosphere which in turn can have equally dramatic effects on the ground.



Specifically, last year’s cold winter may – and everyone is stressing that may – have been caused at least in part by an unusually quiescent Sun.

Then there are those Pacific Ocean currents, El Nino and La Nina. The latter is particularly confusing as its effects seem to mask, at least in the short term, the overall warming trend, bringing unusually chill air to the eastern seaboard of North America and to northwest Europe. Just what causes El Nino and La Nina is not fully understood.

So what does this mean for global warming and mini-ice ages? As I said, it is complicated. If we are heading for a really unusually low period of solar activity – a Grand Solar Minimum – then we can expect this to mask, at least in our part of the world, the effects of the general warming trend.



Yes we may be in for a string of chilly winters but ‘mini ice-age’ is an exaggeration. And the effect will (hopefully) be temporary.

Dial in the cosmic ray factor, and the behaviour of the Pacific and you could be forgiven for wondering whether there is any point at all in making predictions.

But I am afraid that the relationship between carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and overall temperature remains one of the simpler relationships in the great climate game.



Pretending the Sun doesn’t really matter was, as I said, foolish.

Yes we may be in for a string of chilly winters but ¿mini ice-age¿ is an exaggeration. And the effect will (hopefully) be temporary.

It was also foolish for the environmentalists to pretend that climate change is simple and to start blaming individual weather events on it.



A warmer world might mean a cooler Britain, a warer Britain, it may trigger floods or droughts.



A lot of this is work in progress hence the often odd, apparently contradictory messages being put out by the climate modellers.



They won't listen to me, but one bit of advice would surely be to go easy on the 'firm' predictions until you are sure that your computer model accurately reflects reality.

We cannot affect what the Sun does and we cannot do anything about La Nina or El Nino.