Make the most of this summer because it could be your last decent one: winter is coming as the planet enters the most devastating cooling period since the 65-year Maunder Minimum of the 17th and early 18th centuries.

This is the dire forecast of Professor Valentina Zharkova, a solar physicist at Northumbria University, who has based her prediction on sun spot activity – known to be a significant driver of global climate – which is currently very low and likely to get even lower during the next three solar cycles.

She has spoken about her research and her battle to get it taken seriously by the climate establishment in an interview with the Global Warming Policy Forum. You can see it in this short film.

According to Professor Zharkova:

We will see it from 2020 to 2053, when the three next cycles will be very reduced magnetic field of the sun. Basically what happens is these two waves, they separate into the opposite hemispheres and they will not be interacting with each other, which means that resulting magnetic field will drop dramatically nearly to zero. And this will be a similar conditions like in Maunder Minimum. What will happen to the Earth remains to be seen and predicted because nobody has developed any program or any models of terrestrial response – they are based on this period when the sun has maximum activity — when the sun has these nice fluctuations, and its magnetic field [is] very strong. But we’re approaching to the stage when the magnetic field of the sun is going to be very, very small.

The Maunder Minimum occurred during the depths of the Little Ice Age, a period of feeble summers and bitingly cold winters, war, pestilence and famine. It wasn’t all bad: rivers like the Thames in London froze so thickly they could accommodate Ice Fairs; and it’s said that the slow tree growth induced by the cold gave the wood in Stradivarius violins their special timbre. On the whole, though, a descent into a new mini Ice Age would be massively debilitating both to the global economy and people’s living standards. Since the Little Ice Age ended in the middle of the Nineteenth century, we have all got used to the comforts and agricultural advantages (such as being able to grow wheat in more northerly latitudes) of living through a period of global warming. A second Little Ice Age will come as a very nasty shock.

That shock will be felt most especially by the world’s climate alarmist Establishment, whose scientists and learned institutions have staked their reputation on the idea that CO2, not solar activity, is the prime driver of climate and that the planet is on a warming trend not a cooling one.

This explains why when Professor Zharkova first released her findings last year, various climate alarmists went behind her back to the Royal Astronomical Society to try to persuade them to withdraw the press release.

Some of them were welcoming and discussing. But some of them were quite — I would say — pushy. They were trying to actually silence us. Some of them contacted the Royal Astronomical Society, demanding, behind our back, that they withdraw our press release. The Royal Astronomical Society replied to them and CCed to us and said, ‘Look, this is the work by the scientists who we support, please discuss this with them.’ We had about 8 or 10 exchanges by email, when I tried to prove my point, and I’m saying, I’m willing to look at what you do, I’m willing to see how our results we produced and what the sun has explained to us. So how this is transformed into climate we do not produce; we can only assume it should be. So we’re happy to work with you, and add to your data our results. So don’t take the sunspots which you get, we can give you our curve. Work with our curve. So they didn’t want to.

But Zharkova’s ice age predictions have been backed by a number of scientists, among them Australia’s Dr David Evans with his Notch-Delay solar theory and, more surprisingly, by scientists at Germany’s ideologically warmist Potsdam Institute.

Meteorologist Paul Dorian of Vencore Weather has also predicted an imminent solar minimum as the world finds itself in the weakest solar cycle for more than a century.

Evans is so confident of the imminent cooling that he’s helping set up a hedge fund specifically geared to betting against global warming. I’ve written about this before at Breitbart. It’s called Cool Futures and I am – technically speaking – a hedge fund manager because I bought a share in it. You can too if you go to their website. It seems to me a very sensible way of getting payback for all that green guff we’ve been sold over the last few decades. Perhaps with the profits, we shareholders might be among the few people able to afford the extravagantly high heating bills during the coming mini Ice Age. If he’s really lucky and we’re feeling generous when he comes knocking at our door begging for help, we might even be kind enough to toss the odd lump of coal or two in the direction of a shivering, starving old man with a tattered tartan tie round his neck.

“See that sad old loser?” we can say to our kids. “That guy used to be a billionaire hedge fund manager. Tom Steyer, his name is. Poor guy went and staked everything on global warming. Go on, kids. Have a pity on him. Chuck him one more piece of coal. And if you can get him on the head this time that’ll score you an extra fifty points.”