BBC runs 6 excellent minutes on quiet sun and past correlation with Little Ice Age

Watts Up With That?

Guest post by Alec Rawls

Nice hype by Matt Drudge, whose three linked quotes are all from the BBC’s one brief paragraph of text, but the accompanying video (full transcription below) is more substantial, with scientists talking about the likelihood of an extended Maunder Minimum type period low solar activity and the cold temperatures that coincided with the Maunder Minimum during the 1600’s.

Professor Richard Harrison from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is clear about the correlation [at 1:57]:

The Maunder Minimum of course was a period of almost no sunspots at all for decades and we saw a really dramatic period where there were very cold winters in the northern hemisphere. It was a period where you had a kind of mini ice-age. You had a period where the Thames froze in winters and so on. It was an interesting time.

BBC science correspondent Rebecca Morelle doesn’t shy away…

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Climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide more limited than extreme projections, research shows | Science Daily

“… A new study suggests that the rate of global warming from doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be less than the most dire estimates of some previous studies — and, in fact, may be less severe than projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007…”

via Climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide more limited than extreme projections, research shows.