| More on this story from yesterday. |
[PRESSTV] Scientists say our Sun will likely enter a cooldown cycle as soon as 2050, but the phase has almost no effect on global warming. Physicist Dan Lubin at the University of Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party, San Diego and two of his colleges managed to collect and observe relevant data for the past 20 years and came to the conclusion that the giant burning ball of gas in our planetary system might enter a "grand minimum" period of decreased ultraviolet radiation that would last for some 11 years by mid-century.
"The cooldown... [is] a periodic event during which the Sun’s magnetism diminishes, sunspots form infrequently, and less ultraviolet radiation (UV) makes it to the surface of the planet," researchers noted in a statement earlier this week, adding that "the event is triggered at irregular intervals by random fluctuations related to the Sun’s magnetic field."
The study, whose results were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, said the Sun is likely to be 6.9 percent cooler than its usual lowest amount of activity in the grand minimum.
According to the researchers, the cooldown phase could echo those experienced in Europe
...also known as Moslem Lebensraum...in the mid-17th century, called the "Maunder Minimum," or the prolonged sunspot minimum, during which temperatures were low enough to cause London's River Thames to freeze over on a regular basis and to freeze the Baltic Sea to such an extent that Swedish troops were able to invade Denmark in 1658 on foot by marching across the sea ice.
| Thank goodness for anthropogenic global warming. Imagine how impossibly cold it would have become without it! |