While decreased solar activity will decidedly play a role as stated earlier, our good old friend global warming will be the main culprit for this trend.
«The stagnation of temperature since 1998 was caused
by decreasing solar activity since 1998,» wrote Jürgen Lange Heine, a physicist with the German - based European Institute for Climate and Energy.
«The stagnation of temperature since 1998 was caused by
decreasing solar activity since 1998,» wrote Jürgen Lange Heine, a physicist with the German - based European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE).
Completely independently of this oceanographic data, a simple correlation analysis (Foster and Rahmstorf ERL 2011) showed that the flatter warming trend of the last 10 years was mostly a result of natural variability, namely the recently more frequent appearance of cold La Niña events in the tropical Pacific and a small contribution
from decreasing solar activity.
Last year, a team of European researchers unveiled a scientific model at the National Astronomy Meeting in Wales predicting a «mini ice age» from 2030 to 2040 as a result
of decreased solar activity.
We are currently within a period of
decreasing solar activity, which may spell the end for severe magnetic storms in the near future,» Kataoka says.
Scientists now say that
decreased solar activity may increase the frequency of cold winters and return Northern Eur
This is key to deciding if we should panic over CO2 or, for example, be equally concerned about the possibility of global cooling due to
decreased solar activity.
Anyway, the long term trend seen in the cosmic ray flux, after you average out the 11 - year solar cycle, is an increase from the 50's to the 70's (because of
a decreased solar activity), and then a decrease from the 70's to 90's (i.e., increase in solar activity.