{"id":3884,"date":"2015-08-09T14:31:53","date_gmt":"2015-08-09T18:31:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/?p=3884"},"modified":"2015-08-09T14:33:40","modified_gmt":"2015-08-09T18:33:40","slug":"sunspots-ice-ages-and-changing-climate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/2015\/08\/sunspots-ice-ages-and-changing-climate\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunspots, ice ages and changing climate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late last month a story made the rounds of national newspapers about predictions of a new Little Ice Age<\/a> that would hit the world in about 15 years, based on some solar research done by scientists in the United Kingdom. \u00a0One example of the story from AOL.com<\/em> is available here<\/a>\u00a0and a longer-more detailed story at LiveScience<\/em> here<\/a>.\u00a0 The stories said that new predictions of solar activity would lead to sharply decreasing temperatures in 15 years.<\/p>\n

Climatologists later looked at these stories and determined that the popular press had misinterpreted the results of the astronomy research and that the change in the solar cycle was unlikely to lead to catastrophic cooling. \u00a0You can read an excellent two-part discussion of this topic by Dr. Ricky Rood at the Weather Underground<\/em> blog\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This week\u00a0Astronomy Now<\/em>\u00a0announced that a conflict in the historical number of sunspots based on two different time series of sunspot counts has been resolved by astronomers. \u00a0Here is a link<\/a> to the story. \u00a0The new corrected data show that the recent warming in global temperature could not have been due to increased solar activity, since the original spurious upward trend in sunspots in one of the original datasets was shown to be faulty in the new analysis.<\/p>\n

Climatologists use paleodata like tree rings, sunspots, lake and ocean sediments and ice cores to look at climate patterns over\u00a0longer time periods that the historical instrumental record of about 150 years can measure. \u00a0Climate modelers use the results of paleodata analysis to test their models to see how well they can predict past climates. \u00a0That gives them confidence that the models will also work well for future climates.<\/p>\n

\"Source:<\/a>
Source: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Late last month a story made the rounds of national newspapers about predictions of a new Little Ice Age that would hit the world in about 15 years, based on some solar research done by scientists in the United Kingdom. \u00a0One example of the story from AOL.com is available here\u00a0and a longer-more detailed story at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":2252,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,16,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-and-ag-in-the-news","category-climate-science","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3884"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3981,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3884\/revisions\/3981"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/climate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}