~ RHF wrote:
On Apr 2, 9:27 am, dave wrote:
Billy Burpelson wrote:

Telamon wrote:
And you can read about it here on the NASA web site.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm
dave wrote:
What more could they possibly add?
- - That we may be experiencing the beginning
- - of another "Maunder Minimum"?

The Maunder Minimum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_minimum

The Little Ice Age (LIA)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

While not a true ice age, the term was introduced into scientific
literature by François E. Matthes in 1939.[1] Climatologists and
historians working with local records no longer expect to agree on
either the start or end dates of this period, which varied according to
local conditions. Some confine the Little Ice Age to approximately the
16th century to the mid 19th century.[2] It is generally agreed that
there were three minima, beginning about 1650, about 1770, and 1850,
each separated by slight warming intervals.[3]

It is not certain if the LIA was a global phenomenon. The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describe areas affected
by the LIA; "Evidence from mountain glaciers does suggest increased
glaciation in a number of widely spread regions outside Europe prior to
the 20th century, including Alaska, New Zealand and Patagonia (Grove and
Switsur, 1994). However, the timing of maximum glacial advances in these
regions differs considerably, suggesting that they may represent largely
independent regional climate changes, not a globally-synchronous
increased glaciation" with "a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere
during this period of less than 1°C," and suggests that "current
evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold
or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of 'Little Ice
Age' and Medieval Warm Period appear to have limited utility in
describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in
past centuries. "
.
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