Is a Mini Ice Age Coming? 'Maunder Minimum' Spurs Controversy - Live Science Regarding the Maunder Minimum predicted by Zharkova, Feulner said, "The expected decrease in global temperature would be 0.1 degrees Celsius at most, compared to about 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times by the year 2030," Feulner told the Post. Furthermore, this isn't the first time research has predicted waning heat from the sun, to which experts also said that man-made global warming won't be trumped.
"The Little Ice Age may have been more significant in terms of increased variability of the climate, rather than changes in the average climate itself," Mann wrote. Furthermore, the most dramatic climatic extremes happened with year-to-year temperature changes, rather than prolonged multiyear periods of cold.
Mann points to atmospheric circulation patterns, like the North Atlantic Oscillation, to explain some of the regional variability during the Little Ice Age. Although the coldest year in Europe and over much of the Northern Hemisphere was 1838, temperatures were relatively mild over significant portions of Greenland and Alaska during the same year. A large volcanic eruption in Cosigüina, Nicaragua, in 1838 may have emitted aerosols that circulated through the atmosphere, deflecting incoming solar radiation and cooling the air.
Also, Dickens' white Christmases may have benefited from the 1815 eruption of the volcano Tambora in Indonesia.
Although solar activities can align with changes in temperatures, there are many processes that contribute to climatic variations, and human-induced climate change will likely prove too big a force for muted solar activity to influence.
