Conventional wisdom holds that solar activity swings back and forth like a simple pendulum. At one end of the cycle, there is a quiet time with few sunspots and flares. At the other end, solar max brings high sunspot numbers and frequent solar storms.
It's a regular rhythm that repeats every 11 years. Reality is more complicated. Astronomers have been counting sunspots for centuries, and they have seen that the solar cycle is not perfectly regular. 'Whatever measure you use, solar peaks are coming down,' Richard Harrison of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire told the BBC.
'I've been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I've never seen anything like this.' He says the phenomenon could lead to colder winters similar to those during the Maunder Minimum. 'There were cold winters, almost a mini ice age. 'You had a period when the River Thames froze.'
Comment:The implications for global warming are: THAT IT'S OVER!
Solar activity is so low that we may indeed be facing an ice age in the not too distant future:
Sun's bizarre activity may trigger another ice age
New paper predicts a sharp decline in solar activity until 2100
Falling temperatures are giving climate alarmists chills
The Frozen Thames, 1677 - an oil painting by Abraham Hondius shows the old London Bridge during the Maunder Minimum
Lucie Green of UCL believes that things could be different this time due to human activity.
'We have 400 years of observations, and it is in a very similar to phase as it was in the runup to the Maunder Minimum.
'The world we live in today is very different, human activity may counteract this - it is difficult to say what the consequences are.'Mike Lockwood University of Reading says that the lower temperatures could affect the global jetstream, causing weather systems to collapse.
'We estimate within 40 years there a 10-20% probability we will be back in Maunder Minimum territory,' he said.
Last year Nasa warned 'something unexpected' is happening on the Sun'
This year was supposed to be the year of 'solar maximum,' the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle.
But as this image reveals, solar activity is relatively low. unspot numbers are well below their values from 2011, and strong solar flares have been infrequent,' the space agency says.
The image above shows the Earth-facing surface of the Sun on February 28, 2013, as observed by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
It observed just a few small sunspots on an otherwise clean face, which is usually riddled with many spots during peak solar activity.
Experts have been baffled by the apparent lack of activity - with many wondering if NASA simply got it wrong.
However, Solar physicist Dean Pesnell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center believes he has a different explanation.
'This is solar maximum,' he says.
'But it looks different from what we expected because it is double-peaked.'
'The last two solar maxima, around 1989 and 2001, had not one but two peaks.'
Solar activity went up, dipped, then rose again, performing a mini-cycle that lasted about two years, he said.
The same thing could be happening now, as sunspot counts jumped in 2011 and dipped in 2012, he believes.
Pesnell expects them to rebound in 2013: 'I am comfortable in saying that another peak will happen in 2013 and possibly last into 2014.'
He spotted a similarity between Solar Cycle 24 and Solar Cycle 14, which had a double-peak during the first decade of the 20th century.
If the two cycles are twins, 'it would mean one peak in late 2013 and another in 2015'.
The first peak was in Nov-Dec 2011, and the spots were mostly confined to the Sun's Northern Sunspot Belt, just as in SC23. There is now a 2nd peak, Dec-Jan 2014, and the spots are mostly confined to the Southern Sunspot Belt, just like SC23's 2nd peak.
I don't believe there is enough data yet to conclude whether this cycle (SC24) is going to be a Maunder show-stopper, it could be like the Dalton Minimum (1795-1830's) where SC5 had many peaks. If the current peak is the last one of SC24, we will know that in 2-3 years as the Sun goes back into full hibernation, and it's more like the Maunder. Just don't have enough to call it as of yet. For sure, this is a Grand Minimum.
One thing in particular that stands out for the Dalton Minimum: Ukraine had a bountiful grain harvest during the worst of that Minimum, and for that reason, and that reason alone, Europe obtained the food it could not produce, avoiding the specter of starving masses succumbing to plague & disease. I'm pretty sure that Putin is fully aware of the value of the Ukraine's harvest. The Russian Solar Physicists have not been corrupted by political agenda's, and they are well poised to give critical guidance. The US is naïve and stupid by contrast, being run by men blinded to the reality that is now set to play out. If the population of the US falls victim to starvation and disease, the men running the place will lose their most valuable asset, and with that loss goes the means to sustain their maddened lust for power & control.