The Astrophysicist Warning About the Coming Little Ice Age: “It’s Already Started”
“CO2 is not a bad gas,” says Valentina Zharkova, a Professor at the Northumbria University in Newcastle, U.K. On the contrary, she points out, every garden centre uses it in its greenhouses to make plants lush and green. “We actually have a CO2 deficit in the world, and it’s three to four times less than the plants would like,” she notes, adding that the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere has been at much higher levels throughout our planet’s history than it is now.
In fact,
over the last 140 million years, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been steadily decreasing and only now slightly starting to rise. It is currently around 420 parts per million (ppm), or 0.042%. 140 million years ago, it was estimated at 2,500 ppm (0.25%), or about six times higher. And it also meant a greener and more biodiverse world. If CO2 were to fall below 150 ppm (0.015%), it would already mean the extinction of vegetation and all other life. We came close to that
during the last glacial maximum when it was at 182 ppm (0.018%).
Zharkova says that the fact that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are now increasing is a good thing. “We don’t need to remove CO2 because we would actually need more of it. It’s food for plants to produce oxygen for us. The people who say CO2 is bad are obviously not very well educated at university or wherever they studied. Only uneducated people can come up with such absurd talk that CO2 should be removed from the air,” says Zharkova.
The Sun – a natural driver of climate change
In fact, Professor Zharkova can go on at length about what CO2 does or does not do in nature and how it behaves, but she does not actually study it directly as a scientist.
Zharkova is an astrophysicist originally from Ukraine. She graduated in mathematics from Kiev National University and did her PhD at the Main Astronomical Observatory in Kiev, Ukraine. She has worked and done research at various U.K. universities since 1992 and has been a Professor of Mathematics at the Northumbria University since 2013, teaching key Maths and Physics modules.
However, her research has focused on the Sun and she can confirm that, unlike CO2, the Sun plays a major role in Earth’s climate change. So much so, in fact, that Zharkova’s
research suggests that we have entered a colder period, or essentially a little ice age, in the next 30 years, as the Sun’s activity weakens in the context of global warming.
In other words, there is not a question of Zharkova – or any other scientist who is justifiably sceptical about the omnipotent power of the CO2 molecule to warm the air – denying climate change. On the contrary, climate change and the cooling or warming of temperatures are very real, she asserts. For example, Zharkova points out that in Scotland, where she has lived for many years, the weather was much warmer 2,000 years ago. “The Romans were growing grapes and making wine in Scotland at that time, for example,” she says.
However, between 1645 and 1715, for example, the period known as the
Maunder Minimum, when the Sun’s activity weakened particularly sharply, the weather in Europe became much colder. Britain’s major rivers – such as the Thames and Tyne – could be skated on, and the Dutch canals regularly froze over. Alpine glaciers widened and absorbed large areas of arable land, and the ice mass expanded strongly southwards from the Arctic. Temperatures across the planet were much lower – in Europe and North America, for example, up to 5° to 7°C colder in places. This is a huge change.
Zharkova
estimates using some previous
research that on average – which of course means potentially much larger changes from region to region – the Earth’s temperature will fall by one degree Celsius over the next 30 years, and not rise, as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns us.
She explains that such abrupt changes depend on the cycles of solar activity. When the Sun is less active, its decreasing magnetic field causes a decrease in irradiance. Less solar radiation means less heat. According to Zharkova, such a change occurs every 350-400 years (
grand solar cycle or GSC), and she says we entered one of the Grand Solar Minima (GSM) separating GSCs in 2020. This GSM will continue until 2053 after which in cycle 28 the solar activity will return to normal.
. Worked for us just negative - they objected. We messed up allowing them laws to protect themselves like giving themselves pay raises and investigating themselves and…. 
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