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I've been doing a bit of mooching about, looking at what may be in store for us in terms of future climate as a result of the current sunspot minimum. Dr Hathaway said in late July that a Dalton style minimum with a peak of around 50 is possible ( http://www.gopexiles.com/?p=2760 ), and officially he and his NASA bunch have predicted a peak of 90 ( http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/29may_noaaprediction.htm ). My own thoughts are that we will end up around 55-65ish. With that in mind, here is a graph illustrating the smoothed sunspot activity over the last 400 years: As you can see the peaks during the Dalton minimum were around 55 and then 95. Taking a look at the temperature in Europe only over the last 1000 years: You can see that the Dalton minimum coincided with the so-called 'Dickens winters', where the temps across Europe were around 0.25c below the 1900-1999 mean. If we are moving towards another Dalton-type minimum we might expect temps across Europe to dip from the current level of approx. 0.15c above mean to around 0.25c below mean - a swing of 0.4c. If we take AGW into account, I don't think it's too liberal to theorise a swing of 0.3c. What might this mean for us in Britain? Well the mean annual CET for the period 1971-2000 is 9.75c. A downward adjustment of 0.3c results in a mean annual CET of 9.45c, not unlike the 1980's (average annual CET - 9.52C). Needless to say this is all harmless supposition and a lot depends on the depth of minimum and subsequent amplitude of maximum, but I have tried to be as impartial as I can possibly be - you can be the judge as to the success of this or not!! http://nwstatic.co.uk/forum/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif

Your prediction may well be right! I have read some opinions that time is starting to run out in this minimum to attain a proper deep minimum but purely from looking at that graph it is not unreasonable to speculate that there is some extra mileage in it yet. And in the final analysis what matters is weakening the upside potential in C24 solar max as much as poss. Each day does a little more work. And yes - we have another spotless day. Yay! Slowly slowly catchy monkey an all that Btw - love your signature. Very colourful !! Can't think where you got the idea from lol!?

Have found and copied from easternwx a comparison of our current solar minimum to the ones that commenced in 1896, 1909, and 1805 (Dalton). Can be seen that we are already passed the 1909 one. The first minimum at the start of the 1800s was reporting frequent, if not constant, zero sun spot months at this point. Atm we are perhaps in between the 1896 and 1805 scenarios? We might know by this time next year! 0