"Tudor Hughes" wrote:

"Togless" wrote:
Teignmouth" wrote:
People should be careful of what they wish for, a Mini
Ice Age would be much more damaging to the World
economy & day to day living than Global Warming.

A 'mini ice age' now would take us all the way back to the
blisteringly cold climate of... the 1980s.

If you'd said the 1880's I'd take the remark a little more seriously.

According to the palaeo data, the LIA was about 0.4C cooler globally than
the MWP and the mid-20th Century. 0.4C back from today's temperature takes
us to the global temperature of the mid-1980s.

The world has warmed so much in the last 100 years or so that a global
cooling of a few tenths of a degree would be insignificant, unless for some
reason it had highly localised effects which weren't seen in the 20th
Century.

Part of the reason for the locally harsh winters around the North Atlantic
and Europe during the LIA may have been expansion of ice and snow cover
which acted as a positive feedback to the relatively small global cooling.
It's unlikely this would happen now, given the rate of global warming which
is causing rapidly diminishing snow and ice cover over the northern
hemisphere. Solar physicists say that at best, a Maunder Minimum-scale
decrease in insolation would delay global warming by 15 years or so, but
then it would continue as before (assuming we don't come to our senses and
start fixing the problem).