Positions on solar influence on global and regional climate
In 2007, Lockwood co-authored a paper about solar data from the past 40 years. He was partly inspired to conduct the study after seeing the Great Global Warming Swindle, which contends that the Sun is the primary cause of recent climate change. He found that between 1985 and 1987 all the solar factors that could affect climate performed an "U-turn in every possible way". Lockwood told the New Scientist that he seriously doubted that solar influences were a big factor compared to anthropogenic influences: to explain the lack of global cooling since 1987 would require a very long response time to any solar forcing which is not found in detected responses to volcanic forcing. However, Lockwood has stressed the distinction between global, regional and seasonal climate changes and is of the opinion that solar modulation of the winter, northern hemisphere jet stream might well result in Europe experiencing a higher fraction of cold winters. From past variations of the Sun deduced from cosmogenic isotopes he concludes that a slide into a new Maunder Minimum is possible over the next 50–100 years. The biggest impact of such a decline in solar activity would be a higher occurrence frequency of relatively cold winters in the UK and across Europe, each of which would be accompanied by a relatively warm one elsewhere. In 2012, Lockwood criticised the scientific field as having been "corrupted by unwelcome political and financial influence as climate change sceptics have seized upon putative solar effects as an excuse for inaction on anthropogenic warming".
Awards
1990 The Zel'dovich Award for Commission C. Awarded by COSPAR.
M. Lockwood, The study of HF radio waves propagated over a long, sub-auroral path, Exeter University, UK, 1978
Saas-Fe Book, J.D. Haigh, M. Lockwood and M.S. Giampapa, The Sun, Solar Analogs and the Climate, Springer,, 2004
M. Lockwood Reconstruction and Prediction of Variations in the Open Solar Magnetic Flux and Interplanetary Conditions, Living Reviews in Solar Physics, 10, 4, 2013.
M. Lockwood, Solar Influence on Global and Regional Climate, Surveys in Geophysics, 33, 503–534, 2012.
M. Lockwood et al., The rise and fall of open solar flux during the current grand solar maximum, Ap. J., 700, 937–944, 2009.
M. Lockwood et al., A doubling of the sun's coronal magnetic field during the last 100 years, Nature, 399, 437–439, 1999.
S.W.H. Cowley and M. Lockwood, Excitation and decay of solar-wind driven flows in the magnetosphere-ionosphere system, Annales Geophys., 10, 103–115, 1992.
M. Lockwood et al., Ionospheric signatures of pulsed magnetic reconnection at the Earth's magnetopause, Nature, 361, 424–428, 1993, 1993
M. Lockwood et al., Non-Maxwellian ion velocity distributions observed using EISCAT, Geophys. Res. Lett., 14, 111–114, 1987.
M. Lockwood et al., The geomagnetic mass spectrometer – mass and energy dispersions of ionospheric ion flows into the magnetosphere, Nature, 316, 612–613, 1985.
