Professor Valentina Zharkova of the U.K.'s Northumbria University faces opposition from climate scientists over data that could indicate the coming of an "ice age" because of declining solar activity.
In a study on sunspot modeling, Zharkova and her team discovered that solar activity could decrease to a level last seen during the "Little Ice Age" of the 17th century. Such a change could drastically affect global temperature modeling, but Zharkova said some climate scientists have rejected her research and sought to suppress it, The Daily Caller reports.
"Some of them were welcoming and discussing. But some of them were quite — I would say — pushy," Zharkova said in an interview with Global Warming Policy Forum posted Tuesday. "They were trying to actually silence us. Some of them contacted the Royal Astronomical Society, demanding, behind our back, that they withdraw our press release."
"The Royal Astronomical Society replied to them and CCed to us and said, 'Look, this is the work by the scientists who we support, please discuss this with them,'" Zharkova said.
"We had about eight or 10 exchanges by email, when I tried to prove my point, and I'm saying, I'm willing to look at what you do, I'm willing to see how our results we produced and what the sun has explained to us," she said. "So how this is transformed into climate we do not produce; we can only assume it should be. So we're happy to work with you, and add to your data our results."
"So don't take the sunspots which you get, we can give you our curve. Work with our curve. So they didn't want to," the scientist said.
Zharkova's research made headlines when unveiled a year ago, but some questioned the relationship between lower solar activity and the Little Ice Age. According to Forbes, the Little Ice Age was a mostly European event possibly caused by volcanic ash in the atmosphere blocking sunlight.