In an exclusive interview, scientist Valentina Zharkova told The Epoch Times that her 2015 paper predicting the onset of a grand solar minimum between 2020 and 2053 has been borne out, prompting her to warn that temperatures could soon rapidly fall. Grand solar minima last for multiple solar cycles, during which the sun produces less energy and sunspot activity is low. During a previous grand solar minimum, the Maunder minimum between 1645 and 1715, glaciers expanded and the River Thames in England frequently froze over. “The temperature during the current grand solar minimum will be slightly higher than it was during the Maunder minimum—and this grand solar minimum will be shorter,” Zharkova predicted. In their 2015 publication, Zharkova and her colleagues derived a pair of principal components from the solar background magnetic field. They linked those components to a pair of magnetic waves originating in different layers of the sun. …