Calm Sun, Cold Earth!

By Alan Caruba

When you’re well known as a global warming skeptic, it comes as no surprise that any scientific evidence that refutes this hoax means that your email box fills up quickly as the dissenters share the news. I am among a relative handful of people who also believe that we are heading right into a new Ice Age.

Investors Business Daily had an editorial today, Feb 7, titled “The Sun Also Sets”, in which it cited the views of Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council. In essence, Tapping wants people to know that solar activity such as sunspots, i.e., magnetic storms, “has been disturbingly quiet.”

It’s useful to know that global temperatures closely reflect solar cycles.

The lack of activity “could signal the beginning of what is known as the Maunder Minimum.” While solar cycles tend to last about 11 years, the lack of normal or increased activity can trigger the Maunder Minimum, an event that occurs every few centuries, can last as long as a century, and causes a colder earth.

The most recent such event was the mini-Ice Age that climatologists date from around 1300 to 1850. In the midst of this there was a distinct solar hibernation from around 1650 to 1715.

“Tapping reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.”

If you have been paying attention to global weather reports, you know that China has had the heaviest snowfall in at least three decades. David Deming, a geophysicist, in a December 19, 2007 article in The Washington Times, noted that, “South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918.” This occurred across the entire Southern Hemisphere. “Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever.”

This represents a major threat to Earth’s population because it means that food crops will fail and, with them, the means to feed livestock, and the rest of us.

Up to now, the mainstream media has ignored this cooling. They have been in complete thrall to the howling of Al Gore with his endless lies about an imminent warming. Add to Gore the large numbers of scientists who have sold their soul to the global warming lies in order to receive millions in research grants.

Driving this bogus crisis has been the United Nations whose International Panel on Climate Change reports have been based, not on hard science such as observations of solar activity, but on flawed, often deliberately false computer models. To their credit, many of the IPCC participants have protested these reports.

Now layer in U.S. politicians and their counterparts in Europe who are seeking to impose all manner of limits on energy use based on the false assertion that greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming. They want to mandate a “cap-and-trade” scheme that will make some people and industries wealthy selling credits that will permit greenhouse gas emissions. But it is not greenhouse gases we need to fear, it is the action or inaction of the Sun.

At the very moment the Earth is on the cusp of what is likely to be a very long cooling and possibly a full scale repeat of the last Ice Age, all the engines of government, nationally and internationally, are trying to inhibit the discovery, extraction, and use of energy reserves that will be needed to cope with climate changes that will impact millions, if not billions of people.

All the wind turbines and solar panels in the world will not keep you warm in your home or apartment when a short or long term cooling of the Earth occurs. Ironically, as the Greens rant about so-called endangered polar bears in the Arctic, the bears are far more likely to survive than humans.

What controls the Earth’s climate? The Sun!