A new study by American solar experts identifies a sharp fall in sunspot activity since 2007 that fits the hallmarks of a soon-arriving ice age.
Solar scientists, not to be confused with climate scientists, study the most important heat engine driving our planet’s temperatures – the Sun.
Matthew Penn and William Livingston, solar astronomers with the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, have been following a marked decrease in sunspot activity recently.
Reputable studies link a prolonged drop in sunspot activity to a cooling epoch or even a potential new ice age as more sunspots correlate with more global warming, while fewer sunspots are proven to match episodes of long-term cooling.
Since the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 the talk has been about global warming. But 22 years on the evidence has grown to raise fears of a catastrophic climate switch in the opposite direction.
Backing up the claims is Australian Geophysicist, Phil Chapman, a former NASA astronaut. Chapman confirms the historic correlation of sunspots to global temperatures and points to the dearth of sunspots since 2007 as the reason why the world has since cooled by about 0.7C.
Writer, Alan Caruba (September 21, 2010) probes the story further after a June 14 article published in the New Scientist by Stuart Clark.
Caruba reports that Clark, “raised the question of why and where the sunspots have gone. Noting that they ebb and flow in cycles lasting about eleven years, Stuart said, “But for the last two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged in nearly 100 years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise.”
The last time sunspots disappeared altogether, during the Maunder Minimum (about 1645 to 1715), our planet descended into a lengthy period of cooling known as the Little Ice Age.
The last major ice age, known as the Younger Dryas happened 12,000 years ago. That sudden event plunged temperatures in the North Atlantic region to about 5°C colder with a 1000-year duration.
Today Californians just had the coldest summer in decades.
Last year in the northern hemisphere, Britain suffered one of the worst winters in 100 years.
While in the U.S. the National Weather Service (NWS) reported that the bitterly cold winter broke numerous temperature and snow extent records with the 4th coldest February on record.
New York and much of the U.S. Northeast was pumelled by record snow falls that deposited about 60cm (2 feet) of snow in NYC alone. While in New Zealand tens of thousands of lambs have perished in bitter winter snows.
Are we now seeing the specter of a return to the fears of the 1970s, when climatologists warned of ‘The Cooling World’ (Newsweek, April 28, 1975)?
Anna Petherick reporting for Nature.com (August 27, 2010) recently reported on the brutal northern winter that was quickly followed in the southern hemisphere by a viciously cold winter and Antarctic chills killing millions of aquatic animals in the Amazon.
So will these latest changes in the sun’s behavior finally force a more balanced look at the whole question of climate change, without the hysterical emphasis on CO2 levels and predictions of catastrophic warming?
Ref: http://www.suite101.com/content/evidence-of-solar-scientists-raise-fears-of-imminent-ice-age-a288855
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