All Posts Tagged With: "Chill"

Prepare for the big chill. Notwithstanding the near hysteria over global warming the earth cooled 0.7C in 2007, the fastest decline in the age of instrumentation, putting us back to where the Earth was in 1930.

Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut, and who served as mission specialist on the Apollo 14 lunar mission writes the same solar phenomenon that doomed Napoleon’s army may soon stop Al Gore’s march to glory cold.

The sun goes through a series of 11-year cycles in which sunspots fluctuate in both number and intensity, greatly influencing Earth’s climate and weather. The end of each cycle is called a solar minimum, where sunspot activity is at a low point. Activity usually picks up after that as each new cycle begins. The most recent minimum occurred in March 2007. Sunspot activity should have increased shortly after that but sunspot activity has remained at a virtual standstill.

If you log on to www.spaceweather.com, you will see a current picture of the sun from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) with but a single tiny sunspot, dubbed number 992. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this, according to Chapman, was during what was called the Dalton Minimum, a particularly cold period that lasted several decades starting in 1790. “Northern winters became ferocious,” he says.

Solar researchers report no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate another repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth. Were that to continue at that rate for 20-years a drop of 14 degrees Celsius would trigger glaciation and an ice age would return.

Chapman and increasing numbers of other scientist are asking the rhetorical question “What’s wrong with this picture.”