Ahhh for the good old days of global warming….

Back in 2005, I was ranting in the pages of the Powder River Examiner (and others)on the Climate Gloom/Doom Folks called Global Warmers and made the prediction that we will be wishing for the good old warm days around 2025. By then the new global cooling trend (started in 2010) really starts kicking in.  I said then, “don’t sell your snowmobiles”. It is starting to look like I was right.

I have been studying the earth past and present seriously for 35 years now.  I have always been an earth scientist who believed that the sun’s variable activity dominates the warming or cooling of the planet (duhhh).  There has always been a large body of evidence supporting this idea in contrast to what the “consensus of scientists” would have you believe.  Slowly coming into the light of day (and the press) are the Solar scientists.  Here is another spin for you, it appears that our sun is going into a period where it is cooling off.  It all has to do with sunspots.  To explain it very basically, many sunspots on the sun’s surface denote a very active sun which is more energetic (hotter) than a sun without sunspots.  Sunspots come and go in periods denoting high and low activity every 11 or so years taking 22 years average to complete the cycle.  It comes as no surprise that the Sun’s most active period in over 11,000 years was during the end of the 20th century.  Amazingly, the last 10 years have displayed a clear cooling trend as temperatures post-1998 leveled out and now appear to be dropping globally. This corresponds to a long weak sunspot cycle ending in a whimper followed by the next cycle that seems reluctant to start. Temperatures world wide have already fallen by about 1/2 degree C over the last year apparently as a result of this very long drawn out solar sunspot minimum.  I have heard whispers in the scientific community that we may be heading into another really long solar minimum similar to the Maunder Minimum (a little ice age) back in the 18th century.  There were almost NO sunspots during the Maunder minimum (as in less that 50 total sunspots in over 60 years instead of a typical 40,000).  Solar scientist universally agree that the sun in going into a minimum period and if the solar cycle plays out the way that it appears to be going, we may loose 2 degrees centigrade over the next two decades.

Unfortunately, such observations make little difference to the public relations machine that is in goose step with the Global Warming bandwagon.  Those GW worshipers will continue to legislate new ways to control our energy use, the way we live and the way we travel with a good profit in it for some of them. (Sounds like a mutated form of communism to me). I guess that I am just too dense to see the significant effect of the 1 additional part CO2 in 10000 air that man has added during the industrialization of the globe, considering a climate system as vast as the earths.  Maybe the answer was up there every day staring us in the face giving Al Gore a tan in the process.

Frank Bliss

Copyright 2008