Thursday, July 18, 2013

Sunspots and the Great Cooling Ahead

Presumably, even among the ill-informed ideologues at the White House, there are a few who have heard of sunspots.  There may even be one who knows, as most informed persons do, of the correlation between sunspot activity and the earth's climate.  But apparently no one has bothered to inform the president.

When sunspot activity is high, as it was during the 1990s and early 2000s, temperatures tend to be high as well.  When it is low, as it is now, temperatures fall.  And because sunspot activity occurs in decades-long cycles, the unusually cold winter and spring of 2012 may be just the beginning.  As a Barron's article recently noted, current sunspot activity is now the least it has been in a century.

What this means is that the era of global cooling has begun.  In the northern hemisphere, three out of the four last winters and springs have been unusually cold.  This spring was so cold in East Asia that China was forced to import millions of tons of grain and soybeans from the U.S. and other suppliers.

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