Get your long underwear out.

Manbearpig might be going extinct. We may be heading for another Ice Age or at least another cooling period in the Earth’s Climate. See, the Climate of theEarth coincides with the amount of SunSpots on that big Orange thing in the sky. Sun Spots have an impact on the temperature of the Earth more than all the CO2 we could produce. We know this because the temperature on Mars, Venus and all the other planets in our Solar System have warmed at the same rate as the Earth has. And what is in common with all of these planets, The Sun. So it is a pretty well known fact that the Sun affects the Climate here on Earth and on our sister planets. But now there is a disturbng trend in the cycle of the Sun. There are no Sun Spots, and that corresponds to cooler temperatures. And could lead to another Ice Age. Forget all of what the Global Warming fanatics tell you, a cooler Earth is more dangerous to hunankind than a warmer Earth. Without the warmth the Sun, plants do not grow in the Temperate regions of the Earth. Just ask France about that, starvation and failed crops lead to the French Revolution.

This is not a post to scare you into thinking the Ice Age is right around the corner. If indeed we are going into a Ice Age, it will take a long time for the Ice to cover the continents. But as happened in the Little Ice Age, we could be in for harsher winters and more Glacial Ice. And this is not to say also that this is absolutely going to happen either. The earth’s Climate is almost impossible to predict to the nth degree, but we have not had any kind of warming in the past decade and 2007 had the most dramatic drop in temperatures ever. So we could be in the down trend of temperature for awhile. So I wouldn’t get my swimsuit out for Siberia for a while.

Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

It didn’t happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.

That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.

It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.

There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it…. (More on The Australian)

And HappyAggravation Day to you all in LA.

Cross Posted at the Grizzly Groundswell, and the Stix Blog.

H/T to Ace of Spades

Also see: Manhattan under 15 metres of seawater by 2015 is apparently more real than today’s Islamist bomb blasts and beheadings.