So, I’m going to depart from my rather narcissistic bent of the last month or so and actually NOT blog about myself today… Shocking, troubling, and upsetting as it may be…
As I was going through the scads of blog posts that I’ve missed over the past month, I happened upon this one in a blog about solar weather that I follow. Yes, it’s a weird interest…
Anyway, the gist of the article is that it’s entirely possible that we’re going to be entering a period of reduced solar activity (sunspots, etc.), which seems to have a pretty profound effect on the weather. If you consider that Mars as well as Earth has been experiencing global warming, it seems appropriate to consider that there might be something about the Sun that’s factoring into the warming equation.
Anyway, to avoid getting (too far) into the weeds, there’s a fairly strong correspondence between climatological data and solar activity records that may indicate that when the Sun is particularly magnetically active, things heat up in the Solar System, specifically here on Earth. The sun has a roughly 11-year cycle for sunspot activity, with periods of increasing and decreasing activity over time.
What’s interesting is that the general consensus seems to be that we’re going to have another cycle (Cycle 24) of increasing solar activity, which would quite possibly factor into more global warming. However, as the original article that I referenced points out, this next solar cycle just hasn’t been doing a very good job of getting started. They thought it got going back a couple years ago, then they announced in January that it had begun.
And where this could lead (believe me, I’m stretching things a bit because I like a good storyline), if the solar activity continues to stagnate, is that we find another period of minimum solar activity… the most infamous of which is called the Maunder Minimum and is widely thought to correspond with the Little Ice Age of the late 1600s when it was standard for the Thames to freeze in the winters, etc. Wow! How weird would it be if, instead of continued warming, we were to see a turnaround and colder winters, milder summers, etc? (I like this idea because I prefer colder weather to warmer weather and have always thought that more snow is better than less…)
I make no prognostications, I have no set opinion, but I like the idea that the vaunted “scientific consensus” about anthropogenic global warming could be wrong… I don’t like consensuses on principle–I think it’s a good way to avoid the truth by getting together with a group of like-minded people and agreeing that what we want to be actually exists. Besides, humans have a natural tendency to enjoy end-of-the-world hysteria and to over-exaggerate their own impact on the world as a whole. IMHO.
Besides, I might get a few more snowy winters if we aren’t going to continue experiencing warming on a global scale!
Posted by Kjirstin 
