Global What?!

"Real risk of a Maunder Minimum 'Little Ice Age'"
"Professor Lockwood ([of Reading University] believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years [raising the risk of a new Little Ice Age] from less than 10% just a few years ago to 25% - 30% ... as "occurred in the early 1800s, which also had its fair share of cold winters and poor summers is, according to him, 'more likely than not' to happen."
BBC News -- Paul Hudson, climate correspondent

Sunspots are regions on the solar surface that appear dark because they are cooler than the surrounding photosphere, typically by about 1500 K (thus, they are still at a temperature of about 4500 K, but this is cool compared to the rest of the photosphere). They are only dark in a relative sense; a sunspot removed from the bright background of the Sun would glow quite brightly.
The largest sunspots observed have had diameters of about 50,000 km, which makes them large enough to be seen with the naked eye. Sunspots often come in groups with as many as 100 in a group, though sunspot groups with more than about 10 are relatively rare.

"When we have had periods where the Sun has been quieter than usual we tend to get these much harsher winters. Now get ready for an 'Ice Age' as experts warn of Siberian winter ahead."
Climatologist Dennis Wheeler, Sunderland University

Away back in recent climate history and prognostication, around the 1960s and 1970s, there was a scientific consensus that Earth was on the cusp of global cooling, the "western world's leading climatologists have confirmed recent reports of detrimental global climate change ...[akin to the Little Ice Age of the 17th and 18th Centuries] ... an era of drought, famine and political unrest in the western world."

Popular history recorded London, England in the grip of what was termed a little ice age. The Thames famously froze over. And King Henry VIII just as famously went skating on the Thames. Remember that?

Frost fair fun: The frozen Thames in 1677 when the absence of man-made embankments meant the river flowed more slowly

A paper published in October by the American Meteorological Society unequivocally slighted the claims by IPCC scientists that the Sun couldn't possibly be held responsible for impacting on major shifts in climate on Earth. Judith Curry of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology took exception in a mocking manner of the IPCC scientists' claims that major shifts in climate had nothing to do with the Sun.

The National Research Council's report recently published, The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth's Climate was among the studies and authorities cited in the paper of which Ms. Curry was the lead author. Scientists at the Climate and Environmental Physics and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at University of Berne, Switzerland, support Sun-impact-on-climate theories. 

 

NASA, which once supported the anthropogenically-caused global warming theory of the IPCC appears to have done a complete turn-about.

In citing the NRC report on solar variations: "There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate", listing authorities such as Dan Lubin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who concludes from his research on sun-like Milky Way stars that "the Sun's influence could be overpowering".

Scientists at the Danish National Space Center in the 1990s published articles relating to the Sun's role in climate change. Global cooling beginning in this decade was predicted by scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Pulkovo Observatory. The global cooling alert dating from the 1960s and 70s is experiencing a renaissance. Columbia University's George Kukla explained that global warming always precedes an ice age.

The calm before the storm, as it were.

Moscow Endures the Snowiest Winter in 100 Years
© RIA Novosti. Denis Tyrin

17:51 05/02/2013