Monday, May 24, 2010

It's the sun, stupid

Earlier this month, the link between solar activity and climate made headlines throughout Europe after space scientists from the U.K., Germany and South Korea linked the recent paucity of sunspots to the cold weather that Europe has been experiencing. This period of spotlessness, the scientists predicted in a study published in Environmental Research Letters, could augur a repeat of winters comparable to those of the Little Ice Age in the 1600s, during which the Sun was often free of sunspots. By comparing temperatures in Europe since 1659 to highs and lows in solar activity in the same years, the scientists discovered that low solar activity generally corresponded to cold winters. Could this centuries-long link between the Sun and Earth’s climate have been a matter of chance? “There is less than a 1% probability that the result was obtained by chance,” asserts Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading in the U.K., the study’s lead author.


It's the sun, stupid.

Gosh, do you think that the fact that there has been little sunspot activity since 2008 could possibly have been responsible for cooler than normal temperatures during all of 2009?

Just sayin'

2 comments:

  1. "You thought last winter was bad? Wait until this winter,"

    "Expect global cooling for the next 2-3 decades that will be far more damaging than global warming would have been," says Easterbrook. "Twice as many people are killed by extreme cold than by extreme heat."

    http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/05/mighty-freeze-coming-our-way.html

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  2. You know what? Climate changes up and down all the time.

    Just gotta make sure the scientists work on faster germination crops is all.

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