Canadians and Global Cooling?

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council and a group of similar researchers are looking for funding to further their research on what they seeing as a startling solar trend.

According to their information the Sun runs on an 11 year cycle and so far this cycle, it hasn’t done much of anything. Tapping and his associates say this could be a signal of the beginning of what is called a Maunder Minimum.

The Maunder Minimum was a period from 1645 and 1715 in which solar “sun spot” activity plummeted from an average of 40-50,000 sun spots to around 50. The Maunder Minimum coincided with what has been dubbed the “Little Ice Age”. The “solar hibernation” brought about a cold spike that lasted (with intermittent mild warming) until 1715.

There have been many studies done on solar activity and its effects on the climate of our planet and when compared to the normal activity blaming man made industry it puts the “our fault” crowd down quite a few rungs.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, (Now THERE is a long title if I’ve ever seen one…) stated,

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again. If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than ‘global warming’ would have had.”

A recent study by the Hoover Institution commented on this very same thing…

“The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100… try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures.”

It makes sense to me, the sun is THE source of our energy on this planet… every living thing on this planet would simply cease to exist without the careful balance we have with our sun. Of the temperature data and solar data I’ve seen lines up FAR better than the so called CO2 disaster we’ve been fed up to this point. I’ll have my beach wear and my snow suit handy…