alexpgp | The ice man cometh...

There has, for some time, been evidence to suggest that terrestrial temperatures are correlated to the number of sunspots appearing on the face of the Sun. Said number varies from year to year, but basically rises and falls in a cycle that averages about 11 years. The most recent minimum occurred last March, and the new cycle is late, which worries Phil Chapman, a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco.

According to Chapman, writing for The Australian, a delay in the start of the "next" sunspot cycle may be a harbinger of what happened in 1790, during something called the Dalton Minimum, when temperatures were especially cold.

Adds Chapman:

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature [...] report that it cooled by about 0.7°C 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.

In distinction from media flacks and others who rarely fail to point to, say, a record high temperature as further evidence of global warming, Chapman acknowledges that "it is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year."

Cheers...