Sun’s Effect on Earth Climate
This has been a bitter cold winter so far in the US but the news of last few days tells of the sub-zero cold in Britian also, and I suspect the same is true in continental Europe as well. I’m sure the global warming lobby considers this just a hickkup in their doomsday prophecy. But it is interesting that this coincides with an unusually quiet Sun, as shown above. There is a historical precedent for this connection between a quiet Sun and cold weather. There was a dearth of sunspots between 1645 and 1715, informally designated the Maunder Minimum, which just happened to coincide with what is known as the Little Ice Age, during which many people died.
During the Maunder Minimum, some winters were so cold that the English Channel froze solid and one could ride a sleigh across. For a safe sleigh ride, the ice has to be at least four inches thick. A sustained period of sub-zero temperatures without a thaw was required to freeze ocean water in that manner. The recent reports from Britian say that sea water near the coast has already frozen.
Whether or not the reader accepts or understands my explanation of the cause of sunspots (below), the important point is that the temperature of the Earth is controlled by forces much greater than environmentalists imagine. It is wise to build more efficient cars and reduce pollution of the atmosphere but understand that nature will do what it will and mankind is at its mercy.
Scientists today realize that the Coronal Mass Ejections are caused by sunspots. They do not understand the cause of sunspots, but this does not matter because in either case we are powerless in controlling them. Sunspots are caused by the decay of highly eccentric orbits of millions of asteroids, which originated from Jupiter’s Great Red Spot in the last 6,000 years. One obvious clue is that the sunspot period is roughly equal to the period of Jupiter. These asteroids eventually strike the surface of the Sun, causing sunspots. The hot charged particles splashed from the surface of the Sun comprise Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), which often strike the Earth’s atmosphere and heat it. A one year lack of sunspots is of little concern – just a warning of our vulnerability, but a period of over a hundred years, as in the Maunder Minimum, could cause great distress, In which case we might even have to consider ways of increasing green-house gases.
One cannot help imagining that, along with the financial crisis and the plague of religious fundamentalism, another little ice age could be signaling the onset of the ‘great tribulation.’
