After the coldest January to March for the northeastern United States (10 states plus DC), and a cooling of 3°F for the last 20 years in winters, you may not want to hear what solar scientists are telling us.

This month, UK astrophysicists in a release reported:

> “Our planet is just 15 years from a new ‘mini ice age’ that could cause extremely cold winters characterized by the freezing of normally ice-free rivers as well as by year-round snow fields in areas that have never witnessed such climate conditions before, a group of astrophysicists claim. > > "The scientists could draw such a conclusion based on a new model of the sun’s activity that reportedly enables the researchers to make 'extremely accurate predictions' of changes in solar activity.”

The study findings were presented at the UK National Astronomy Meeting on July 9 and published in the Royal Astronomical Society papers.

Their new model based suggests we will see the conditions last experienced during what was called the Maunder Minimum 370 years ago.

The Maunder Minimum was a period between 1645 and 1715 characterized by prolonged low solar activity as well as by extremely cold winters in Europe and North America at the heart of the climatic period between 1550 and 1850 called the “Little Ice Age.”

This finding is not unique or new. “My opinion is that we are heading into a Maunder Minimum,” said Mark Giampapa, a solar physicist at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona. “I’m seeing a continuation in the decline of the sunspots’ mean magnetic field strengths and a weakening of the polar magnetic fields and subsurface flows.”

Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, who heads Russia’s prestigious Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg, warned in a 2013 paper that "after the maximum of solar Cycle-24, from approximately 2014, we can expect the start of the next bicentennial cycle of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age.“

Australian Scientist Dr. David Evans remarked, "As we head to the UN meeting in Paris 2015 where global bureaucracy beckons, a sharp cooling change appears to be developing and set to hit in the next five years. Yet consortia of five-star politicians are not preparing for climate change, only for global warming. Around the world a billion dollars a day is invested in renewable energy, largely with the hope of changing the weather. Given that 20% of the world does not even have access to electricity, history books may marvel at how screwed priorities … of ‘bureaucratized science’ were.”

Do I believe it? Yes! When I taught in college in the cold late 1970s, I had a panel in the second Northeast Storm Conference (now in its 41st year) on factors in climate. The panel included MIT’s Hurd ‘Doc’ Willett, who showed how the sun’s cycles (22 years, 180-200 years and others) affected the climate. He predicted then a cool down starting in the 1990s. I have published peer reviewed papers showing that, though the sun’s detectable brightness (called irradiance) only changed 0.1% over most 11-year cycles, there were amplifying factors that greatly increased the sun’s affect on climate on decadal and century scales (everyone recognizes earth/sun orbital parameters affect our days, seasons and the longer term cycles of glaciation).

These amplifiers include ultraviolet radiation that varies 6 to 8% in the 11-year cycle and produces heat from ozone chemistry in the high atmosphere in low and middle latitudes, geomagnetic activity that causes the ionization heating and displays called the “aurora,” and solar wind modulated galactic cosmic rays that affect the amount of cloudiness (and through that, solar heating) we experience. All of these have been shown from empirical evidence to produce more warming for a time, active solar periods and cooling when the sun grows quiet.

So what remedy should we pursue? I turn again to Dr. Abdussamatov, who I met over a year ago in a Las Vegas climate convention. There was the language barrier, but he spoke enough English and I did have some Russian coursework in high school and college, so we did understand each other.

Dr. Abdussamatov points out that earth has experienced major cooling occurrences five times over the last 1,000 years and that "[a] global freeze will come about regardless of whether or not industrialized countries put a cap on their greenhouse gas emissions. The common view [that] man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect.“

He adds, "The most reasonable way to fight against the coming Little Ice Age is a complex of special steps aimed at support of economic growth and energy-saving production in order to adapt mankind to [the] forthcoming period of deep cooling which will last approximately until the beginning of the 22nd century. Early understanding of reality of the forthcoming global cooling and physical mechanisms responsible for it directly determines a choice of adequate and reliable measures which will allow mankind, in particular, population of countries situated far from the equator, to adapt to the future global cooling.”

Given that cooling produces 20 times more mortality and more suffering than warming, we should take this seriously and push back at efforts to drastically disrupt our energy solutions to combat a failing prophecy that politicians, our universities and the compliant media have been indoctrinating our children and the masses with for two decades.


Joe D'Aleo is a certified Consulting Meteorologist, Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), former chair AMS Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, co-founder and first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and a former college professor of Meteorology and Climatology.