Backcountry Notes

Above, left: spot-free Sun; right, with sunspots.

December 7, 2008 - - In my vicinity there has been snow on the ground since mid-November, for the first time in this century. Not a lot of snow, mind you, but enough to cover the ground at higher elevations. Where there's snow, there's cold weather, and we've had plenty of that since mid-November.

If theories of solar activity are correct, there's a lot more snow and cold weather to come.

This change in the weather was predicted - - but not by the Politically Correct Science community that dominates the global-warming debate, both in academia and Washington, D.C. Once again I risk being written off as an eccentric crank of the "denier fringe" by citing the Old Farmer's Almanac, a venerable publication which has been predicting the weather and providing other useful information since 1792 without a single government grant or bailout.

The 2009 edition of the Old Farmer's Almanac, published in the summer of 2008, contains an informative article titled "Is Global Warming On The Wane?" Examining various factors including sunspots and oceanic multidecadal cycles, author Joseph D'Aleo, a co-founder of The Weather Channel, finds that they "suggest that a staggered cooling period could continue." The Almanac's long-range weather forecast called for sharply colder temperatures in much of the U.S. in December. (The Almanac was wrong about November, which turned out to be colder than predicted.) The general assessment of the weather includes the following:

Our study of solar activity suggests that as we enter solar cycle 24 we are at the beginning of a significant change. Over the coming years, a gradual cooling of the atmosphere will occur, offset by any warming caused by increased greenhouse gases. . . . Most of the nation will have below-normal winter temperatures, on average.

I live on the boundary of two Old Farmer's Almanac weather regions, Appalachia and the Ohio Valley, so I typically check both forecasts. For the first week of December, they are right on target. If our Weather Channel short-range forecasts are anywhere close to accurate, the Alamanac's predictions for the second week of December will be proven correct as well.

As for what's up with the sunspots: sunspot cycle 24 began in January of 2008 - - later than had been predicted - - with the appearance of a sunspot with the opposite magnetic polarity of those in the previous cycle. By August 2008, after the Almanac had gone to press, the sunspot count dropped to zero. That's right: zero. None. Zip, zed, zilch. See Sun poised to make history with first spotless month since 1913.

According to Sunspot Activity Notes, the recent counts have been: August, none; September, one; October, three. Science Daily reports the October count as 5. By historic standards these counts are very low. According to Science Daily:

As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times.

"Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "We're experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle."

Science Daily, Spotless Sun: Blankest Year of the Space Age.

A few scientists have acknowledged that the Earth may be entering a cooling period. See The Sunspot Enigma: The Sun is “Dead”—What Does it Mean for Earth? Such thoughts are contrary to the orthodoxy of Politically Correct Science, however.  A report questioning global warming which was issued this past Thursday by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, an office responsible for developing plans for future military strategy, was immediately attacked as being "out of line" and "bizarre." See New US military report on global warming raises worry.

Yet global temperatures are going down, not up.  See Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof.  From Australia we have this perspective:

It has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

The Australian, Climate hysterics v heretics in an age of unreason.

Oh, and about those polar bears - - Arctic Sea ice, while still below the median, increased in 2008, and went through a rapid period of ice formation this past fall. See Arctic Sea Ice Melt Season Officially Over; ice up over 9% from last year.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES:

NASA - The Sunspot Cycle

American Thinker - Sunspots and a possible new ice age (updated)

MIT Scientists Baffled By Global Warming Theory

The Australian, No smoking hot spot

IBD Editorials - See Gore, See Spot

Gore's Climate Claptrap

Current Arctic Sea Ice Extent

Cryospheric Climate Indicators

RELATED ARTICLES:

"Global Warming"Followup

A Note On The Global Warming"Debate"