Uncontrolled Thermonuclear Explosion Responsible for Warming and Cooling

Guardian: Weak sun could offset some global warming in Europe and US – study

Global warming in northern Europe and the eastern US could be partially offset in future winters because of the sun entering a weaker cycle similar to the one which enabled frost fairs to take place on the river Thames in the 17th and 18th century, according to new research.

However, the study said any potential weakening in solar activity would have only a small effect on temperature rises at a worldwide level, delaying the warming caused by emissions from cars, factories and power plants by around two years.

The fighting withdrawal begins.

Globally, a grand solar minimum would reduce temperatures by just 0.1C between 2050 and 2099. Manmade climate change, by contrast, is expected to bring temperature rises of up to 6.6C in the same period if drastic action is not taken to cut carbon emissions.

There's a high probability of at least 0.1C cooling if the astrophysicists are right and possibly more if the more dire solar cycle forecasts are correct. Climate computer model forecasts haven't had predictive success yet. And cooling is far more dangerous than warming.

Year Without a Summer

The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer (also the Poverty Year, the Summer that Never Was, Year There Was No Summer, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death[1]), because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F).

Evidence suggests the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), the largest eruption in at least 1,300 years. The Earth had already been in a centuries-long period, since the 14th century, of global cooling known today as the Little Ice Age, which itself caused considerable agricultural distress in Europe as a whole during its onset; the Little Ice Age's existing cooling was solely as a potentially aggravating factor, as the eruption of Tambora occurred during the Little Ice Age's concluding decades.

If the Sun were to enter another long cycle of weaker output, carbon levels might start falling to dangerously low levels, threatening plant survival (on a windless day, a cornfield will consume 50% of the available CO2). Scientists in 50 or 100 years may be worried about mass plant extinction and the need to pump CO2 into the atmosphere. They might advocate drilling oil wells and setting them on fire. No more insane (from today's perspective) than their plan to pour coal all over the South Pole in the 1970s in order to heat the planet and melt the ice cap.

Newsweek Global Cooling