Here comes the ice age?

Contributed by: filbert Thursday, January 31 2008 @ 10:41 AM CST

Snow in Baghdad.

Snow in Jerusalem.

Oh, and the Sun may now be putting out so little energy[*1] that if trends continue, we're looking at an ice age.  And not one with cute animated figures, either.  A real one.  With glaciers that carve out Great Lakes and wear down mountains and stuff.

CSA project director Ken Tapping calls the radio telescope that supplies NASA and the rest of the world with daily values of the Sun’s magnetic activity a “stethoscope on the Sun”. In this case, however, it is the “doctor” whose health is directly affected by the readings.

This is because when the magnetic activity is low, the Sun is dimmer, and puts out less radiant warmth. If the Sun goes into dim mode, as it has in the past, the Earth gets much colder.

Tapping, who was originally from Kent, says that “Typically as you go through the ten or eleven year solar activity cycle you see the numbers go up or down. The lowest number is 64 or 68. The numbers 71 or 72 are very low, but they usually start to go up. We are at the end of a cycle, but the numbers still haven’t gone up. We have been joking around coffee that we may be seeing the Sun about to shut down.” (To date Tapping has been far more concerned about global warming.)

Do you still want to ban incandescent light bulbs?  Really?  It may be, ten years from now, we'll all be saying that global warming would be a very good thing indeed.  We just don't know, and honest scientists will tell you that.

Medary.com - Here comes the ice age?
http://www.medary.com/article.php/20080131104114776

[*1] http://www.britsattheirbest.com/001645.php