We Need Global Warming

....because the Sun has different ideas:

Researchers in the US may have discovered further evidence that the Sun is heading towards an extended period of quiet activity, the like of which has not been seen since the 17th century. The impact this may have on climate is poorly understood but it would be good news for satellite communications, which would continue to avoid the harsher impacts of space weather.

Scientists have long known that the Sun's magnetic activity varies over a cycle of approximately 11 years. Greater magnetic activity leads to more "sunspots", or darker patches visible on the solar surface. These sunspots are regions where the magnetic field lines have become twisted due to differential rotation in the outer layers of the Sun.

Particularly violent sunspots can result in the sudden release of magnetic energy in the form of solar flares, which cause the outpouring of protons and electrons into space. Some of these particles can reach the Van Allen radiation belt of Earth – the outer region of Earth's own magnetic field – where they are accelerated to speeds approaching the speed of light. During the solar maxima, when sunspot numbers are at their peak, the abundance of particles shooting around in the radiation belt can become a real hazard to the satellites that reside there.

Extended calm
We were expecting to reach the next solar maxima around 2011–2012. However, space weather experts have been surprised over the past few years to report very few signs that the number of sunspots has been picking up since the last solar minimum in 2006. This has prompted some space scientists to forecast that we are heading towards another prolonged spell of quiet sunspot activity, the last of which was observed between 1645 and 1715 in a period called the "Maunder Minimum".

A period also known as "The Little Ice Age," which had significant negative impacts upon global agriculture and otherwise made human life more difficult and miserable:

The Little Ice Age brought colder winters to portions of Europe and North America. In the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, gradually engulfing farms and crushing entire villages. The River Thames and the canals and rivers of the Netherlands often froze over during the winter, and people skated and even held frost fairs on the ice. The first Thames frost fair was in 1607; the last in 1814, although changes to the bridges and the addition of an embankment affected the river flow and depth, hence diminishing the possibility of freezes. The freeze of the Golden Horn and the southern section of the Bosphorus took place in 1622. In 1658, a Swedish army marched across the Great Belt to Denmark to invade Copenhagen. The Baltic Sea froze over, enabling sledge rides from Poland to Sweden, with seasonal inns built on the way. The winter of 1794/1795 was particularly harsh when the French invasion army under Pichegru could march on the frozen rivers of the Netherlands, whilst the Dutch fleet was fixed in the ice in Den Helder harbour. In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing that island's harbors to shipping.

 

The severe winters affected human life in ways large and small. The population of Iceland fell by half, but this was perhaps also due to fluorosis caused by the eruption of the volcano Laki in 1783. Iceland also suffered failures of cereal crops and people moved away from a grain-based diet. The Norse colonies in Greenland starved and vanished (by the 15th century) as crops failed and livestock could not be maintained through increasingly harsh winters, though Jared Diamond noted that they had exceeded the agricultural carrying capacity before then. In North America, American Indians formed leagues in response to food shortages. In Southern Europe, in Portugal, snow storms were much more frequent while today are rare. There are reports of heavy snows in the winters of 1665, 1744 and 1886.

 

In 1995, Herbert Lamb said that, in many years, "snowfall was much heavier than recorded before or since, and the snow lay on the ground for many months longer than it does today." Many springs and summers were outstandingly cold and wet, although there was great variability between years and groups of years. Crop practices throughout Europe had to be altered to adapt to the shortened, less reliable growing season, and there were many years of death and famine (such as the Great Famine of 1315–1317, although this may have been before the LIA proper). Viticulture entirely disappeared from some northern regions. Violent storms caused massive flooding and loss of life. Some of these resulted in permanent losses of large tracts of land from the Danish, German, and Dutch coasts.

The extent of mountain glaciers had been mapped by the late 19th century. In both the north and the south temperate zones of our planet, snowlines (the boundaries separating zones of net accumulation from those of net ablation) were about 100 m lower than they were in 1975. In Glacier National Park, the last episode of glacier advance came in the late 18th and early 19th century. In Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, large temperature excursions during the Little Ice Age (~1400–1900 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (~800–1300 AD) were possibly related to changes in the strength of North Atlantic thermohaline circulation.

In Ethiopia and Mauritania, permanent snow was reported on mountain peaks at levels where it does not occur today. Timbuktu, an important city on the trans-Saharan caravan route, was flooded at least 13 times by the Niger River; there are no records of similar flooding before or since. In China, warm weather crops, such as oranges, were abandoned in Jiangxi Province, where they had been grown for centuries. Also, two periods of most frequent typhoon strikes in Guangdong coincide with two of the coldest and driest periods in northern and central China (AD 1660-1680, 1850-1880). In North America, the early European settlers also reported exceptionally severe winters. For example, in 1607-1608 ice persisted on Lake Superior until June. The journal of Pierre de Troyes Chevalier de Troyes who led an expedition to James Bay in 1686 recorded that the Bay was still littered with floating ice on July 1 such that he could, in his canoe, hide behind floating ice.

Antonio Stradivari, the famous violin maker, produced his instruments during the LIA. It has been proposed that the colder climate caused the wood used in his violins to be denser than in warmer periods, contributing to the tone of Stradivari's instruments.

The Little Ice Age by anthropology professor Brian Fagan of the University of California at Santa Barbara, tells of the plight of European peasants during the 1300 to 1850 chill: famines, hypothermia, bread riots, and the rise of despotic leaders brutalizing an increasingly dispirited peasantry. In the late 17th century, writes Fagan, agriculture had dropped off so dramatically that "Alpine villagers lived on bread made from ground nutshells mixed with barley and oat flour." Finland lost perhaps a third of its population to starvation and disease.

In our case, the despotic leaders were elected BY the peasantry they're now trying to brutalize, only to find that we're not yet ready to accept disspiriting.  And as the case for the "global warming" hoax gets ricketier and ricketier, the climatalogical chicken littles are getting more and more desperate:

Yesterday, as one of the articles on NPR's The Takeaway, they were going on about "climate stability," rather than "global warming" or "climate change" or whatever it is today.

The guy doing most of the talking, some climate blogger from the NYT, was talking about how the entire planet doesn't experience climate change uniformly, but rather that different parts of the globe experience differnt sorts of climate change, at different rates.

The reason for all this blather eventuallty became obvious:  the hurricane season is going into its cyclic lull, which will last for about thirty years, so environmentalists aren't going to have hurricanes to beat us over the head about climate change.  They're prepping the battlespace for the notion that "even though you have it good, look at these poor people over here."

So, I think he environmental community is expecting weather patterns to moderate over the US in the next few years, and they're grasping at whatever they can inorder to remain relevant.

Personally, I think it's all crap.  The Sun is the driver for all the warming or cooling.  What we might be doing is roundoff error.

Precisely.  If the long-range space weather forecast is accurate, terrestrial living conditions over the next few generations are going to be a lot tougher than they've been for us and our antecedents over the last century.  The last thing on God's cooling Earth we need is to get panicked and bullied into inflicting on ourselves the economic privations "Mother Nature" is already preparing to send our way.

I've said it before, and I'll keep right on saying it: fire up those smokestacks, ratchet up the flatulence content of your diet, drill & burn, baby, drill & burn, and make that carbon footprint as big as humanly possible.  Because we're going to need all the warming power we can get.