Quote from trefoil:
It's a solar minimum. Jeez.
GOODBYE, GLOBAL WARMING
Deepest Solar Minimum in Nearly a Century
by Gregory Murphy and Laurence Hecht
The authors are editors of 21st Century Science & Technology magazine.
April 9, 2009âA continued low in solar activity, as measured by the appearance of irregularities on the Sun's surface known as sunspots, may be responsible for the recent phase of cooling experienced in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere. In the opinion of many specialists, the downturn in solar activity likely marks the beginning of a prolonged cooling period.
The expected cooling will produce many hardships for a human population already stressed by a prolonged downturn in global physical-economic productive capability. But the bright side may be that such bloated windbags as Al Gore and his leaner companion James Hansen, who have led Royal Consort Prince Philip's genocidal global warming promotion, will finally be silenced.
For students of the Sun, the length of the solar cycle, which lasts an average of 11 years but may go longer or shorter, has proven the best historical indicator of short-term climate. At the ends of these solar cycles, sunspot activity first declines, and then picks up markedly, indicating the beginning of a new cycle. The precise relationship between the sunspots, which are thought to be determined by magnetic activity within the Sun, and the energy output of the Sun, is not known. However, long-term studies of the historical record have shown that when the minima in sunspot activity extend beyond the average 11 years, significant declines in temperatures on Earth are experienced. Regular records of sunspot activity go back to the 17th Century.
The current solar cycle, numbered 23, began in 1996, and was expected to reach minimum and transition to solar cycle 24 in January 2007.
It did not. Instead, a prolonged period of excessively low solar activity has continued to this moment. In 2008, there were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). "To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913," NASA reported in a press release. Since the beginning of the current year, sunspot counts have dropped even lower: As of April 9, there were no sunspots on 89 of the year's 99 days (90%)....
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2009/sci-techs/3615solar_min.html