NASA Scientist Warns Lack of Sunspots Could Bring 'Mini Ice Age' on Earth

A lack of sunspots on the sun could be a sign of a looming 'mini ice age' As climate scientists continue to push the Global Warming narrative through the mainstream media, other scientists are focused on studying the true master of the Earth's temperature: The sun.

One NASA scientist has made an alarming discovery, warning that the global temperatures could be on the verge of plummeting, taking our planet into a "mini ice age."“The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age,” Dr. Tony Phillips warned in late September.

Dr, Philips research found that the lack of sunspots on our sun could bring about record cold temperatures, and perhaps even a mini ice age, which is in total contrast to the warnings from Climate Change alarmists.

Our sun was not expected to head into a solar minimum until around 2020, but it appears to be heading in that direction a little early which could prove to be bad news for warm weather lovers.

The last time there was a prolonged solar minimum, it did, in fact, lead to a mini ice-age which was scientifically known as the Maunder minimum

Mac Slavo writes that sunspots have been absent for most of 2018 and Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding, says Phillips, the editor of spaceweather.com.  “The bad news,” according to Phillips, is “It also delays the natural decay of space junk, resulting in a more cluttered environment around Earth.”

“It could happen in a matter of months,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center on the cold snap that may be coming.“If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold,” says Mlynczak.“We’re not there quite yet,” he said.

However, “months” is not all that far away.

The new NASA findings are in line with studies released by UC-San Diego and Northumbria University in Great Britain last year, both of which predict a Grand Solar Minimum in coming decades due to low sunspot activity.Both studies predicted sun activity similar to the Maunder Minimum of the mid-17th to early 18th centuries, which coincided to a time known as the Little Ice Age, during which temperatures were much lower than those of today.

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Will The Snowiest Decade Continue?

BOSTON (CBS) — Despite the snow blitz of 2015, many baby boomers still insist that, overall, we don’t get the harsh bitter cold and deep snowy winters like we did in the good ole days.

Weather records prove that just isn’t the case and despite the ongoing claims that snows are becoming rare and hurting winter sports, this millennium has been a blessing to snow lovers and winter sports enthusiasts.

Just as the Saffir-Simpson and Fujita Scales were devised to categorize hurricanes and tornadoes, the Northeast Snowfall Impact Scale (NESIS) was created by Paul Kocin and Louis Uccellini of the National Weather Service to rank high-impact Northeast storms. This scale has 5 categories including extreme, crippling, major, significant and notable. In addition to meteorological measurements, the index uses population information which provides an indication of a storm’s impacts on society.

The NESIS scores are a function of the amount of snow, the area affected by the snowstorm and the number of people living in the path of the storm. The aerial distribution of snowfall and population information are combined in an equation that calculates a NESIS score which varies from around one for smaller storms to over 10 for extreme storms.

The last decade stands out like a sore thumb! It has had 29 major impact northeast winter storms with NO previous 10-year period with more than 10 storms! In Boston, 7 out of the last 10 years have produced snowfall above the average 43.7 inches.

2008-09: 65.9″
2009-10: 35.7″
2010-11: 81.0″
2011-12: 9.3″
2012-13: 63.4″
2013-14: 58.9″
2014-15: 110.6″ Greatest On Record Back To 1872
2015-16: 36.1″
2016-17: 47.6″
2017-18: 59.9″

Additionally, the trend for fall snow across the northern hemisphere has been increasing, defying the forecasts over the last two decades for snows becoming an increasingly rare event.

 The 10-year running mean of the Boston area snowfall has skyrocketed to the highest level since snow records were kept and that goes back about 145 years! Fluctuations in the temperature regime and annual snowfalls are a function of about 25 global factors including changing oceanic oscillations mainly sea-surface temperature anomaly locations which impact atmospheric conditions creating certain jet stream configurations plus others such as solar activity and irradiance, geomagnetic activity, volcanism, etc.

Interestingly, some scientists have stated that increasing snow is consistent with climate change because warmer air holds more moisture, more water vapor and this can result in more storms with heavy precipitation. The trick, of course, is having sufficient cold air to produce that snow. But note that 93% of the years with more than 60″ of snow in Boston were colder than average years.

The reality is cooling, not warming, increases snowfall. Note the graph depicting declining January through March temperatures for 20 years at a rate of 1.5 degrees F. per decade in the Northeast!

So, what gives? What can we expect going forward in the decades ahead? Are we indeed looking at a new paradigm? There is great uncertainty about the scope and prediction of climate change. Will there be a switch in direction? The Earth has experienced major cooling occurrences five times over the past 1000 years. When will the pendulum swing?

Arctic temperatures and arctic ice extent varies in a predictable 60-70 year cycle. The greatest warming has been happening in the Arctic region and that can produce a weaker, less stable jetstream that allows frigid air to dive farther south to mix with the warmer oceans to trigger more potential snow events.

It’s all cyclical. Ocean cycles are driven by solar cycles. Above and beyond that, important drivers are the Earth’s orbital cycles being comprised of such variables as the changes of the angle at which the Earth tilts on its axis plus the wobble of Earth on its axis. For now, we can be accurate in saying that the shorter range prediction of seasonal trends is more forecastable.

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France demands UK climate pledge in return for Brexit trade deal

France is pushing the UK to incorporate future European climate change directives into law automatically in return for an ambitious trade deal with the EU.

A large number of member states fear that the UK could enjoy an economic advantage after Brexit if it were able to diverge from European laws and regulations, and they want to use their leverage now to force a commitment from future British governments.

The demand by Emmanuel Macron for the UK to be tied into the EU’s Paris 2030 targets was just one of a series of interventions made by member states during recent meetings with Michel Barnier and his negotiating team.

While a UK withdrawal agreement dealing with citizens’ rights, the £39bn financial settlement and the Irish border have been agreed in principle, the political declaration on the future relationship is yet to be finalised. A seven-page declaration published last week is set to become a much heavier document after member states made a series of interventions in meetings with the European commission for additional text. One EU diplomat said: “It’s a Christmas tree and all the member states are putting their baubles on it.”

Olly Robbins, Downing Street’s Brexit adviser, was in Brussels this weekend for meetings with the commission. On Sunday, ambassadors for the 27 member states are to meet Barnier to discuss the text. Negotiations will have to be completed when ministers for the 27 meet on Monday, with a draft due to be made public on Tuesday.

Downing Street is hopeful that the political declaration can be a “sweetener” to the withdrawal agreement, which has faced a storm of protest in Britain.

On Saturday, Commons leader Andrea Leadsom insisted there was “more to be done” before a special European council meeting on Sunday 25 November to get “the best possible deal for the UK”.

But the extra demands on the UK are likely to be unwelcome to Brexiters, who fear that the government is allowing the UK to be permanently sucked into the EU’s regulatory orbit.

While the UK is a leading light among the EU member states on climate change, the French government is concerned that in a post-Brexit world there will be calls within Britain to undercut the rest of the continent.

The EU has been steadily ratcheting up its targets as part of the 2015 Paris climate change accord, and France wants the UK to be bound to them.

Last week the European parliament adopted energy-savings targets of 32.5% and a renewable energy uplift of 32% by 2030. That will put the bloc on course to cut emissions by 45% from 1990 levels by 2030.

The most politically sensitive demand from the EU is likely, however, to concern the trade-off the bloc wants to make between access for the European fishing fleet to British waters and the wider trade deal.

It is understood that a clause will be included in the political declaration making a link between British companies having access to the European market, and maintaining the “existing reciprocal access to fishing waters and resources”.

The EU wants a deal on access to UK waters by July 2020, with the UK being tied to making its “best endeavour” to get an agreement, or British exporters will face a loss of access to its market for their own goods.

A number of member states are also championing more positive language in the political declaration on the future trading relationship.

One diplomat from a European country on the western fringe of the EU said: “The relationship as sketched out in the political declaration doesn’t do enough for us. It doesn’t protect the supply lines and we should aim higher, and lock ourselves in to achieve more.”

Andrew Duff, a former MEP, and visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre thinktank, said: “The political declaration needs to do two things – corral the 27 behind a settled course of action leading to an unprecedented association agreement with the UK, and secondly to commit the British prime minister – and if possible her successor – in that same direction.

“It can’t be too loose, therefore, but also can’t be so tightly drafted that it pre-empts the association agreement negotiations. It’s the first chance for the EU 27 to plot the future of Europe without the Brits – an important moment, therefore.”

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How The Industrial Revolution Single-Handedly Saved Mankind

Environmentalists have spent decades lamenting the Industrial Revolution. In their view, we all lived in Eden once. Then noisy, smelly machines came along and ruined paradise.

Canada’s David Suzuki, for example, says that because automobiles run on fossil fuels and emit carbon dioxide, they’re nothing to celebrate. In his view, everything industrial, large-scale, or efficient generates pollution and is, therefore, a curse.

The “path we embarked on after the Industrial Revolution,” he insisted in a 1997 book, “is leading us increasingly into conflict with the natural world.”

Research analyst Luke Muehlhauser presents another perspective. He’s the author of an essay titled How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution? The short answer is that it was the single most important thing ever to happen to humanity.

Muehlhauser has visually charted six lines across multiple centuries:

* Life expectancy at birth

* GDP per capita

* Percentage of people who’ve escaped extreme poverty

*Access to energy (for cooking, lighting, heating, and for producing tools and clothing)

* Technological developments

* Political freedom (the percentage of people who live in democracies).

*Muehlhauser events



These lines speak volumes. For the vast majority of human beings who’ve inhabited this planet – generation after generation, century after century – life was precarious. Almost everyone was poor.

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, human lives improved dramatically. Muehlhauser says the history textbooks to which he was exposed in school discussed at great length:

The transformative impact of the wheel or writing or money or cavalry, or the conquering of this society by that other society, or the rise of this or that religion…or the Scientific Revolution.

But they could have ended each of those chapters by saying “Despite these developments, global human well-being remained roughly the same as it had been for millennia, by every measure we have access to.” And then when you got to the chapter on the industrial revolution, these books could’ve said: “Finally, for the first time in recorded history, the trajectory of human well-being changed completely, and this change dwarfed the magnitude of all previous fluctuations in human well-being.” [bold added]

His one sentence summary of human history:

Everything was awful for a very long time, and then the industrial revolution happened.

David Suzuki is right, to some extent. Many industrial processes produce pollution. But then something else occurs.

Human populations that emerge from desperate poverty soon acquire sufficient good health, education, and financial means to clean up that pollution.

Once we humans have enough to eat, once half our children no longer die before age five, we start to care about the environment.

The crucial point is that, in order to get to stage B, you first need to pass through stage A.

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High energy costs send Pact packing

Australia's largest manufacturer of rigid plastic packaging, billionaire Raphael Geminder’s Pact Group, says it will move more of its operations offshore to Asia because of the soaring cost of doing business in Australia.

Pact has closed three local manufacturing sites over the past 12 months among more than 60 it runs in Australia, New Zealand, Asia and the US after undertaking extensive work on establishing a reliable and cost-effective import supply chain for select product categories.

Pact, which has more than 4000 staff, supplies a wide range of plastic and steel packaging to the food, household cleaning, pharmaceutical, personal care, agricultural, chemical and industrial markets....

The manufacturer’s second-largest shareholder, the $9 billion Investors Mutual’s Anton Tagliaferro — who has previously written to the Pact board questioning the company’s performance — said Australian manufacturers faced a gloomy outlook given slipshod government policy and higher energy prices than many of its global competitors.

“All of manufacturing in Australia is feeling the pinch of failed government policies and that includes electricity,” Mr Tagliaferro told The Australian. “Manufacturers are seeing their costs going up, their margins being squeezed and they’re grappling with having to put their prices up to customers,” he said.

“It’s a diabolical situation where the price of electricity in Australia is three times what it is in the US. Unfortunately we’re living in this crazy environment where we sell coal, uranium and gas to everyone else in the world but it doesn’t seem like we are able to effectively use it here for our own needs.”

More broadly, he said a decade of ineffective government policies had put a handbrake on the ability of Australian business to succeed.

“Unfortunately, eventually the country is going to have to pay the price for this poor management.”

Mr Tagliaferro said there may be a pick-up under a Bill Shorten-led Labor government.

“At the moment I don’t think things could be any worse. We basically have a government that’s basically running the country by opinion poll and every week the policies change depending on what the polls say. What we need is some certainty,” he said. The impact of ineffectual policy had added to the pain of sharemarket investors reeling from weeks of volatility, he said.

Manufacturing Australia chair­man James Fazzino has previously claimed high costs and declining energy security were materially damaging the ability of local manufacturers to compete against imports, impacting both potential and current manufacturing investments.

He claimed the business case for undertaking essential reinvestments and plant maintenance in many existing manufacturing operations was increasingly being scrutinised by boards and executive teams and that plant closures and job losses flowing from high energy costs were inevitable.

But chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, Innes Willox, said recently that challenges remained for the sector.

“While manufacturers are working hard to sustain these robust conditions, the uncertainties hanging over energy prices and energy policy continue to cloud the medium and longer-term outlook, particularly for the more energy-intensive segments of the industry,” he said.

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