Winter is coming?

Forget global warming, it’s more likely we’re on the cusp of another Little Ice Age than of a warming Armageddon. The brutal winter that has hammered the U.S. Northeast, Atlantic Canada, Ontario and Quebec could become the norm in the Northern Hemisphere for the next 30 years if a growing number of solar physicists are right.  Our sun goes through very predictable 11-year cycles. The current one began in 2008 and is expected to produce among the fewest sunspots and most diminished solar radiation of any of the 24 cycles that have been carefully recorded by scientists going back nearly three centuries.

Read more at the Toronto Sun Read More......

WUWT: Dr. Vincent Gray on historical carbon dioxide levels

There are two gases in the earth’s atmosphere without which living organisms could not exist. ✧ Oxygen is the most abundant, 21% by volume, but without carbon dioxide, which is currently only about 0.04 percent (400ppm) by volume, both the oxygen itself, and most living organisms on earth could not exist at all. ✧ This happened when the more complex of the two living cells (called “eukaryote”) evolved a process called a “chloroplast” some 3 billion years ago, which utilized a chemical called chlorophyll to capture energy from the sun and convert carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a range of chemical compounds and structural polymers by photosynthesis. These substances provide all the food required by the organisms not endowed with a chloroplast organelle in their cells. ✧ This process also produced all of the oxygen in the atmosphere. ✧ The relative proportions of carbon dioxide and oxygen have varied very widely over the geological ages.

Read More (with charts): Watts Up With That?

I'm guessing they don't teach this stuff in school. Shameful, if not. --bc Read More......

Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about

‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’

Read more: Mail Online
Read more (with charts and data): Watts Up With That Read More......