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Global Cooling 50-50?

I have for some time been very suspicious of the lobbies, social groupthink, and research grants available to the man-made carbon-based global warming community. Arguments about cosmic rays affecting the development of cloud cover, sunspot activity, and methane 'burps', and the heating or cooling of the pacific ocean, by contrast, have been and are being presented clearly across the internet. Such reporting is being done not only by nutters but by sane scientists and researchers as well.

These arguments have the virtue of being clear, and for a non-scientist such as myself, they also are defended by people who do not resort to exasperated, pseudo-religious style attacks but who instead take refuge in data. Here is a link to the interesting Fabius Maximus site. As with all sites I link to, the authors and I do not necessarily agree and nor should we be expected to. Fabius Maximus reports that some are now talking of global cooling in terms of coming famines.

They can of course still be wrong. I'm also reminded of Mencken's dictum that the simplest, clearest explanation is usually the wrong one.

However, I was interested to read here today an argument about the quietude of solar cycle 24 from the 2nd of July. It's an obvious cliche, but that won't stop me, to note that solar activity is ultimately the cause of all weather and climate on this planet.

The sun going quiet, with few or no sunspots, therefore offers an explanation for why global warming seems to have stopped a decade ago; and why the chances of a new little ice age as we had for the better part of four centuries after 1600 might be quite high. At least some authors think the chances of radical global cooling to be approaching 50-50. Sausage sandwiches all round then.

Watch the sun! Not directly, obviously, you'll go blind. The picture at the top of this blog details the sun recently--without a single visible sunspot. Here's an almost comically scary global cooling video, complete with a narrator who has been on some form of throat-grating but still small cigar. Panther or Turkish chocolate perhaps

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