THE NYTIMES REPORTS ON THE RECENT DEARTH OF SUNSPOTS AND CLIMATE CHANGE: "IT'S (PROBABLY) THE SUN, STUPID!"

NYTIMES: "The Sun is still blank (mostly)."

These photos show sunspots near solar maximum on July 19, 2000,
and near solar minimum on March 18, 2009.
Some global warming skeptics speculate
that the Sun may be on the verge of an extended slumber.

Ever since Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, a German astronomer, first noted in 1843 that sunspots burgeon and wane over a roughly 11-year cycle, scientists have carefully watched the Sun’s activity.

In the latest lull, the Sun should have reached its calmest, least pockmarked state last fall.

Indeed, last year marked the blankest year of the Sun in the last half-century — 266 days with not a single sunspot visible from Earth.

Then, in the first four months of 2009, the Sun became even more blank, the pace of sunspots slowing more. “It’s been as dead as a doornail,” David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said a couple of months ago.

The Sun perked up in June and July, with a sizeable clump of 20 sunspots earlier this month. Now it is blank again, consistent with expectations that this solar cycle will be smaller and calmer, and the maximum of activity, expected to arrive in May 2013 will not be all that maximum.

... Among some global warming skeptics, there is speculation that the Sun may be on the verge of falling into an extended slumber similar to the so-called Maunder Minimum, several sunspot-scarce decades during the 17th and 18th centuries that coincided with an extended chilly period.

Most solar physicists do not think anything that odd is going on with the Sun. With the recent burst of sunspots, “I don’t see we’re going into that,” Dr. Hathaway said last week.

Still, something like the Dalton Minimum — two solar cycles in the early 1800s that peaked at about an average of 50 sunspots — lies in the realm of the possible, Dr. Hathaway said. (The minimums are named after scientists who helped identify them: Edward W. Maunder and John Dalton.)

THE TRUTH - THAT AGW IS BS - IS BEGINNING TO BECOME UNAVOIDABLE, EVEN TO THE LEFTISTS AT THE NYTIMES!.

THANK GOD: IT MAY SOON BE APPARENT TO A SOLID MAJORITY THAT AGW IS BS BEFORE WE ENACT CAP & TRADE.

AND THAT WILL PREVENT IT FROM BECOMING LAW.

THANK GOD.

(BTW: IT WORKS BOTH WAYS: THE PEAK OF SOLAR ACTIVITY COINCIDED WITH PEAK GLOBAL TEMPS: 1999/2000.)