“Winter is just around the corner.”
Yep, and it is the “Sun” Stupid. We are coming out of the longest, quietiest and deepest sunspot minimum in my lifetime. It has been know for over 100 years that during sunspot minimums and maximums weather is more variable. Now we are seeing huge flares and this too shall pass.
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The Next Grand Minimum
http://nextgrandminimum.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/mission/
“The Maunder Minimum was named in honor of Edward W. Maunder, an earlier astronomer who had examined the period between 1645-1715 when sunspots became extremely rare. It was also a period when the world experienced successive crop failures.”
“During one 30-year period within the Maunder Minimum astronomers observed only about 50 sunspots, as opposed to the thousands in modern times. The science is robust, and based on a systematic program of observations conducted by the Observatoire de Paris. The Maunder coincided with the coldest part of the so-called Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America experienced bitterly cold winters.”
Generally, each interglacial starts with a bang, with a sharp rise in global annual temperatures, achieving a maximum, or Climatic Optimum, about 1000-3000 years in. The curves are modulated curves, i.e. there are several cyclicities at work, and their influences are additive (positive or negative values), and they are rank-ordered by profundity.
The temperature break at the end of the Pliocene Epoch was the first-order change. The glacials and interglacials are the second order changes. Third-, fourth-, and fifth-order variations turn the interglacial temperature curves into cockscombs which roach, or curve, from the Climatic Optimum (maximal temps) gradually downward toward the end of the interglacial 6000-12,000 years later, ending with a temperature crash and the onset of full-glacial conditions.
The new evidence from tree rings shows that the net background change, i.e. trend, in global temperatures since the time of the Romans has been downward (comprehensively refuting the "Hockey Stick" thesis), in agreement with the major trend in previous interglacials.
Enjoy it while it lasts. By the 38th century, we're history.
One last point: Warmer = wetter, and abundant harvests. Cooler = drier weather, and crop failure. The AGW crowd hasn't figured that out yet, or they'd be building their "We need totalitarian Communism NOW!" message on the Russo-Danish astrophysicists' predictions of low sunspot activity, cooler global temperatures, and all that that entails (as during the Dalton and Maunder lows).