And now for something completely different

I find this interesting:



It's today's sun. What's interesting is that there are no sunspots. As you may know, the number of sunspots rises and falls on a very regular 11-year cycle. We should have been getting more sunspots last year, but we didn't. NASA reports that its been almost 100 years since the sun has been so spotless, and 2008 was already the most spotless year of the space age.

Two years of spotlessness. So what?

Here's a graph of climate change from a post at PowerLine:




Note the "Little Ice Age" of the 1600s. It coincides with something called the Maunder Minimum, an extended period when, for unexplained reasons, there were no sunspots. We could be entering a new Little Ice Age, based upon the sun's current inactivity. However, scientists are still debating that relationship—the Little Ice Age started before and ended after the Maunder Minimum, but the minimum was its coldest part.

If it seems like the winters are getting colder, it may not be your imagination. Can we hold off on that new carbon tax until we get more data?