Baby it's gonna get cold outside!

Once again, more scary scientifically-based reasons to think that the Ice Age is on it's way:

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

As always, read the whole thing. And remember this; the evidence that we are entering a period of natural, solar-related global cooling is just as strong, if not stronger, than the evidence that we are suffering from anthropomorphic global warming. And it's all the more reason why states and countries should not trip over themselves trying to pass far reaching legislation (i.e. O'Malley's Global Warming Solutions Act) without seriously considering the scientific and economic ramifications of such legislation.....