Are you ready for bone-chilling cold this winter? The Old Farmer’s Almanac and other weather forecasters that rely on solar activity as a factor in their weather forecasts are projecting that this upcoming winter will be bitterly cold. Solar activity is at a 100-year low, and even though we were supposed to be in the midst of a solar maximum this year, our sun has been eerily quiet. So precisely what in the world is going on?
There have been other periods throughout history when solar activity has been extraordinarily quiet, and those times have corresponded with periods of extreme cold. For example, the “Maunder Minimum” which stretched from 1645 to 1715 corresponded with the most bitterly cold period that the earth experienced in the last 1000 years. So could we be heading toward another “mini-ice age”? That is a question that some scientists are now beginning to ask.
Clearly, something unusual is happening with our sun. The following is from a Universe Today article that was posted back in July…
Our nearest star has exhibited some schizophrenic behavior thus far for 2013.
By all rights, we should be in the throes of a solar maximum, an 11-year peak where the Sun is at its most active and dappled with sunspots.
Thus far though, Solar Cycle #24 has been off to a sputtering start, and researchers that attended the meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Solar Physics Division earlier this month are divided as to why.“Not only is this the smallest cycle we’ve seen in the space age, it’s the smallest cycle in 100 years,” NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center research scientist David Hathaway said during a recent press teleconference conducted by the Marshall Space Flight Center.
