As the Sun Weakens, the Earth Cools

You may be aware that the sun is in a deep solar minimum, with an ultra-low sunspot count. Besides sunspot number, the sun is behaving strangely in other ways.

"Lately, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have become very slow, so slow that they have to be dragged away from the sun by the solar wind," says researcher Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Lab. Here is an example from April 11th:

Each second in the SOHO animation corresponds to an hour or more of real time. "The speed of the CME was only 240 km/s," says Vourlidas. "The solar wind speed is about 300 km/s, so the CME is actually being dragged."

Vourlidas has examined thousands of CMEs recorded by SOHO over the past 13 years, and he's rarely seen such plodding explosions. In active times, CMEs can blast away from the sun faster than 1000 km/s. Even during the solar minimum of 1996, CMEs often revved up to 500 or 600 km/s. "Almost all the CMEs we've seen since the end of April 2008, however, are very slow, less than 300 km/s."

Is this just another way of saying "the sun is very quiet?" Or do slow-motion CMEs represent a new and interesting phenomena? The jury is still out. One thing is clear: solar minimum is more interesting than we thought. _spaceweather_via_FreshBilge

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the climate is getting distinctly colder. March 2009 was the coldest March this millenium, and April is on track to be even colder compared to other Aprils.

The sun is in a deep slumber. Arctic sea ice is growing ever thicker since 2007, and Antarctic sea ice extent is growing alarmingly. More reputable scientists are disputing the IPCC's myopic anti-scientific fascism.

More up to the minute news about the dismantling of the faux crisis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) here and here.