Here’s a PDF to read for those of you who, like myself, have been keeping an uneasy eye on sunspot activity and the delayed transition from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24.
The consequences of a Dalton minimum or worse, a Maunder minimum causing little ice age conditions for those of you that live, work, and farm in the northern areas of North America is something that you may wish to contemplate just in case.
I’m sure people who haven’t been following the solar cycles may be saying “SwampWoman, have you gone slap crazy? Why in the world would I want to waste any time at all thinking about the implications of losing a month of the growing season every year when that noted climate scientist Al Gore assures me that we are going to shortly be enjoying tropical weather conditions in Canada?” Well, I wouldn’t be planting any orange groves in the wheat fields just yet. Global warming appears to have stopped @ 10 years ago, although the hysteria about the evils of global warming has actually been increasing.
State and federal energy policies are being based on the premise of “global warming” linked to miniscule human-caused increases in carbon dioxide, a theory that has featured seriously flawed data and computer “modeling” that has shown little real world correlation. In the meantime, little attention has been paid to the role of the sun in warming and/or cooling.
As for me, I plan on perusing the fruit tree catalogs to contemplate tasty apple and peach tree varieties that require more winter chill hours than what has (previously) been available in my north Florida climate. If solar cycle 24 kicks in robustly, I’ll be out a few hundred dollars for fruit trees. If we do indeed go into an extended period of global cooling and the energy policies based on global warming cripple our electrical production, there are giant oak trees on the property which will provide winter firewood for years to come. And I’ll finally have good-tasting apples.
Thanks to Al Fin for bringing this PDF to my attention.
A1A South 
John A. Jauregui said,
October 9, 2008 @ 11:28 pm
I just returned from visiting Yellowstone and was struck by the devastation of the 1988 fires, which were preceeded by acute drought and record setting dry lightening. I began to wonder what solar activity occured leading up the 1988 fire storms. Solar cycle 22 started just a couple of years before that summer of drought and dry lightening. Check this out. Relative to other cycles, that solar cycle had 1) a very fast rise time – 2.8 years, 2) a very short cycle length – 9.7 years, 3) a high minimum sun spot number – 12.3, and 4) a high maximum sun spot number – 158.5
more:
“Cycle 22 certainly provided us with many highlights. Early in the cycle the smoothed sunspot number (determined by the number of sunspots visible on the sun and used as the traditional measure of the cycle) climbed rapidly; in fact more rapidly than for any previously recorded cycle. This caused many to predict that it would eclipse Cycle 19 (peak sunspot number of 201) as the highest cycle on record. This was not to be as the sunspot number ceased climbing in early 1989 and reached a maximum in July of that year. Whilst not of record amplitude, Cycle 22 still rated as 4th of the recorded cycles and continued the run of recent large solar cycles (Cycles 18, 19 and 21 were all exceptional!). A very notable feature of Cycle 22 was that it had the shortest rise from minimum to maximum of any recorded cycle.”
Material Prepared by Richard Thompson. © Copyright IPS – Radio and Space Services.