In message , echinosum
writes

Bob Hobden;883489 Wrote:
This looks ominous for those of us that like to grow exotics in their
gardens.....

'BBC News - Low solar activity link to cold UK winters'
(http://tinyurl.com/y8y749h)

Seems like our cold winters are coming back to stay for a long time.
But the arguments in the work reported there don't make much sense to
me. The variation in the output of the sun has only an average effect
of 0.1 or 0.2C on temperatures. There are other things around which
have much larger effects. Why should that particular effect tend to
rearrange the climate to give a cold winter in Britain, rather than
other things which have larger effects? No one is giving an answer to
that rather telling question.

I'm suspecting statistical coincidence. As has been reported in
scientific papers, there are strong reasons to suppose that a
substantial proportion of scientific papers reporting statistically
significant correlations are in fact random coincidences for two reasons
(1) scientists carry out lots of attempted correlations and discard
those that don't find anything (2) there is a bias towards publicity for
interesting results.

Also it is difficult to be sure that in fact we are arriving in a period
of extended low solar activity. Sure we have had an extended and low
minimum and it is not the first time that has happened. Solar activity
has in fact picked up in the last couple of months. Talk of a new
"Maunder minimum" remains utterly speculative.

But there are nonetheless other grounds to suppose we might be arriving
in a period of cold winters. When the North Atlantic Oscillation is in
negative phase, we tend to get colder winters in NW Europe. It stayed
persistently negative from about 1950 to 1970. Nothing to do with output
of the sun. So there is no apparent reason it shouldn't get stuck
negative for another extended period of a decade or two.




They'll be a lot colder if the second Icelandic Volcano (Katla) goes up!
See the Daniel Finkelstein article of 11 March - link below. This is a
different item from that previously referred to in a different post:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle7074418.ece

Let's hope co-ordinated group finger crossing is effective!
--
Gopher .... I know my place!