Edtor: Originally published on January 18, 2017. As Europe sweats away in temperatures we Australians would find quite pleasant, with a bit of Air conditioning, here in Oz it is cold, flu is on the rise and the rain continues to fall.

There’s some very strange global warming going on these days. We’ve been told for decades that global warming would be making summers hotter and longer by now, that the Arctic would be ice-free and the polar bears would all starve, that global warming would make us fatter and that hundreds of thousands of species would be extinct by now. Al Gore even told us that Mount Kilimanjaro would be snow-free by 2016 and that it would be ‘the point of no return’.

Like the poor Mayans, none of Al’s prophecies came true. Indeed, none of the claims that the establishment media have been bombarding us with for twenty years with regard to anthropogenic (man-made) climate change have come true. Not one.

What is occurring, though, is the number of extreme cold weather events is rising sharply around the world.

In January 2016 we saw snowfall in Laos and Vietnam for the first time in living memory.

In November 2016 there was summer snowfall at Perisher resort in the Australian Snowy Mountains.

Last week the Tahoe ski resorts in the western United States had to close because of too much snow.

In the same week, a never-before-seen weather system hit Saskatoon in Canada, leading to -47C wind chill. Similar temperatures in Ontario caused ice crystals to freeze in the air, creating an extremely rare phenomenon known as ‘light pillars’.

Also in the same week, heavy snowfall in Pakistan caused food shortages and migrations, while the Black Sea froze over in Bulgaria for the first time in 60 years.

While at the same time, extremely heavy snowfall buried entire communities in Turkey.

These are just some of the extreme cold weather events which have been hitting with greater ferocity each winter every year around the world. How can these extreme cold weather events be happening globally if man-made climate change is making the planet hotter?

As well as extreme cold weather events, anomalous weather is occurring more and more often. In 2016, for example, Western Australia received five times its usual annual rainfall, while Egypt had a record drought. Ayers Rock in central Australia received a full year’s worth of rain in a single day, causing desert blooms not seen for well over a century in the Simpson Desert.

None of these types of anomalous weather events were predicted by the much-vaunted warmist climate models put out by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They were, however, predicted by a different set of climate models that have nothing to do with man-made climate change.

The cult of anthropogenic climate change has become part of the leftist establishment’s Sacred Ideas That Must Not Be Questioned. Careers are made by championing this myth in the priesthood that runs globalist institutions like the UN. Like the positive effects of the welfare state, the equality of the races and genders, the enriching delights of multiculturalism and the economic benefits of central banking, belief in climate change has become necessary for a person today to be considered socially acceptable by mainstream society. Start questioning whether carbon output through the burning of fossil fuels is really changing the climate and you might be eating your morning tea alone at the office. Or worse.

What is becoming increasingly awkward, though, for the global warmist bureaucracy and their shills in academe, media and Hollywood, is that there has been no warming at all for the past 20 years. They keep bamboozling the public with jargon and fake stats, but the facts remain. The establishment media is now telling those gullible enough to still believe them that the recent sharp drops in global temperatures are a harbinger of global warming. The narrative keeps shifting all the time. Perhaps there is there another, more plausible explanation for the global cooling we are experiencing?

According to many astronomers, space scientists and citizen amateurs who have been investigating this issue for years now, there is. We are heading into an ice age which is being caused by a cyclical downturn in the energy output of the sun. It has happened before and will affect societies profoundly around the world. It could also have been predicted so that preparations could have been made to offset its worst effects.

According to this heliogenic model of global climate, the sun is the main driver of Earth’s climate shifts. It is well-known that the sun has an 11-year activity cycle, and that these minor cycles also comprise larger cyclical fluctuations called grand solar minima and maxima. These grand solar cycles have a duration of approximately 300 years. During a grand solar maximum, the sun is peppered with sunspots, solar flares erupt and the sun hurls out billion-ton clouds of electrified gas into space. It’s awake, and very busy. Historically, these grand solar maxima correspond to peaks in civilisation. During a grand solar minimum, sunspots and solar flares almost disappear.

Even the mainstream media now is acknowledging that over the next five years, the sun will be entering another grand solar minimum. Evidence of this has been appearing frequently, with sunspots becoming extremely rare over the last few months. This has corresponded with the recent extreme cold weather events.

What heliogenic global cooling advocates are arguing is that this reduced solar activity will have devastating impacts upon the Earth’s climate. Not only will temperatures plummet around the world, but extreme weather events and unusual patterns will make agriculture less productive. This will have implications for the stability of societies everywhere.

The last time the sun entered a grand solar minimum was during the 1600s. This is known as the Maunder Minimum, after the two solar astronomers who identified the phenomenon. During this time, solar activity stayed low for about 70 years. It was also a time of great political, social and economic upheaval around the world.

Among many indications that a period of heliogenic global cooling is upon us, recent snowfall in the US matches areas of snowfall during the Maunder Minimum. This mini ice age 300 years ago caused wars, catastrophes and political revolution around the world. Temperatures dropped so low during winter that the Thames River in London froze over. Like the grand solar minimum and resultant mini ice age of the 14th century before it, the Maunder Minimum changed the socio-political paradigm around the world and ushered in the modern era.

We are seeing the same solar patterns today that preceded that last cooling period.

The datasets which are used by solar scientists to determine when the next ice age will begin on Earth are the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the Atlantic Multi Decadal Oscillation (AMO), the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), levels of volcanic activity and solar cycles. Unfortunately for us, all of these indicators are pointing to Earth’s climate starting to cool significantly this year. Temperatures will drop sharply into 2025, recover somewhat into 2035 and then drop precipitously afterward. The debate among the heliogenic global cooling community is whether this ice age we entered at the end of 2016 is a mini ice age similar to the Maunder Minimum period, or if we have entered a prolonged ice age. Such periods last for up to 100,000 years and cover much of the northern hemisphere in ice sheets more than two kilometres high.

Should this be the case, there will be no agriculture or indeed human settlements beyond 45 degrees latitude in both hemispheres. Without adequate preparation beforehand, there may be no civilisation left on Earth at all. Although this possibility may seem preposterous to many people today, it is worth remembering that for the majority of its history Earth has been in an ice age and the current interglacial warm period is quite long in the tooth.

Most researchers instead believe this current cooling period is a mini ice age similar to the Maunder Minimum. Should that be the case, it would be another few centuries before the next full ice age begins. Either way, the next few decades are going to be much, much colder.

Citizens in Western countries may well wish we had built a lot more coal-fired power stations to keep us warm while resources were still abundant.

Even the establishment media has been forced to admit that solar output is declining in the same way it did during the Maunder Minimum. Establishment scientists, however, generously take time out from their busy schedule of taxpayer-funded junkets they call international conferences to reassure us ig’nant plebs that a grand solar minimum will be offset by anthropogenic global warming. We should be grateful to these oracles of omniscient wisdom.

The reality is, however, that the correlation between cyclical solar activity and temperatures on Earth is absolutely clear. The Maunder Minimum of the 17th century was just the most recent of a regular pattern of diminished solar activity and simultaneous global cooling patterns. These events occur approximately every 300 years and last for about 70 years. They cause widespread crop losses, migrations, political turmoil and enormous social change. The cooling period of the 14th century caused the Black Death which wiped out one third of Europe’s population. This made labour scarce, raised wages, ended serfdom and kick-started capitalism in Europe again after it had disappeared for a millennium.

Indeed, what is most interesting for those of us who want to know what is ahead is what a global cooling phase does to societies. In short, it’s not good for political elites and terrible for agriculture but quite good for volcanic eruptions as well as the bugs that kill people. It’s also not good for witches. The Maunder Minimum coincided with the collapse of public confidence in monarchies across the northern hemisphere and a century of general turmoil and upheaval. The Roman and Minoan cooling events, which were much harsher, coincided with mass migrations in search of resources. Sound familiar? The first also ended the Graeco-Roman classical period and the second ended the Bronze Age civilisations. Both led to dark ages which lasted for centuries.

The Black Death across Europe and Asia coincided with the Wolf Minimum in the early 1300’s. Everything is interconnected. The understanding that solar cycles drive historical change supports the anacyclotic, or cyclical, theory of history that has been understood in the East for millennia. Only in the modern West have we viewed history as a straight line; this type of simplistic model is evident in the mindset of those who believe in the establishment’s version of anthropogenic global warming. Reality is far more complicated and dynamic than such two-dimensional models of climate and weather.

The warmist cult which has overtaken the climate sciences, government, the media and the rest of the establishment has shut down the possibility of even investigating whether, in fact, the sun drives climate. Valuable time has been lost and resources have been squandered in the West chasing after so-called ‘green’ energy while we could have been preparing for what is really ahead. How many elderly, sick and poor people have died already due to rising energy prices caused by the anti-carbon policies of Western governments? How many more millions might die around the world because of the warmist propaganda pumped out relentlessly by an elite who don’t seem to care whether their beliefs are true or not?

Is the global elite really so stupid as to be so completely and utterly wrong, or is something else at play? Why else would a globalist elite who seek depopulation and centralised control allow the world’s peoples to get it so wrong? Is it that the elites don’t want to lose control as the population realises there is nothing their political masters can do to stave off such calamitous change?

One thing is for certain: Either the global elite are entirely incompetent or they are entirely evil.

The peoples of the world should have been preparing for the cooling period ahead rather than having their taxes used for bureaucrats to line their own pockets. Should the theory of heliogenic global cooling be correct, people are going to die due to elite incompetence and dishonesty. As a country, we should be investigating if this is true and coming up with strategies to mitigate the effects. To do anything else is utter madness.

Instead of using myths about carbon and white guilt to force European nations to destroy their energy infrastructure and hand the baton of civilisation to Asia, we should have had a Manhattan Project for how to cope with these adverse changes coming down the pipe. Western civilisation has the means and the abilities to perhaps be the first ever societies to prepare for an ice age well enough that we could weather the storm and thrive despite it. Already there are inventors coming up with ways to grow food without sunlight, water or soil. All we need is the collective will and we can overcome any challenge.

What is preventing us from doing so is a corrupt, immoral and self-obsessed global ruling class. The sooner we get rid of these career liars and find leaders who put their people’s interests first, the sooner we can begin to fight real problems – like a possible ice age bearing down us in the next few years. We should at least be talking about it.

Moses Apostaticus writes regularly and brilliantly at http://mosesapostaticus.com