They called it a “ground breaking study,” I call it rubbish. This new study claims that global warming began in 1830 just when the industrial revolution began to pick up steam (no pun intended). What they didn’t take into account was just around the same time the Earth was coming out of an unusually cold 40-year period caused by low sunspot activity called the Dalton Minimum (no relation to Timothy Dalton).

An international team of scientists, led by Associate Professor Nerilie Abram from the Australian National University, have analysed detailed reconstructions of climate going back 500 years. To their surprise, they’ve found that the current global warming trend began in the 1830s, further confirming that it is an anthropogenic, or human-induced, phenomenon. The study was published today in Nature. Co-researcher Dr Helen McGregor, an earth sciences expert from the University of Wollongong, tells SBS Science the findings have a major impact on our understanding of how climate change works. “If we know when global warming started, we know what the actual rates of warming are and we know when our climate is emerging above natural variability,” McGregor explains.

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The scientists go on to explain they created a climate model (which have proven to be very flawed–for example none of these models have figured why the earth hasn’t warmed in over 18 years.). So to create this model they took into account other account climate model simulations and experiments (that’s right a flawed climate model using data from a flawed climate model–almost like a double negative), major volcanic eruptions and, most importantly, natural markers of climate variation found in places like corals, tree rings, and ice cores obtained from glaciers.

Dr McGregor says the study provides new, independent proof that climate change is indeed caused by human activity. “One thing that our study provides is that it’s an alternative line of evidence,” she explains. “We’re not using thermometers and satellite records, we’re using natural archives of climate, so it’s a completely independent source of information that shows that climate change and warming is occurring. “The central tenet of climate change, that the planet is warming, doesn’t change.”

Well not necessarily, because nowhere in their analysis do the scientists take into account sunspot activity.

Note: The sun goes through a natural cycle approximately every 11 years. The greatest number of sunspots in any given solar cycle is designated as the “solar maximum” and the lowest number is referred to as the “solar minimum” phase.

The chart below shows sun spot activity for the past 400 years.

What scientists have observed is that when sun spot activity is low so is the earth’s temperatures. The time period of low sunspot activity below called the Maunder Minimum is also known as “The Little Ice Age.” not because glaciers covered the Earth, but because it was a long period of abnormally cold weather throughout the world. The period of low sunspot activity between 1790-1830 is known as the Dalton Minimum, again the weather was colder than normal.

In the late 1950s sun spot activity peaked at a much higher level than normal and was called the Modern Maxim, this was reflected in the global warming scare show global temperature growth accelerating.

It seems as if the scientists behind this”ground breaking study,” picked the result they wanted and selected the elements that would give them that result.

Now here’s the good news they might have ignored. It seems that solar activity is slowing down. The in the chart above it seems that activity started to decrease toward the end of the 1990s. Similarly the satellite temperature data shows the Earth hasn’t warmed since 1998.

Vencore Inc. is a company that has worked closely with a number of government agencies on weather-related projects, including NASA, NOAA, Naval Meteorological and Oceanographic Command, Naval Postgraduate School and the Intelligence Community. It is now suggesting that the extreme lack of sunspot activity now may be an indication of a major cooling period for the Earth.

Not since cycle 14 peaked in February 1906 has there been a solar cycle with fewer sunspots. We are currently more than six years into Solar Cycle 24 and the current nearly blank sun may signal the end of the solar maximum phase. Solar cycle 24 began after an unusually deep solar minimum that lasted from 2007 to 2009 which included more spotless days on the sun compared to any minimum in almost a century.

It’s not just the fewer number of sunspots…its the pattern of their peaks:

The smoothed sunspot number for solar cycle 24 reached a peak of 81.9 in April 2014 and it is looking increasingly likely that this spike will be considered to be the solar maximum for this cycle. This second peak in the cycle surpassed the level of an earlier peak that reached 66.9 in February 2012. Many solar cycles are double peaked; however, this is the first one in which the second peak in sunspot number was larger than the first peak. Going back to 1755, there have been only a few solar cycles in the previous 23 that have had a lower number of sunspots during its maximum phase.

Now that doesn’t mean it’s definitely staying that way..but chances are it will. And here is where it gets interesting:

It is pretty well understood that solar activity has a direct impact on temperatures at very high altitudes in a part of the Earth’s atmosphere called the thermosphere. This is the biggest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere which lies directly above the mesosphere and below the exosphere. Thermospheric temperatures increase with altitude due to absorption of highly energetic solar radiation and are highly dependent on solar activity. Finally, if history is a guide, it is safe to say that weak solar activity for a prolonged period of time can have a cooling impact on global temperatures in the troposphere which is the bottom-most layer of Earth’s atmosphere – and where we all live.

Vencore’s prediction substantiates paper written by Russian scientists in 2013 who used sunspot activity to predict we are heading for a “Mini Ice Age.”

. The German Herald reported on March 31, 2013 regarding Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov from the St. Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, “Talking to German media the scientist who first made his prediction in 2005 said that after studying sunspots and their relationship with climate change on Earth, we are now on an ‘unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop.’”