Casey's research into the Sun's activity, which began four years ago, resulted in discovery of a solar cycle that is now reversing from its global warming phase to that of dangerous global cooling for the next thirty years or more.
This new cold climate will dramatically impact the world's citizens. In Cold Sun, he provides evidence of • The end of global warming • The beginning of a "solar hibernation," a historic reduction in the energy output of the Sun • A long-term drop in the Earth's temperatures • The start of the next climate change to decades of dangerously cold weather •
The high probability of record earthquakes and volcanic eruptions A sobering look at the Earth's future, Cold Sun predicts worldwide, crop-destroying cold; food shortages and riots in the United States and abroad; significant global loss of life; and social, political, and economic upheaval.
In the 1970s, it was not as widely understood as in more recent decades that glacial cycles are largely controlled by orbital variables that will not permit another full glacial for at least 20,000 years. This is why some weather researchers of that period thought that a turn to more severe winters (1976 to 1979 were generally harsh winters in the northeast U.S. and Europe) might be signalling an impending ice age. By which they meant a return to full glacial conditions because as some of you already know, the phrase “ice age” is a slight misnomer, we have been in an ice age for about a million years and within that we have had four glacial periods and are now into a fourth inter-glacial. The ice age would only end if land glaciation totally ceased to exist (Greenland, Antarctica and mountain glaciers included). That was the condition of the land masses for many millions of years as a chart posted earlier in this thread shows.
Anyway, the reason why we are not going to hurtle back into full glaciation is that the orbital cycles (identified by Milankovitch back in the 1930s but his research was only being cautiously accepted by the 1970s) are not about to swing headlong into max cooling as apparently happened before the last glacial period started about 125,000 years ago. That one came after a relatively short inter-glacial. The next one may be more gradual, the situation being complicated by the existence of three or more different orbital variables that can promote cooling.
These include (a) greater axial tilt than we have now, (b) solar perihelion in our summer not the southern hemisphere summer as currently the case, (c) greater eccentricity of our orbit than currently the case.
Without going into a lot of detail, the current situation is relatively warmth-promoting but the three cold-promoting outcomes are not going to phase like they did during the last glacial. So the entry into the next one will be more gradual. Our human-generated slight warming signal may also be a preventative factor, if you accept it as 0.5 to 1.0 C deg, that may offset natural cooling factors.
The other variables that can come into play are increased volcanic activity (not predictable) and long solar downturns possibly even longer than in historical records where they seem good for a 2-3 C cooling. We need more like a 5-6 C cooling to overwhelm the current equilibrium and get the northern ice building and moving south.
For all of those reasons, we are not likely to see anything too dramatic even if there’s another Maunder-like solar minimum in the 21st century. The oceans take a very long time to respond to external signals and ice margins are nowhere near where they were in the coldest portions of the LIA these days.
My view is that we’ve reached a kind of equilibrium climate that will be tough to shift out of neutral with various conflicting external and internal influences. More by dumb luck than design, we may be creating the ideal climate by combining greenhouse gases with increased cloudiness from jet contrails. It’s sort of like we insulated and turned down the thermostat.