And here's the kicker--We may have an ice age while preparing for global warming---are you cackling in glee yet, Willhelm?

Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory also show that there are currently no spots on the sun. He also noted that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Dr Chapman noted in The Australian recently.

If the world does face another mini Ice Age, it could come without warning. Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rat

I think this points the arrogance of humanity to think we can control nature. We should quit wasting time worrying about the lie of man made warming and put our scientific minds to work learning and understanding how to mitigate the natural climate swings with technology that helps us adapt. It is only a matter time before we are faced with more climate challenges. The Earth today is relatively cold when you consider it's entire history.

You're right about the arrogance of humans, but for the wrong reasons...The FACT that the immense amounts of CO2 that we release into the atmosphere is upsetting the balance of the climate dynamic. To what effect remains to be seen. The arrogance is that wee can keep burning fossil fuel and fouling the air and the oceans with our filth and survive at all. THAT'S ARROGANT.

As a Ham Radio Operator, I have a vested interest in sunspots, they give off charged particles that, when they collide with the Earth's atmosphere, create ionized layers, that we bounce our signals off (skip). So I watch them closely, at the moment we are at the bottom of an eleven year cycle, so numbers would normally be low. Whilst the present numbers are lower than normal, there are still sunspots being produced, the latest about a week or so ago. It's way to early to say if this period of low numbers will continue, it may or may not at this stage. No need to panic yet.
Observed sunspot numbers are readily available on the net, though they can be confusing or misleading, point is, sunspots have not dissapeared,.........Yet.