Two links on Climate - it's the sun

Hat tip to Rivrdog for these two links and this post:

Two assignments today
We're returning to mid-winter in the Pacific Northwest. Russia's Chief Climatologist, Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, is proving more and more accurate every day. Last fall, he predicted that a severe "cool cycle" in the sun's warmth would make this year memorable for a lack of summer in northern climates. BTW, the same savant also predicted the end of the recent global warming cycle and a return to a cooling cycle.

So, in the Northwest, we're having an unheard-of Spring arctic outbreak for the next four days. It will probably snow at my house near Portland this weekend (438 feet of elevtion), and the Northwest's second most important crop, but the one it is best known for, fruit, is about to be severely damaged. Temperatures in the fruit-growing regions definitely will fall to the crop-damage level of 25-28 degrees, and in some of the higher pockets of those regions, will probably fall to the tree-damage level of 21-23 degrees.

The first link is to this article in The Oregonian:

Columbia Gorge farms fear weekend spring freeze
Growers will crank the heat and cross their fingers as they try to shield millions in fruit crops

Massive frost fans and giant propane heaters will be churning and burning in the Columbia River Gorge this weekend as growers try to protect their tender budding and blooming fruit trees from a winterlike cold snap.

At stake are 300 tons of cherries, apples and pears worth $110 million to growers in five counties: Hood River, Wasco and Sherman in Oregon and Klickitat and Skamania in Washington.

The second item is Rivrdog's mention of Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin. Here is one of his online articles describing what he thinks is going on:

A cold spell soon to replace global warming
Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason�solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.

It determines decisions and instruments of major international organizations�in particular, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signed by 150 countries, it exemplifies the impact of scientific delusion on big politics and economics. The authors and enthusiasts of the Kyoto Protocol based their assumptions on an erroneous idea. As a result, developed countries waste huge amounts of money to fight industrial pollution of the atmosphere. What if it is a Don Quixote�s duel with the windmill?

More at the site. It will be interesting to see when the thinking shifts. CO2's relationship with warming is minimal at best - a few tenths of a percent. Getting back to the farming, it's not just the cold weather damaging the fruit trees. Bees and other pollinating insects to not fly when it is chilly -- they stay in the hive and work to maintain the temperature. If the blossoms on the trees are not pollinated, they will not bear fruit. Here is an article in the Vancouver Sun about the problems they are having:

Cold weather hurts fruit, vegetable crops
Colder than usual weather could mean a drop in Lower Mainland's fruit production and a late harvest of the region's potatoes and other vegetable crops.

That's the word from local farmers and growers' organizations who say much depends on weather patterns for the rest of April.

"If the temperatures stay cold, we'll lose a lot of blueberry production," Surrey Farms owner Sukhi Rai said in an interview. "Last year we only had 35 tons. It's getting tougher to grow them."

A quiet sun is a cold sun and today's sun was quiet -- very very quiet: