Quote Originally Posted by Pendell
1) These are general interest publications. Given the discussions we've had on the poor quality of science reporting in the media, does anyone want to unpack this and give us a better picture of what's really happening?
Well given that the responses to this so far have been blog posts, I think this question has been been looked over.
Blogs are at least as bad, if not worse, then mainstream news for sensationalism or simply being contradictory to be contradictory. Their relevance is also much more tied to their "ratings" and how much they fit to their readers expectations then normal news.



I think in the cases of all of these articles, both for and against, is sensationalism in the titles, rather then the meat of the argument. The last time we had a minimum that was sustained for a long period of time we also had a minor ice age. However at this point we could have a fair amount of cooling before we get back to normal* and then a lot more cooling after that before we got to an "ice age."
And as both sides say, its a reduction in the energy from the sun, but there is still a lot of energy there.
When you consider that the whole negative part of greenhouse gases is that they capture and retain more energy from the sun. Its impossible to reasonably say that a change in the energy from the sun won't have an impact on the amount of energy capture by greenhouse gases.
And even the pro articles don't say anything about what sort of temperatures we might expect to see if the sun is much less active, they don't even imply (at least the ones I read, I haven't read them all) that its for sure going to be enough to put the world into another ice age.



*I find the claim of deviation from the normal temperature of the earth laughable at best considering that in the 4.5billion years the earth has been around its been constantly changing temperature. Which isn't to say that we aren't taking part in the change in climate. But that you can't claim we're going to destroy the world when its already been much colder and much hotter then it is now and has been in the last couple hundred years. Obviously living organisms can change the climate, bacteria and plants have been responsible for large temperature changing events in the past.