does that mean we're heading into an ice age? no. quite the opposite.
how these magnetic storms affect the earth's weather depends on when and how they hit us. if they hit us in the winter, they break up the vortex and make it colder by pushing cold air down into the lower latitudes. if they hit us in the summer, the increase in temperature will lead to mild to moderate warming outcomes that are more pronounced in the hemisphere that gets nailed, which is usually the north. this has to do with the current tilt in the axial procession, which makes the northern hemisphere more likely to get nailed.
the problem in the narrative in recent decades is that the media, in apparent collusion with competition for funding dollars in scholastic departments, has set the question up as a debate and competition. this is so absurdly capitalist. capital destroys everything; it has this reverse midas touch to it. so, let us go back to hegel and remember that competition just creates false dichotomies in place of the useful synthesis presented by dialectics.
if you want to understand the weather, you need to stop with the petty bickering between the solar scientists and the earth scientists, which generates false dichotomies, and get back to trying to build a proper synthesis of the two sciences. by discounting solar science on it's face, earth scientists have tried to explain things they cannot explain, and created absurd hypothesis, like the idea that sudden stratospheric warming is caused solely by ocean heat somehow breaking the laws of thermodynamics and jumping up into the stratosphere. conversely, solar scientists have tried to discount earth science altogether, in reducing everything to milankovitch cycles.
i assert that both fields are valid and both things are true.
- yes, global warming is caused by greenhouse gasses
- yes, ssws are usually caused by solar flares using well understood physics, and rarely if ever caused by rossby waves somehow breaking physics to warm the stratosphere
- yes, ice ages are caused by milankovitch cycles and often undone by volcanism
- yes, we're at solar maximum in what looks like a weakening solar output, at least for now
- yes, anthropogenic global warming is real.
we don't have the science to conclude we're going into a "grand solar minimum".
and we don't yet know what the resultant outcome will be if lower solar outcome coincides with increased greenhouse gas emission and a milankovitch cycle hurdling us back into a glaciation period.
there is nothing wrong with me pointing out that it might actually be true that if we don't saturate the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses then we might be heading directly into a glaciation, and that more and more carbon emissions might be the only hope we have of preventing that glaciation. but, unless some science is being suppressed, we're not there yet.
right now, the best science we have says that despite the weakening solar output and despite the milankovitch cycles, carbon emissions are going to lead to out of control temperature increases in the upcoming decades even if we do get them under control, immediately.
so, yes, it's been cold and it's been cold because the sun is throwing more radiation at the north pole, which is warming the north pole, and causing the vortex that keeps the cold at the pole to break up and scatter. what neither side of the argument is explaining to you is that, when that happens, it means the cold air collapses. we're not experiencing the north pole freezing over because the sun is weakening, although that could happen, too; we're experiencing the north pole getting nuked by the sun, and blowing the cold air out in all directions. it's cold in siberia and in canada, but it's actually warm at the north pole, itself. that's unusual - most cold snaps caused by ocean currents, to the extent that they weakly are, lead to high or low pressure systems moving heat on the earth around, so that the cold air shifts here or there. that's not what happened this winter. this winter, the pole got very warm, and the cold pushed out everywhere.
that means what happens next is that it gets warmer, not colder, because the nuclear weapon that the sun bombed us with blew up the polar vortex altogether. once that cold air pushes south and dissipates, it's gone.
so, that's the good news: the same solar event that created such a cold winter will result in a warm spring because it superheated all the cold air out of the northern hemisphere. we experienced this as a brutal blast of cold air, but that blast of cold air was a temporary result of an overall warming process and, once it dissipates, we'll get a couple of hot months now, instead.
the system is too complicated to try to predict further than that.