the sun's come back a little. as i pointed out before, there's some research indicating that solar strength has some effect on the strength of the air flow in the north. the papers i was reading suggested it may in turn have some effect on the el nino in terms of influencing trade winds. that's of course ignoring that the el nino is itself about a warming ocean area. and, we are in fact seeing a mild el nino.

now, i don't want anybody jumping on me about this, so you have to go back to the old beaten weather/climate thing. the idea that the sun is modifying the climate is entirely debunked. the idea that the sun is the dominant factor in terms of the weather we see is beyond question - in terms of the actual science and just basic intuition. we didn't worship the sun all those years for nothing, after all.

this is the money graph, and you can see how the spots have come down, which you would expect to have an effect on the weather by decreasing the amount of energy introduced into the system. it *does* correlate, once you adjust for the effects of increased greenhouse gasses. now, we've seen a couple of warm years in the northern hemisphere over the last few years even in spite of this decrease in solar strength, and the southern hemisphere really hasn't slowed down at all (we get zapped by the sun differently due to the earth being tilted). but, for the last year or so, that substantial decrease in solar energy seems to be dominating the effects of increased carbon emissions. it's one thing to talk about trapping heat, it's another to cut off the source of the heat in the first place.

we're at a maximum right now, but it's very weak and might not disturb the existing patterns. so, you're looking at one of two scenarios for the fall and winter:

1) the increased solar activity is just enough to break up the vortex, in which case the dominant factor should be the el nino. where i am, weak el ninos lead to slightly cooler winters. but that's nothing like last year....
2) the increased solar activity is not enough to break up the vortex, but is enough to weaken it slightly. that's also an improvement over last year, but not by much.

http://www.sidc.be/silso/monthlyssnplot

i just want to add that it would be an error to get complacent about the situation. on the one hand, we know the sun is dying, but we generally think it's going to be millions or billions of years into the future before it burns out. however, it should really be noted that we really just don't understand these cycles well enough to know how strong they're going to be cycle over cycle. we know it has that saddle shape, and that's predictable, but how strong it's going to spike and why remains a complete mystery.

it's interesting to contemplate the idea of some force or entity turning the sun down a little for us to compensate for our errors, or even to stamp us out completely before we get out of hand, but these ideas are purely in the realm of imagination.

the cold kind of sucks, but in the greater scheme we've really just been lucky that the sun has decreased at the same time that we're dumping greenhouse gasses, allowing it to roughly balance out. we could very well continue that streak of luck, and if we do it might put off the upcoming apocalypse for a while. but, we have every reason to think the sun will come back to it's maximum levels and if that happens with a dramatically altered atmosphere the oncoming heat is going to be very fast with very dramatic consequences.