i may not have gone over this in this space.

it's a kind of synthesis. i'm not into false dichotomies.

so, here's how this works: up until 1980, for as far back as we could measure it, the global mean temperatures on earth moved in a very close correlation with the sun. so, when the sun got warmer, the temperatures went up. and, when the sun got cooler, the temperatures went down. it really wasn't complicated at all, in fact.

the sun is, after all, the source of virtually all natural heat on this planet. the atmosphere may trap some heat, but it has to come from somewhere. and, the sun is where essentially all of it comes from. this is really as obvious as it should be, intuitively.

but, starting in 1980 - and this is what the ipcc report is actually about - this correlation broke. what happened is that, for the first time on record, the sun got cooler - but temperatures went up. so, we would need to seek an alternate cause for that increase in temperatures, and that alternate cause appears to be - as best as we can tell - the increase in atmospheric carbon.

but, the sun has not stopped getting cooler since 1980. rather, the cooling has actually accelerated, to the point where it's created some alarm amongst certain solar scientists.

i've pointed out repeatedly that my background is in mathematics, and i'm just dabbling when it comes to climate change. but, a background in math means you can read just about anything - what it does is cut the learning curves down. and, i don't have difficulties understanding published papers in climate science, because of that. so, i've read a few.

it's not that decreasing the total amount of energy from the sun has any effect on the amount that is absorbed, exactly. this is measured in w/m^2, and it's not a big difference, relatively, even if you account for the large number of metres squared over the area that the sun hits, which is in the northern hemisphere, because the earth is tilted. in theory, if the sun turned off, sure - but these are small fluctuations. so, if you live in australia, total solar irradiance will not have much of an effect on the weather you experience. but, the weather we experience here in southern canada is driven almost entirely by the jet stream, and the dominant factor that controls how the jet stream behaves is, in fact, how much energy you're getting from the sun.

as we are in an interglacial, the earth is in fact in constant threat of snowballing. how would the earth snowball, if it were to do so? what would happen is that the arctic air masses would reach out from the poles until they reached each other, enveloping the earth in total frozenness. and, the sun would need some extra help in unfreezing the earth at that point. sunlight wouldn't be enough. it would need the warm air masses, some how, like maybe via an increase in atmospheric carbon, to help trap in heat from an internal source, like a volcano.

what keeps this cold air bottled up is sunlight. well, again, not exactly - the sunlight triggers a reaction in the atmosphere, and it's then the jetstream that keeps it bottled up. but, you can think of this like you think of photosynthesis: it is essentially a function of the sunlight. in the summer, the arctic air mass shrinks to directly around the pole, as a consequence of the increase in sunlight. and, in the winter, the air mass expands as a consequence of a decrease in sunlight.

every year at the bottom of the winter, we get dangerously close to the trigger point. and, what global warming is doing is exaggerating the shrinkage involved in bottling the air masses up.

but, these are the two extremes - it works in degrees, too.

so, when the northern hemisphere gets less sunlight, the arctic air masses that the sunlight bottles up are more able to escape, which they are constantly seeking to do. then, you get colder winters  - and blicky summers - in the areas dominated by the northern jetstream, which often runs close to the us-canada border in north america.

we're entering a solar minimum in one of the weakest cycles we've ever seen. that is going to make it that much easier for the arctic air to escape downwards. and, that is the crux of your forecast of a winter dominated by polar air masses - vortexes, if you will - moving into the inhabited areas of north america.

but, i'm skeptical that this dominates the winter, because we still have so much warm air in the oceans, as a result of the global warming. look at the hurricanes we had this year. there's a lot of heat, there, and it's not able to dissipate like it used to.

so, what you get is a tug of war between the cold arctic masses pushing down and the warm ocean air pushing up - which is technically tautological. that's every winter. except the extremes are both intense, right now.

if emissions continue as they are, and the sun comes back, we're going to get really, really hot all at once. but, if the sun stays weak for the next several decades, this particular area of the planet is probably going to avoid a lot of the warming effects in the short run, as these cold air masses are allowed to run rampant.

no trend in reality is monolithic. or, to take some poetic license with newton: there's always a counterforce.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.