the thing about these guys is that they won't tell anybody what they're actually doing. so, it's fashionable amongst science-y types to just write it off as nonsense, but that's actually not very rigorous. the more science-y approach is to point out that they can't be analyzed, so we can't know whether what they're doing makes any sense or not. that's fundamentally different from a clairvoyant or a fortune teller, or even a magician, where we can break it down and explain how it works.

they might have a great scientific model. they probably don't. but...

that said, i don't think that this is something that public dollars should be funding reports on, either. cbc should really be embarrassed for running a story like this.

can somebody at wikileaks or somebody get this out there so we can figure it out?

my analysis is not based on a secret formula, and i don't have a crystal ball, so i'm not trying to predict the future. i'm just looking at broad trends around the solar cycle, and what are at this point quite rigorous correlations from ancient  ice core tree ring samples.

we are bottoming out right now. so, that means that the conditions for a very cold winter do in fact exist. but, we can also be sure of something else: things will be getting better, soon. the cycle will be clicking back in, and when it does we should expect it to get very, very hot and very, very fast.

so, i'm going to split the difference with their secret wisdom. i'm expecting an early fall, and a brutal start to winter, yes - in this part of the world. it may be very different elsewhere. i'm not talking about global average temperatures, i'm talking about local weather.

but, i think there's a lot of uncertainty around what happens at the beginning of the upcoming year.

if the bottoming out clicks in, and gets stuck for a long time, we could indeed have a late spring and one more shitty summer before it flips back over. but, none of us should have any kind of confidence in that actually happening. given that we don't actually understand the physics of this - all we have is an observed pattern - it's actually just as likely that the cycle could click back in very hard. and, we would then want to expect an early spring and a scorching summer.

so, we should expect to get hit early, but we should also have some hope that this is the end of it for a good while. and, we should get ready to exit this little blip we're in, and be prepared for a much warmer future, as it is coming. soon.

so, we might have one more crappy spring left. or we might not.

it'll be clearer what's going on as we get closer to the solstice.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/farmers-almanac-winter-1.5262555