Vor fast genau drei Jahren schrieb ich in einem Kommentar in Kanadas National Post:

Six eminent researchers from the Russian Academy of Science and the Israel Space Agency have just published a startling paper in one of the world’s leading space science journals. The team of solar physicists claims to have come up with compelling evidence that changes in cosmic ray intensity and variations in solar activity have been driving much of the Earth’s climate. They even provide a testable hypothesis, predicting that amplified cosmic ray intensity will lead to an increase of the global cloud cover which, according to their calculations, will result in “some small global cooling over the next couple of years.”

I remain decidedly skeptical of such long-term climate predictions. Nevertheless, it is quite remarkable that the global mean temperature, as recorded by NASA’s global Land-Ocean Temperature Index, has actually dropped slightly during the last couple of years—notwithstanding increased levels of CO2 emissions. Two more years of cooling and we may even see the reappearance of a new Ice Age scare.

Ich bin natürlich kein Hellseher. Allerdings gibt es seit einiger Zeit tatsächlich immer mehr und immer lautere Propheten, die eine neue Eiszeit am Horizont aufkommen sehen. Davon halte ich freilich genausowenig wie von den Prophetien der Wärme-Katastrophisten:

Sunspot activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that — far from warming — the globe is about to return to an Ice Age, says an Australian-American scientist. Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun. He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade.

“This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,” Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. “If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.” “My guess is that the odds are now at least 50:50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades,” he writes.