Ah, sunspots. 1980 it was. A delightful year. One that is quoted by everyone as the year when disastrous warming really took off. Funny that from 1974 or 1975 (depending on what you were measuring) until 1980 there was one of the largest drops in average world temperatures we have ever recorded.
And what happened in 1980? Major solar activity not predicted. It seemed that there was a cycle of fairly long duration that had previously not been detected. This coincided with a shorter cycle that was very much previously understood and predicted. The combined effect was a complete reversal of the short sharp cooling trend.
It actually stuffed up my 1979 1980 studies greatly but that the time I was pretty happy to be proved wrong. Another year of grain harvest failures in the Soviet Union and the world could well have been a vastly different place than the people power pulling down of the Berlin Wall a little while later.
I think a great many people including a great many global warming scientists with their pretty climate models grossly underestimate the effect of sunspot activities, of flares, of output fluctuations and the like. Things that are not well understood at all and have not been studied with any great accuracy for very long at all.
Richard
