Sunspots and the Great Cooling Ahead
...When sunspot activity is high, as it was during the 1990s and early 2000s, temperatures tend to be high as well. When it is low, as it is now, temperatures fall. And because sunspot activity occurs in decades-long cycles, the unusually cold winter and spring of 2012 may be just the beginning. As a Barron's article recently noted, current sunspot activity is now the least it has been in a century.

What this means is that the era of global cooling has begun. In the northern hemisphere, three out of the four last winters and springs have been unusually cold. This spring was so cold in East Asia that China was forced to import millions of tons of grain and soybeans from the U.S. and other suppliers.

The environmental elitists in Manhattan and Laguna Beach may not be greatly inconvenienced by cold winters, but ordinary people have to eat, too, and food exhausts a much greater share of their income. For the world's poor, a cold year means the difference between eating and going hungry, or between heating one's home and shivering all winter. Or as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it (while living through the thick of the Little Ice Age himself), it's the difference between a life that is warm and comfortable and one that is "nasty, brutish, and short." Because climate alarmists are focused on global warming when they should be concerned with cooling, life for the world's poor is likely to be just that....

...Every year, nearly half of the U.S. corn crop goes up in smoke, burned as corn ethanol, while children in Guatemala lie listlessly in the dust, their bellies swollen with starvation. The president is not there at their side, either literally or figuratively. He is too busy playing golf or vacationing at the billionaire beach houses on Martha's Vineyard or Oahu. ...