The link between the solar minimum cycle and climate change

While some continue to blame SUV's, and coal powered electric generation plants first for global warming, and now for climate change, is it possible the sun can be to blame? Dr. Charlie Perry thinks so.

Despite being employed as a research hydrologist, Charlie Perry has degrees in physics and astronomy and studies sunspots and solar activity in his spare time. What Perry has found, is a correlation between the current solar minimum cycle and the cool trend we have all noticed this summer. For those of us who grow gardens, that is not news, it's just what we were working against this year. As reported in the Topeka Capitol-Journal Online Perry has shown a strong correlation between the current solar minimum, which is a period of fewer sunspots than during a solar maximum. A recent period of 51 days of no sunspot activity at all is only one day short of being a record since the early 1900's. While there are still more than one hundred days yet to go, the lack of sunspot activity makes this the third lowest in actual number of spotless days of recent solar minimums with 717 spotless days since 2004. Perry stated it was possible for the current solar minimum to cross into 2010, and if it does to watch for a colder winter than last year. In 1816 the planet Earth was in the middle of a grand solar minimum, and it became known as the year without a summer. Perry noted the snow falls in Buenos Aires and South Africa as the results of the solar minimum. The acting chair of the geography department at Kansas University, Johan Feddema disagrees with Perry and is a proponent of CO2 as the cause of the current Global Climate Change. Atmospheric science is part of the geography department at KU. Charlie Perry recommended delving into the details at [url=http://www.icecap.us/]www.icecap.us/ for climate information, and this site for a graph of the correlation between sunspot activity and temperature.