[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Thor

Covered it in another thread, but I forgot to link to Phil Plaits response to the mini Ice age nonsense, this is in 2011, to give you an idea of how this story keeps popping up

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...a-new-ice-age/

I found this part interesting:

The jet stream is a river of air that flows roughly west to east across the Earth. It varies a lot season to season and year to year, and it can affect regional weather quite strongly. A dip south can bring very cold arctic air to one place while a northward kink keeps another region temperate. When the jet stream is strong it flows well and that doesn’t happen, but when it’s weak it can meander, flopping north and south in various locations. The jet stream strength and direction depends on many factors, including, of all things, ozone.
The dependence is complicated, but the bottom line is the jet stream is weaker when there’s less ozone (it has to do with latitude-dependent temperature gradients across the upper atmosphere; those gradients are strong in winter and weak in summer). Ozone creation depends on UV from the Sun, which is weaker during a solar minimum. See where this is going? Weaker magnetic activity on the Sun means less ozone which means a weaker jet stream which means it meanders more, bringing cold air south in some places.

We know the sun is weaker currently, wonder if that has played some role in the wacky jet stream we have had lately.