Some are making $2,000 to $3,000 a month peddling the myth, Weirdly, they do not look at the details of the sun but cold here or snow there they write up big and that is their “evidense” of the sun going or being in a GSM.

The thing is, when the oh so long awaited Grand Solar Minimum arrives—it will not cause an ice age. Cooling of 0.1°C (J Lean quoted in the video) or 0.2°C as predicted in a science paper I read. AGW warms us by 0.231°C per decade (RSS) so with ocean buffering I doubt cooling could be detected.

I wonder at the motivations of some. The sellers of the GSM = Ice Age snake oil do it for one good reason: money.

But why do people believe them? It is an obvious con. If there is some cold event it was brought by a weather system (or two, e.g. a stable High pressure system blocking the movement of another weather system that then dumps a heap of snow or rain etc in an area that usually doesn’t get that much precipitation/low temperatures etc. To sort out if the cold/precipitation is a sign of some larger trend you need to discuss the weather systems bringing that severe weather. They never do, doubt they would know how. Nope, cold/snow so ice age or GSM.

So the same dupes who sneer at climate scientists “only” using data from 1880 rely on the last major weather event to determine that the sun is in a GSM!

So why believe the snake oil sellers?

1. People that believe that the sun is in/going into a GSM which will bring an ice age obviously no longer need fear AGW.

2. People like having their mind made up for them or don’t like to think hard so a ready made formula would appeal to them

3. People like to be in a cult, to “know what most people don’t know” (I have read these exact same words in comments to some bullshit videos by Dubyne)

4. Finally I suppose there are those just not bright who think that XYZ is giving the real news. (This is a bit like point 2. but is just people who don’t have education etc and are fooled into thinking the snake oil seller is the real thing.)

Behind the snake oil sellers I would say is oil money, happy to encourage some to keep spreading false climate info to confuse the public about AGW etc—disinformation and spreading an air of uncertainty about climate science is a big part of their effort to avoid real action to reduce carbon emissions.

But the sun is not in a GSM—the sun with hardly any sunspots for a solar cycle or three (or about seven in the case of the Maunder Minimum 1650-1725.) There have been up to 220 spots at one time in this cycle so far and it it not near the peak of the cycle yet.

Oh yes, the power of the human mind to fool itself. Earlier on in Solar Cycle 25 the idea of a GSM was of a sun with hardly any sunspots for extended periods (there are hardly any spots visible when one Solar Cycle is winding down and the new one is just starting.) That got changed very quickly once it became clear SC25 was reasonably active to several cycles with lower than normal numbers of sunspots. Now, most seem to have accepted that the sun is not in a GSM or just keep their mistaken beliefs to themselves.

Now the triple La Nina period is finished and ENSO neutral conditions are establishing themselves we should see some heat that hopefully will open the eyes of some of these dupes.

Of course, a warming world is a world where there is more moisture in the atmosphere and more precipitation when the warm moist air moves over colder land will still see significant snowfalls. Also more hailstorms and bigger hailstones because of the warming world (with bigger convection currents in thunderstorms) so the snake oil sellers will be able to profit for a while longer from their dupes.

Next El Nino will be hotter than 2016. Not looking forward to it at all!

All quiet on the Western GSM front: