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SO WE BASICALLY REALLY ARE LIVING IN FALLEN ANGELS, WITH HUMAN EMISSIONS OFFSETTING A NEW ICE AGE: The sun is experiencing a less active phase called ‘solar minimum,’ but it won’t cause an ice age. “But this solar minimum won’t spark another ice age, they say. And that’s likely due to [anthropogenic] climate change.”

Related, from last year: Big U-turn: Key melting Greenland glacier is growing again. “A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds. The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-en) glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) and thinning nearly 130 feet (almost 40 meters) annually. But it started growing again at about the same rate in the past two years, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Geoscience . Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.”

Temporary, eh? Well, so was the shrinkage before, as it turned out.

AN YOU THOUGHT FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL: We were heading for an Ice Age — until humans started warming the globe. “A study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides new evidence that ancient farming practices led to a rise in the atmospheric emission of the heat-trapping gases carbon dioxide and methane—a rise that has continued since, unlike the trend at any other time in Earth’s geologic history. It also shows that without this human influence, by the start of the Industrial Revolution, the planet would have likely been headed for another ice age.”

FALLEN ANGELS IS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Sunspot update for July 2018: The Sun flatlines! “Except for two very short-lived and very weak sunspots that observers hardly noted, the Sun was blank for entire month of July. This has not happened since 2009, during the height of the last solar minimum. What makes this so significant and unique is that it almost certainly signals the return of the next solar minimum, a return that comes more than a year early. The solar cycle the Sun is now completing has only been ten years long. It is also one of the weakest in more than a hundred years. This combination is unprecedented. In the past such a weak cycle required a long cycle, not a short one.”

FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? So it was snowing all afternoon today in Knoxville, it’s going down below freezing, and that breaks a 113-year-old record for cold on this date.

UPDATE: Nooo! “The temperature drop is in keeping with a prediction made 35 years ago by physicist Leona Woods Marshall Libby that temperatures would rise in the 1980s and 1990s, then fall. She is the woman who developed the tree ring method used in climatology to measure temperatures thousands of years ago. ‘Easily one to two degrees,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. ‘And maybe even three or four degrees. It takes only 10 degrees to bring on an Ice Age.'”

FALLEN ANGELS IS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? The sun is going to be really cool in 2050, scientists say. “Based on 20 years of data collection and observations, a research team led by physicist Dan Lubin calculated that the sun will be 7% cooler — and dimmer — by the mid-century.”