Dark Winter: How the Sun Is Causing a 30-Year Cold Spell

Former White House space program advisor and space shuttle engineer, John Casey hits it out if the park again with Dark Winter. In this book, he further discusses the coming Dalton Minimum (Little Ice Age) but he also details specific things we can do to best adapt to this. Of particular interest is fascinating material on the rise of volcano and earthquake activity both historically during the Maunder and Dalton minimums, but what is to come.

Casey's predictions speak for themselves. Go listen to his speeches before last year's "polar vortexes" hit the USA, freezing us into miserable ice cubes. This man knows what he is talking about, and even if you decide you don't like his politics, I have read everything from Michael Mann to Bill Nye all the way far right to David Archibald, and without a doubt, Casey provides a chillingly accurate yet hopeful, read. It's a not miss if you want to know why we are heading for cooling, with serious and soon evident consequences. Don't miss this. I have Cold Sun, and I loved reading Dark Winter. I hope he tours in my area as he is a great speaker too. No, I do not know him at all, just a big fan. Beware of the inevitable trolling. Some never like the messenger, even when he's repeatedly correct.

As a college professor that is invited to panel discussions on man made global warming I find Casey's book very interesting. I am often invited to these panels because I am a doubter. I would have liked more details about the research but I believe it is a viable alternative. I like his attitude that he is open to being proven wrong.

The big problem with climate change supporters is that they cherry pick data. When I appear on a panel I ask two questions and say if someone can explain this I might be able to accept the theory. The questions are why did temperatures in the 20th century rise before carbon dioxide levels rose and why did we have an ice age when carbon dioxide levels were 10 times higher than today. Believers do not even attempt to answer the questions which indicates a political agenda not a scientific one.

I am very concerned when people want to do science by consensus which only measures popularity. Casey sites many scientists who are researching solar activity and have determined it is the cause of the current warm spell. These studies are usually ignored because the do not fit the political agenda that has become man made global warming. Casey does answer one of the questions I asked and it appears rising temperatures cause carbon dioxide levels to rise.

Finally, I find the correlation of volcanic activity and cooling interesting, but he provides no explanation of the relationship but he simply sites the correlation. This should be studied much more.

I hate to give this book two stars, because I agree with the role of sunspot cycles for the global climate.

But the book does too much with too little.

1) Solar cycles have only been metrically recorded since 1755. That's too little time with which to create an adamant pronouncement of a 206 year solar cycle. That's basically one full cycle. You just can't create a real pattern based on a single cycle.

2) The presence of a solar cycle does not prove the absence of a CO2 correlation. It's like trying to argue that unmarried couples can't get pregnant because married couples do. The one does not negate the other.

3) The book doesn't give real data. He gives his conclusions and implications, but he doesn't walk his readers through the process of reaching the same conclusion.

4) The book reads like an advertisement for his blog. I write a blog myself, but if I were to put my blog into a book I would make the book the standalone and use the blog to advertise it -- not the other way around.

5) The book counters global warming alarmism with global cooling alarmism. Perhaps the answer is to be less alarmed and more strategic. Historical climate changes vary by 24.5 degrees Celsius over the course of 100,000 year ice age cycles, and the news is alarmed at the possibility of a change by 1.5 degrees. The answer to global warming alarmism isn't to deny temperature changes and rising oceans, nor is it to try to stop them from happening (like the boy with his finger in the dike), but rather to plan accordingly -- with major cities a little further inland and technological innovation for renewable energy (not to eliminate future warming, but to survive future cooling).

6)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Too! Many! Exclamation! Marks! I understand that the writer is excited about his premise, but he'd do better with a little wording changes and a lot less punctuated emphasis.

7) The linking of volcanism to minor air temperature variations on a single cycle destroys any hope for credibility to his work.

Again, I write about this subject myself from time to time, and think that the 1.5 degree terror in a 24.5 degree Milankovitch cycle variation is like screaming about an attack-rabbit. Of course the climate changes. The key -- as Casey himself argues -- isn't controlling the environment, but strategically adapting to it.

I agree with Casey about solar cycle variations and I am also skeptical that we could stop global warming (or cooling) from happening. We're on the same side here. But the good man needs a good editor.

Dark Winter is a breathe of fresh air in a world full of politically polluted books on the subject of climate change. All one has to do is look at a scale model of the solar system to realize that the giant ball of fire extremely close to our humble little planet is, undoubtedly, the main factor regarding temperature fluctuations. Casey might just be the only adult that still has the common sense of a child regarding this topic. Nobody is saying that atmospheric gases do not play a role in global temperatures, but should they be our point of focus. While we are worrying about a 1 or 2 degree fluctuation in temperature over 100 years due to greenhouse gases, the sun can cause greater change in much shorter periods of time. The sun is anything but a constant, and treating it as such could be one of the biggest mistakes of modern history. I applaud Casey's work, but I suspect it will not be taken seriously until politicians figure out a way to regulate and tax solar activity.

As the subtitle indicates, Casey predicts a 30-year cold spell, beginning very recently. If you live in North America anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains you probably saw enough winter last year to concede that he might have a point.

His calculations are based on solar cycles. A couple of years ago the publishers of the Olde Farmers Almanac stated for publication that their method of predicting weather is based on 11 and 22-year sunspot cycles, and has had essentially the same prediction method for more than 2 centuries. At that time the official weather office predictions were based on fluid mechanics. The original researchers on Chaos Theory showed conclusively that the fluid mechanics theory had an absolute maximum usefulness of 23 days. Beyond that time it is totally useless. The weather office claimed that the Farmers Almanac method was unscientific. I disagreed with that position on the basis that the two prediction methods should be judged on the accuracy of their results, not the horsepower of their computer sections.

About 20 years ago the Farmers Almanac was more accurate for weather more than about a week in the future. With advances in satellite technology this breakpoint may have been extended another few days.

Casey has done his homework. He is actually a scientist, not a politician, and every page of his book shows it. He proceeds in the scientific manner. His figures show, as do most similar researchers, that there are strong weather cycles of about 100 years and about 206 years. These strongly indicate a cold period ahead, with the coldest part in about 2030. He quotes figures from other researchers. Most of these are in general agreement. I note that he quotes several Russian researchers. The Russians are not bound by political correctness so they can report results as they see them, not as some politician might see them.

His figures show that the warming period that occurred in the 1990s ended in 1998. This is the same date as given by Phil Jones, the man who fudged the data used in the IPCC studies to start the whole global warming hoax.

Let me be a little more specific here on the difference between politics and science. Before the first IPCC report was published I saw TV interviews of people who had worked on the project. They said that they had been asked to make their report sound more alarming. This happened repeatedly. When the report was published the data was not published, nor were the calculation procedures. The stated reason was that they might be misused by people who disagreed with the findings. This has never happened before in anything that purported to be scientific. I still remember the people who announced that they had found cold fusion. A few researchers took their procedures and repeated the experiments, with totally different results. The original authors had to admit that they had made a mistake. This became apparent because they had published their procedures and their data.

By contrast the IPCC report specifically excluded both their data and their procedures. Another important exclusion was cyclic changes in solar energy output. If you or I or any other intelligent person want to find out what moves something we begin with the most important inputs and work down to the less important.

Sometime after the original IPCC report someone got hold of one of the computer programs that they used to calculate weather patterns and applied it to the time since 1900. By the time it got to Y2K it was off by several degrees.

The 2009 Copenhagen conference was held in the coldest weather that they had had for many years. To add to the problem Wikileaks published a batch of emails showing that the data used in the IPCC analysis had been fudged to remove the medieval warm period because it did not fit the theory. This had been sent out by Phil Jones. A couple of years ago he admitted, in print, that the warming period had ended in 1998. He also published his data for the first time.

More recently it has been shown that the figures the IPCC issued to its collaborators showed a warming in South America that was 2.5 degrees larger than it should have been. A decrease in temperature had been shown as an increase. As usual this report disappeared quite rapidly.

In early June of 2015 the US government announced that their measurements showed no global warming since 1998. Instead of accepting the results from Phil Jones and John Casey they decided to adjust their readings to match the theory.

I saw an interview with Casey. In it he stated that the change in solar radiation necessary to cause an ice age is about 2.5 watts/square meter. Since the background radiation is about 1300, that is a very small change.

Casey's book shows charts and figures, also the sources and a complete description of how the computations were done. Some of the diagrams end in 2008 and some in 2013 but he provides information on the sources so you can bring them up to date.

I sent a question to Casey's research center asking if they had done any work to compare the solar cycle and greenhouse gas theories to explain the ice ages that occurred in ancient times.

After watching several interviews and presentations with John Casey, I had to buy and read this book and I'm glad I did. Since then, I've bought more than 30 more copies which I've given to friends, family, government officials and politicians. The nation wasted two presidential administrations wasting billions on research to justify "fighting climate change" due to the mythical manmade global warming when the need, all along, has been to educate everybody about the onset of global cooling and the impact it will have on all people everywhere. Dark Winter begins that job that should have been priority one with both the Bush and Obama Administrations. Now we have little time and much work to prepare for the cold years to come.

This book pretends to be a scientific account of the strange solar maximum the sun is currently undergoing. However, there's no scientific data or any modern research presented, just his opinion that a new Little Ice Age is about to begin, just a rehash (with other people's graphs) of past researchers. His main proof presented are the press releases that his "research center" published in past years. While I'm one of the few people who don't believe in man=cause global warming and believe that the world's climate is on the down swing and growing cooler, this book is a waste of time and money. There's more research in my monthly electric bill than in this book. Don't buy it; it's a waste of money. JP

Proves that GORE~BULL~WARMING, is just that and in fact a global cooling cycle of 206 years is starting peaking in year 2030.

He references that the year 1814 had the coldest summer, so much so that crop failures were recorded throughout the new country called the United States.

We have now entered that 206 year cycle and proof should be in the winter of 2014 - 15 and it's severity. Time will tell.

A waste of money. 50% of the book was composed if quotes from other articles. The rest was made up of emotional exclamations and gut reactions and personal opinions. I was hoping for some real science.

I deny global warming, and Casey's book should have been welcomed. A friend gave me his extra copy of the book. Casey never got his case presented in his beginning chapters which he says he calculated. I wanted to see the data presented, but the more I read, the less interested I became. Finally, I decided it was wasting my time.