Hudson River
© Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesIce flows along the Hudson River in New York City on Feb. 20, 2015.
The cold crept in early on the 15th of Feb. 2015. By the 21st more than 100 million Americans were being impacted by the arctic blast known as the "Siberian Express" as record (low) temperatures were broken across the eastern third of the nation. Chicago experienced its coldest February since 1875. Last year it was the Polar Vortex and that took down GDP (Gross Domestic Product) quickly. This year the numbers are not in yet but we can expect economic activity to contract.

During this cold, more than 4,700 square miles of ice formed over the Great Lakes in just one night on the 17th. It was minus 41 in Minnesota at that time. "Great Lakes ice is now running ahead of last year and ice will increase with more brutal cold coming," says meteorologist Joe d'Aleo. "We are likely to have the most ice since records began."

Forbes magazine is now equating global warming proponents with snake oil salesmen. There was never any manmade global warming."Global warming activists are in full-throttle damage control, desperately claiming global warming causes record snow and cold," says Forbes. "When global warming alarmists claim winters will become warmer and free of snow, yet their predictions are proven false for 20 years in a row, at some point logical people come to realize that global warming alarmists are selling snake oil."


Which organization, government or newspaper will cry out about the danger of global warming will be interesting to see. If we had an honest president in the White House, he would get on the television and come clean with the titanic climate fraud that his administration is backing. It is important for many reasons to know and hear the truth besides the fact that people are dying from the cold.

According to the CDC, more people are dying from hypothermia in the United States, which seems strange since other branches of government insist we are living through the warmest time in recent history. The storms and freezing temperatures in Tennessee caused 21 deaths, including 11 attributed to hypothermia. With record-breaking cold there is a need for precautions. Temperatures were recently predicted to be 25 to 30 degrees below normal for the East Coast, exacerbated by strong winds, but temperatures actually ended up running as low as 30 to 40 degrees below normal across the Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic on the morning of February 20.

niagra falls
© Lindsay DeDario/ReutersA partially frozen American Falls in sub-freezing temperatures is seen in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, Feb. 17, 2015.
It has been cold across the entire northern hemisphere. The death rate in England and Wales is about a third higher than normal for this time of year, official figures show, as the winter freeze tightens its grip on swaths of Britain. About 28,800 deaths were registered in the fortnight ending 23 January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This is 32% higher than the average for that period over the previous five years (21,859).

Many locations in the Northeast are experiencing their coldest February on record. Toronto - Shaping up to be coldest February on record. Michigan - on pace for coldest February ever. Connecticut - Coldest Month on Record.

As for daily records, some of those dating back to the 1800s were broken in multiple cities from the Midwest to the East, says Accuweather.com. Record lows were reported in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Missouri, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky and Illinois

Cities reporting record-shattering lows on February 20 included Detroit, Michigan, and Cincinnati, Ohio, where the mercury plunged to -12 F (-24 C). Temperatures in Pittsburgh dropped to -9 F (-23 C), while temperatures in New York City fell to 2 F (16.7 C). All new records. Chicago is about to break a 140-Year-Old Cold Record.

A 119-year-old record low temperature for Feb. 20 was broken in Washington, with a temperature of 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 degrees C) recorded at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. At Baltimore's airport, the temperature dipped down to a record low 2 degrees (-16.7 C). As for the winter as a whole, you'd have to go all the way back to 1895 to find a D.C. winter with as many record cold days as this one.

In western Pennsylvania, temperatures dipped to -18 (-28 C) in New Castle, -15 in Butler and -6 in Pittsburgh - more records. Exposure to very cold air can cause serious health consequences. Infants are at a greater risk due to their inability to make enough of their own body heat by shivering. The elderly also have a greater risk because of their slower metabolisms. Learning to treat cold conditions will become more important as the climate continues to cool through the next years.

Heavy snowfall in Afghanistan triggered a series of avalanches that have killed a hundred victims in mountainous Northern provinces. Boston tops 100 inches of snow in one season for only the second time in recorded history and winter is hardly over.


solar cycle chart
Diminished solar activity is the main reason we are facing such dangerous cold. Solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Though intensified volcanic activity is adding to the faster than expected cooling, it is hard to measure how dozens of volcanic explosions are contributing. However, we can see what is happening on the sun. "The Sun is flat lining," says spaceweather.com. "For the 6th day in a row, solar activity remains very low. No sunspots are flaring, and the sun's X-ray output has flatlined."

"The main driver of all weather and climate, the entity which occupies 99.86% of all of the mass in our solar system, the great ball of fire in the sky - has gone quiet again during what is likely to be the weakest sunspot cycle in more than a century," echoes vencoreweather.com. "Not since cycle 14 peaked in February 1906 has there been a solar cycle with fewer sunspots. We are currently more than six years into Solar Cycle 24 and today the sun is virtually spotless despite the fact that we are still in what is considered to be its solar maximum phase."

The Sun is the Mother when it comes to Climate. "Something is up with the sun," writes the Wall Street Journal in 2013. "Scientists say that solar activity is stranger than in a century or more, with the sun producing barely half the number of sunspots as expected and its magnetic poles oddly out of sync. Based on historical records, astronomers say the sun this fall ought to be nearing the explosive climax of its approximate 11-year cycle of activity—the so-called solar maximum. But this peak is "a total punk," said Jonathan Cirtain, who works at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as project scientist for the Japanese satellite Hinode, which maps solar magnetic fields.

NASA solar physicist David Hathaway says "if the sun remains in its sleepy state, we could see a replay of the Dalton Minimum (a period of very low solar activity when sunspots numbers peaked at only 50), which occurred two centuries ago. During the Dalton Minimum (1790 - 1830), global temperatures plummeted, resulting in the "Year Without a Summer" in 1816. The abnormally cold weather destroyed crops in northern Europe, the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. Historian John D. Post called it "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world."

"I've been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I've never seen anything quite like this," says Dr. Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire."If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive... you've got to go back about 100 years," he says.

Dr. David Evans, an electrical engineer and mathematician, who earned six university degrees over ten years, including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering said, "If the Sun mainly controls the temperature on Earth, a turning point is almost upon us. The reason for the cooling is the dramatic fall in solar radiation that started around 2004." There is a delay — probably of around 11 years — between changes in sunlight and temperatures on Earth, says Evans.

2004 + 11 = 2015. Eleven years after 2004 is 2015, suggesting the cooling will start in 2015 according to Evans. In reality, though Russian scientists have also predicted 2015 as the first year of a mini ice age we can see that rapid and deep cooling was already in full force in 2014.

The BBC early in 2014 put out a video warning of rapid deflation of solar activity. The video predicts the next ice age starting in forty years. However, history will remember the year 2015 as the actual start though as predicted it really started in earnest in 2014. What the video's scientists are saying is that we are presently seeing the fastest decline in solar activity in 10,000 years. We are seeing record cold breaking out all over the northern hemisphere and the promise is that it is going to get colder and that the cold is going to stick around longer and longer each year.

Leonard Nimoy broadcast on television in May of 1978 "The Coming Ice Age," a show where all manner of experts and climate scientists were trotted out to warn the world of the run-away global cooling that was just around the corner. Ice ages are not something new and neither are solar cycles and volcanoes that occasionally have a great cooling effect on the weather.

Conclusion

Stories of woe are coming in from all over the globe. At least 124 people killed in Afghan snowstorm at the end of February. "People there have told me that two of my relatives have been killed and eight others are still under the snow," said an Afghan who goes by the single name Sharafudin. "My son and I are trying to get through to see if we can help find their bodies. But it will take us at least three or four hours to get there because of the snow and the road is very narrow, so we have to walk, the car can't get through."

It is not the end of the world but we can be assured that there will be much hardship. A cooling world is not inviting. It is not easy thinking about being buried in snow.