A frozen northern world and new heat records in the southern hemisphere are suddenly making the impact of a deep solar minimum on the world’s weather a politically correct topic.

Yet a year ago I was attacked in Crikey by global warming experts for daring to suggest, in Crikey, that something odd was happening on the sun.

It should emphasised, science has not yet linked the big freeze to the “quietest sun” since 1913 but the historical coincidences between supposedly insignificant deep solar minimums and cold weather are under review and references to them as being factors in very cold winters are appearing in places where they were previously dismissed out of hand.

The big freeze across Europe and parts of North America has energised the climate-change deniers just as the fierce dry heatwaves of this summer have encouraged global warming warriors to attack opponents of the government’s ETS, even though it was useless and dishonest in addressing what is a crisis in fossil carbon pollution of the atmosphere.

The issue for serious climate science now includes possible linkages between the appearance of an Arctic oscillation that no one predicted but that drove frigid air across Europe  and much of middle and eastern North America,  and the solar lull that has just ended.

As explained in this Clarifier, the sun blind-sided the situation by extending its normal 11-year cycle of activity to 13 years, reaching its nadir in old cycle sunspot activity in the second half of last year instead of mid-2007 as expected.

Not since the even deeper solar minimums of 1901 and 1913 had the sun been so quiet. And between or near  them, which was the first time since the Dalton Minimum of 1890-1830 that two or more such notable minimums occurred in sequence, the weather in Australia, Europe and North America produced some very harsh winters and very balmy summers.

These events included the Niagara Falls freezing solid upstream,  downstream and in situ, and several exceptional snow outbreaks in the eastern states of Australia and South Australia.

But there was no glacial response. The temperate glaciers of New Zealand and Europe continued to gradually down waste. The summers offset the severity of the winters. And the inexorable rise of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, which can be traced to the pre-industrial embrace of forest clearing, charcoal making and cement production, continued without variability, rising from 296 ppm in the Law Dome ice cores in 1901 to more than 300 ppm in 1913.

This solar minimum, which was recently ended by strongly rising numbers of new cycle sunspots, coincides with about 390 ppm of CO2 attributed to the inability of the natural carbon dioxide exchange cycles to cope with the outpourings from fossil fuel consumption, as well as synthetic halons never before seen in the atmosphere.

By April last year the GISS was acknowledging  that something was going on with the sun, but also that it was of no comfort to climate-change deniers either.

It was time, according to GISS director James Hansen, to seriously study a solar phenomenon (or lack of it), that closely tracked the prolonged cool periods of the Little Ice Age, using tools in space and on earth never available to the astronomers of the Elizabethan Age or the latter Serenissima.

Will the deep solar minimum of 2009 be followed by another, like that of 1913 after 1901, or will the solar cycle now on the upswing revert to normal, and reverse or erase whatever respite the last minimum was contributing to an overheated world.

That is a very alarming question for science and humanity to consider, and as solar physicists failed to predict the behaviour of the sun in the last cycle, no one is offering any answers with confidence just yet.