'Forget global warming, prepare for Ice Age'

OK, everyone. Fire up your SUVs and leave 'em idling in the driveway. Replace all those CFL light bulbs with good old-fashioned incandescent ones. We have to head off the coming Ice Age and save the planet!

SUNSPOT activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that - far from warming - the globe is about to return to an Ice Age.

Astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory showed no spots on the sun.

He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Dr Chapman writes in The Australian today.

"If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over."

Looks like we need all the CO2 emissions we can get and do the job the sun won't do.