Life Imitates Bad Science Fiction

Fallen Angels is sci-fi book with an interesting premise and multiple references to Wisconsin. So it had enough going on to get my interest. Unfortunately, the character development is so childish that I could never finish the book. The premise can be summed up in these two sentences from an Amazon review:

The Earth is slipping into a new Ice Age, even while zealous Greens and "Eco-Fascists" put a stop to any technology that might lead to global warming. There's only one group to whom Alex can turn, one group still attached to the ideas of progress and science - Sci-Fi fans!

Two recent reports fall in line with precursers to the novel. First I see the efforts to silence any distent to the global warming orthodoxy, and then Cambridge astrophysicist Nigel Weiss writes:

Typically, sunspots flare up and settle down in cycles of about 11 years. In the last 50 years, we haven't been living in typical times: "If you look back into the sun's past, you find that we live in a period of abnormally high solar activity," Dr. Weiss states.These hyperactive periods do not last long, "perhaps 50 to 100 years, then you get a crash," says Dr. Weiss. 'It's a boom-bust system, and I would expect a crash soon." In addition to the 11-year cycle, sunspots almost entirely "crash," or die out, every 200 years or so as solar activity diminishes. When the crash occurs, the Earth can cool dramatically. Dr. Weiss knows because these phenomenon, known as "Grand minima," have recurred over the past 10,000 years, if not longer.

The Fallen Angels authors may be prophets. I'm not a betting man, but in the Man-Made Global Warming vs. Solar Cooling Super Bowl, I take the Sun minus the 7 points.