As Though We Needed Something Else to Worry About

It's been brought to my attention that, although inevitably the earth will be consumed by the sun, and in the meantime lots of crazy space debris is lined up to hit us and cause catastrophic climate change, we have something else to worry about: the sun losing its freckles and giving us an ice age.

Mini though it was, the mini-ice-age from 1645 to 1715 did occur (coinciding with a time when there were hardly any sunspots), and the English Channel did apparently freeze over.

Read more about the Little Ice Age (LIA) known also as (or - for the skeptics- merely coinciding with) the Maunder Minimum, the name given to that period with almost no sunspots. Volcanos also might have been awarded part of the blame, for the ice age, not the missing sun spots. I would prefer to worry about something we have no way of predicting, i.e. the disappearance of sunspots. It's just that much more goth.

I would love to know how the Little Ice Age influenced the emergence of popular English literature in the 18th century. And that, my friends, is why I'm studying for the GRE to go get a practical degree in policy analysis, a degree to keep me off the streets where I would be stalking rare books on the correlation between rare deadly environmental phenomena and social trends, menacing small children with my theories relating the decline of culture and global warming.