On the Tyranny of the Sun and the Folly of Pretending We Control It
My hometown Vienna currently endures the coldest stretch of the year. This is neither shocking nor apocalyptic—January, after all, is winter’s high mass here. Predictably, July is the cathedral’s counterpoint, the blazing zenith.
Let’s dismantle one misunderstanding before it sprouts: “coldest” does not mean “unusually frigid” in the same way “hottest” need not mean “volcanic damnation.” It simply means that, in the normal sine wave of temperatures we call seasons, there must be days that are coldest, just as there must be days that are warmest. Nothing mystical or catastrophic—just the deadpan arithmetic of climate.
So how wide is the gap between these two annual extremes? Let’s consult the bureaucratic annals.
The maximum average monthly temperature for July hovers at 24°C.
The maximum average monthly temperature for January is a balmy zero.
A clean 24-degree spread, just from comparing average monthly highs. And yet—having haunted this city for decades—I have felt summer highs of 44°C sear the cobblestones, and winter lows of -12°C gnaw at bone marrow.
This post first appeared in 2020, back when I still entertained hope that rational arguments might sway public sentiment. I’ve since remastered it—sharpened the edges, clarified the threat, and realigned it with the Grimwright ethos: use what works, discard the rest, and always—always—question the narrative. The date remains unchanged as a historical marker. The content does not.
Quite bracing, even with the Urban Heat Island effect wrapping Vienna in its municipal quilt. Out in the countryside where my parents live, -20°C is a regular house guest.
Restricting the figures to Vienna alone, the spread from the coldest day to the hottest is a grand, operatic 56°C.
What force engineers such a yawning chasm?
Yes—our unblinking overseer in the sky: the indifferent tyrant radiating heat without mercy or favor, Sol Invictus to the Romans. Standing alone, answerable to no one, its furnace governs our comfort and our suffering alike.
On one point, Alarmists and Realists clasp hands—they agree the sun is the source of heat. The schism appears when Alarmists claim more CO₂ means the atmosphere hoards more of that incoming warmth, explaining observed warming. Their catechism: CO₂ rises because of us, therefore we are the planet’s arsonists.
According to the Alarmist liturgy, there are four greenhouse gas horsemen: CO₂, water vapor, nitrous oxides, and methane. Debate over each one’s potency resembles a knife fight in an alley—complete with censorship, social media purges, threats to heretics’ loved ones, and digital auto-da-fé for anyone who questions the scriptures.
I prefer to jab at the issue from another angle. Forget the hysterical charts, the curve-fitting séances, the climate voodoo. Forget the choir of pious models. Let’s do something truly radical: think.
And by “think” I don’t mean the fragile conjuring of possibilities until they feel like truth. I mean the commonsense reasoning of the ancients—Marcus Aurelius-style—cool, unswayed, weighing evidence without theatrics.
The sun keeps us from freezing, and without its light our eyes would be useless ornaments. It has done this every day since Earth’s debut. The planet’s rotation ensures the sun’s blessing—and its neglect—are shared around. Each day, the cycle of light and dark swings our temperature by about 10°C.
Because our planet doesn’t orbit like a Prussian on parade, we have seasons. The tilt of our axis stretches or shortens days and can swing temperatures by up to 50°C. That’s just from two of the most obvious rhythms. The rest is a tangle of lesser—but still potent—celestial disturbances.
Our arrogance tempts us to believe we can rewrite this planetary script, as though the Sun and Earth should bow to the biochemical chatter of one bipedal species. In truth, to them we’re the microbial film clinging to the surface of a rock.
Earth’s orbit is an ellipse, not a circle, and it wobbles drunkenly over cycles of 100,000 to 400,000 years. The orbit precesses—slowly twisting through a 25,920-year cycle. The tilt itself changes every 41,000 years. And Jupiter (with Saturn as an understudy) tugs on our orbit like a heckler at the back of the theater.
Complicated? Yes. Milutin Milanković, a Serbian mathematician, mapped this celestial slapstick with nothing but pen, paper, and an army of human calculators—women who could churn out reams of trigonometry faster than most people can make tea.
The ancient Sumerians already suspected we orbited less like a Swiss watch and more like a tipsy football hooligan weaving home. Celestial mechanics is less “precision timepiece” and more “toss a cucumber into a room of thirty cats.” Chaotic to the eye, lawful to the initiated.
But orbital mechanics is only the prologue. The real drama is in how much sunlight reaches us.
Because the sun, despite seeming constant, has moods. Every 9–14 years (averaging 11) it cycles through sunspot highs and lows. Layered atop this are other cycles—88 years, 208 years, 500, 1,000, 2,300—like an orchestra of drums all out of sync.
Picture a candle guttering in a windstorm, in the middle of a cattery mid-riot. Milanković’s ladies charted that, too.
We don’t fully understand the inner workings of our solar despot, but we can predict its temperament well enough to plan crops and wars.
And yes, distance matters—that’s why Mars is a freezer and Venus an oven. But even at the same distance, variations in solar output change everything. Less energy means colder Earth, more means hotter.
Which brings us to the present: we are exiting one of the weakest sunspot cycles in recorded history. Low activity means extended cooling phases—Solar Minimums. We’ve logged three notable ones: Maunder, Dalton, Gleissberg. A fourth—the Eddy Minimum—may already be slouching toward us, set to linger thirty years or more.
Historically, such Minimums brought famine, plague, and bloodshed. If Eddy isn’t here yet, it’s on the timetable, arriving in a single solar cycle. And no—CO₂ will not save us. If anything, more CO₂ might merely help plants endure the cold.
But remember—sunspot cycles are only part of the weather’s Byzantine complexity. Volcanic eruptions can also slam the brakes on solar energy. When Mount Pinatubo blew in 1991, it lofted ash into the stratosphere, where it lingered for years, blocking enough sunlight to cool global averages by about 0.5°C.
Less sunlight equals less heat. Always has. Always will.
Does this prove the sun alone writes the climate’s script? No. But its role dwarfs that of any atmospheric trace gas.
So next time someone insists their emission model predicts Earth’s fate, ask how well they understand the spinning, precessing, throbbing furnace 150 million kilometers away. This isn’t about denying complexity—it’s about refusing the narcotic simplicity that masquerades as science.
