Apart from a little heat from the earth’s core, all the energy that makes our planet comfortable for life comes from a star – the sun. It’s been getting hotter for the last four billion years and will continue to do so for another five billion.

Thankfully there are just enough complex trace gases in our atmosphere to stop some of this incoming heat escaping. If it was 100 per cent nitrogen and oxygen, rather than the current 99 per cent, the Earth would be a big snowball, and not a comfortable 15 degrees. Very usefully, small amounts of carbon dioxide, methane and water vapour reduce the heat loss, allowing you and me to exist.

Interestingly, the energy from the sun does vary a little, and this is to do with the number of sun spots which fluctuate over an 11-year cycle. More spots mean a slightly stronger sun, but it can be weaker when they are missing, and this has happened in the past.

Why all this might be important has been discussed by Paul Hudson, the dedicated Bradford City fan, BBC weather man, and planetary physics graduate, first class. His blog comments sparked considerable interest following a recent visit to Reading University to find out what’s going on.

Professor Lockwood, a space environment physicist, explained that the present sun spot cycle, number 24, was the least active for the last 200 years and he predicts that the next cycle will have even fewer sun spots. This could mean that locally it might get a little cooler over the next few years, and many quote the historical Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum as recent examples.

While there was little ice, the period between 1550 and 1850 had some distinctly cold winters, and there’s evidence of rivers freezing, all well represented in the paintings of the time. The years from 1645 to 1715, called the Maunder Minimum, were particularly nippy and almost free of sunspots. The resulting average temperatures were colder by about one third of a degree.

Though some have suggested there will be a new Ice Age and so man-made global warming is a thing of the past, the facts are very different. Any cooling is likely to be local and regional, as in the past, and not global, and the reduction will be far less than the heat resulting from our increasing numbers and the use of fossil fuels.

Despite the scare headlines in some papers and news programmes, lapped up by climate-change deniers, Professor Lockwood insists that he is still a vociferous advocate (his own words) of man-made global warming, though Europe could have occasional colder winters.