A Quiet Sun

Last week (5 May 2009), just over the solar horizon, we were treated to a big CME (coronal mass ejection). Two more big eruptions followed on 6 May. The AGW crowd were all atwitter. The sun was waking up and they could now breathe easy. That mean sun was not going to falsify their beloved hypothesis.

Picture taken by the UV telescope on NASA's STEREO-B satellite.

The world waited for the sun to rotate the great big sunspots into view. The days passed, the sun rotated and there into view for the first time in months, NOTHING! Ooops. The sun is not following the model predictions.

Days later we have a couple of sunspecks, hardly worthy of being called spots, but at least technically they are sunspots. Yet, nothing else. The sun remains quiet.

To make matters worse, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Solar Weather Prediction Center glumly adjusted and announced their forecast for Solar Cycle 24. It’s gonna be a quiet one, maybe also a long one like Solar Cycle 23. Their projections for Solar Cycle 25 are for a continuing quiet sun.

The sunspecks are visible in the upper left quadrant.

So far, measurements indicate a Maunder-type minimum (that period between 1645 and 1715 when the sun was very quiet and temperatures plummeted), which would be very bad not only for the AGW crowd’s pet hypothesis and Al Gore’s bank account, but also for mankind. Things could get a lot colder in a hurry. I’m not saying Ice Age, but a lot colder than we’ve seen in a very long time. Crops will fail and people will starve and freeze. Are we ready for that?