An approaching Grand Solar Minimum is gaining evermore support. Even NASA appears to be on-board, with their recent SC25 prediction — though, predictably, they stay clear of the implications.
NASA’s forecast for the next solar cycle (25) reveals it will be the weakest of the last 200 years.
The maximum of this next cycle — measured in terms of sunspot number, a standard measure of solar activity level — could be 30 to 50% lower than the most recent one.
The agency’s results show that the next cycle will start in 2020 and reach its maximum in 2025:
The below is lifted from NASA’s official website (
www.nasa.gov):
The new research was led by Irina Kitiashvili, a researcher with the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in California’s Silicon Valley. It combined observations from two NASA space missions – the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and the Solar Dynamics Observatory – with data collected since 1976 from the ground-based National Solar Observatory.
One challenge for researchers working to predict the Sun’s activities is that scientists don’t yet completely understand the inner workings of our star. Plus, some factors that play out deep inside the Sun cannot be measured directly. They have to be estimated from measurements of related phenomena on the solar surface, like sunspots.
Kitiashvili’s method differs from other prediction tools in terms of the raw material for its forecast. Previously, researchers used the number of sunspots to represent indirectly the activity of the solar magnetic field. The new approach takes advantage of direct observations of magnetic fields emerging on the surface of the Sun – data which has only existed for the last four solar cycles.
Mathematically combining the data from the three sources of Sun observations with the estimates of its interior activity generated a forecast designed to be more reliable than using any of those sources alone.
In 2008 the researchers used this method to make their prediction, which was then put to the test as the current solar cycle unfolded over the last decade. It has performed well, with the forecast strength and timing of the solar maximum aligning closely with reality.
IMPLICATIONS
NASA attempts to paint the upcoming solar shutdown as a window of opportunity for space missions, “the improving ability to make such predictions about space weather are good news for mission planners who can schedule human exploration missions during periods of lower radiation.”
This is absurd, and serves as yet another example of government agency obfuscation and half-truths.
NASA is effectively forecasting a return to the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830) but gives no mention of the brutal cold, crop loss, famine, war and powerful Volcanic eruptions associated with it:
Like the deeper Maunder and Spörer Minimums preceding it, the Dalton brought on a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. The Oberlach Station in Germany, for example, experienced a 2C decline over 20 years, which devastated the country’s food production.
The Year Without a Summer also occurred during the Dalton Minimum, in 1816. It was caused by a combination of already low temperatures plus the aftereffects of the second largest volcanic eruption in 2000 years: Mount Tambora’s VEI 7 on April 10, 1815.
The earthquakes and tsunamis that followed killed tens of thousands of people living on the surrounding Indonesian islands. But Tambora’s eruption wasn’t of much interest to Europe and the U.S., not initially at least — the news was focused on the Napoleonic Wars and the Battle of Waterloo on Sunday, June 18, 1815, in which the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at the expense of 65,000 men.
The newspapers were preoccupied with the battle right up until the start of winter in 1815, when the weather turned decidedly whacky. And by 1816, the climate was dominating headline news as both Spring and then Summer failed to arrive.
One Virginia resident recalled, “In June another snowfall came and folks went sleighing. On July 4, water froze in cisterns and snow fell again, with Independence Day celebrants moving inside churches where hearth fires warmed things a mite.”
Clothes froze on the line in New England, ice on ponds and lakes was reported in northwestern Pennsylvania in both July and August, and Virginia had frosts in August. The temperature occasionally got into the 90s, but then would drop to nearly freezing in just a few hours.
Crops that had managed to sprout were frozen out in early June, replanted, and frozen again in July. Very few crops were actually harvested, and of those that were, the yields were very poor. In turn, food and grain prices skyrocketed — for example, in 1815, oats sold for $0.12 a bushel but by the next year, a bushel would set you back $0.92.
And the story was the same across the world: The potato crop in Ireland rotted in the ground resulting in widespread starvation. In England, France and Germany wheat crops failed leading to bread shortages and food riots and looting. Northern China was also hard hit with thousands of people starving to death. While in southern Asia, torrential rains triggered a cholera epidemic that killed many more.
The year 1816 went on to earn another, rather more morbid nickname, “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death“.
GRAND SOLAR MINIMUM
Solar Cycle 25 will likely be a mere stop-off on our descent into the next Grand Solar Minimum — a period of even further reduced temperatures and crop yields (research Maunder Minimum, 1645-1715), and there are other researchers still insisting there won’t be a solar cycle 25 at all.
While the excellent analysis from Valentia Zharkova suggests that all four of the Sun’s magnetic fields will go out of phase in 2020, which blows any IPCC ‘warming’ out of the water (click here for more). One way or another, the cold times are returning — it’s just a matter of when.
