Chilling Evidence: No Spots by 2015

Russ Steele

Lawrence Solomon has the details in the Financial Post: Chilling Evidence

Two years ago, William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, in a controversial paper that contradicted conventional wisdom and upset global warming theorists, predicted that sunspots could more or less disappear after 2015, possibly indicating the onset of another Little Ice Age.

As they stated then, “the occurrence of prolonged periods with no sunspots is important to climate studies, since the Maunder Minimum was shown to correspond with the reduced average global temperatures on the Earth.” The Maunder Minimum lasted for approximately 70 years, from about 1645 to 1715, and was marked by bitter cold, widespread crop failures, and severe human privation. They concluded their 2008 paper by noting, “Finally, observations of this type during the onset of the next sunspot cycle will be critical in determining if the observed trends continue.”

We are now in the onset of that next sunspot cycle, called Cycle 24 – these cycles typically last 11 years — and Livingston and Penn have this month published new, potentially ominous findings in a paper entitled Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields: “we are now seeing far fewer sunspots than we saw in the preceding cycle; solar Cycle 24 is producing an anomalously low number of dark spots and pores,” they report.

Their conclusions have potential “dramatic implications.” Cycle 24 could have just half the number of sunspots as the recently completed Cycle 23, and there could be “virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25.” The implications of their research points to decades of spotlessness.

Read the rest of the article here.