New data out from NASA shows that sun spot activity over the past few years has been at lows not seen since 1913. According to NASA:
2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year’s 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.
Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year’s 90 days (87%).
It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: “We’re experiencing a very deep solar minimum,” says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.
“This is the quietest sun we’ve seen in almost a century,” agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
As I noted in an earlier post, changes in the sun’s intensity correlate much more closely with global temperatures than changes in atmospheric CO2, which seem to correlate only randomly, so we shouldn’t be surprised that, in spite of a continued upward trend in CO2 concentrations, the earth does in fact seem to be cooling. But the alarmists are right in one regard–the climate is changing, but of course that’s like saying the time is changing.