The U.S. National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center uses NASA’s Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics satellite conducts Sunspot Number Progression counts, measures F10.7cm Radio Flux and the Ap Index geomagnetic activity, and its SABER carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO) instruments gage infrared solar output in Earth’s top atmospheric level.
As the Earth was completing Solar Cycle 24, sunspot counts and magnetic activity were expected cyclically fall from its high of over 100 in 2014 to a low of zero in 2022. But the sunspot count plunged to zero in mid-2018 and has remained substantially lower than forecast for Solar Cycle 25.
The data could indicate the onset of a super cycle ‘Maunder Minimum.’ The last Maunder Minimum period from 1645 to 1715 was a period with 7 percent fewer sunspots and global cooling, referred to as the ‘Little Ice Age.’
The Little Ice Age altered atmospheric circulation patterns across northern Europe, resulting in widespread crop failures, famine, disease, and increased child mortality. London’s Thames River froze over most years during the period.
Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center reported in September: “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”
The Swiss National Science Foundation also published in early 2017 a research paper by the Physical Meteorological Observatory Davos, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, ETH Zurich, and the University of Bern that warned that particle and electromagnetic “radiative forcing” could cause Maunder Minimum low temperatures in “in 50 to 100 years’ time.”
The United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change has been the major “denier” of cyclical solar activity “forcing” climate change because it directly challenges the supposedly settled science that “anthropogenic” releases of fossil fuel CO2 are the exclusive cause of global warming that threatens the destruction of all living creatures.
As the evidence of solar forcing has mounted, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change argues that climate model simulations of the period suggest that multiple factors, “particularly volcanic activity in the northern hemisphere” caused the Little Ice Age.
But the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction issued an October warning that the Ring of Fire’s 452 volcanos along the edge the Pacific Ocean edge that causes 90 percent of earthquakes and tsunamis had entered its 100-year active phase.
