Every 11 years the sun cooks.. bakes.. shakes.. rattles and rolls. But this year, the ball of fire has a little less fire. Sunspots this year are like an Art Bell show: You just can’t find it when you expect to..
The strange doings on the sun, as the WALL STREET JOURNAL calls it, is being covered by major media.. Sunspots are half of what they were supposed to be at this point in the cycle..
I recall about two years ago, people were warning of disaster and catastrophe during this sun cycle.. So far, nothing. Which is great for humanity.. But it certainly brings up the question of ‘why’ ?
One NASA expert quoted in the article said this is the weakest the sun has been in 200 years..And it could be all because of a pole shift. The JOURNAL reports,
Researchers are puzzled. They can’t tell if the lull is temporary or the onset of a decades-long decline, which might ease global warming a bit by altering the sun’s brightness or the wavelengths of its light.
"There is no scientist alive who has seen a solar cycle as weak as this one," said Andrés Munoz-Jaramillo, who studies the solar-magnetic cycle at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
To complicate the riddle, the sun also is undergoing one of its oddest magnetic reversals on record.
Normally, the sun’s magnetic north and south poles change polarity every 11 years or so. During a magnetic-field reversal, the sun’s polar magnetic fields weaken, drop to zero, and then emerge again with the opposite polarity. As far as scientists know, the magnetic shift is notable only because it signals the peak of the solar maximum, said Douglas Biesecker at NASA’s Space Environment Center.
But in this cycle, the sun’s magnetic poles are out of sync, solar scientists said. The sun’s north magnetic pole reversed polarity more than a year ago, so it has the same polarity as the south pole.
This may be the prime time, though, to start worry about fixing the grid, upgrading the grid, repairing the grid, and modernizing the grid. NOW.. when the going’s good.
And as far as the solar silence: Perhaps we should not complain. Maybe the Northern lights are tamer than some would hope, but electronics don’t get fried when there is no Kill Shot.
And is Ed Dames still calling for that one? Or is he nestled somewhere in comfort with his new Russian wife..?
