SUNSPOTS
(Note: underlined words/phrases correspond to links.)
First Published in 2015, then updated in 2017.
Right from the get-go let us make a stance of ours clear, in advance. Despite our preference for clean energy, and our hopes for containable/deliverable thermonuclear fusion energy, Main Street Gov’s team — which counts conservatives, libertarians, independents and centrists to its composition — supports the U.S. fossil fuel industry for the jobs they provide and the choice they enable in how we choose to mechanize. Yet, we despise a number of nation states who’ve made fossil fuels their weapon of choice to aggress and suppress (if not kill) intra-national and inter-national voices of protest and dissent. Let’s face it: fossil fuel dependence by man has spawned and financed the continuance and endurance of a number of undesirables throughout the world, from autocratic and despotic monarchies that have zero tolerance for fundamental human rights, to terrorists who shed the blood of innocents with recruits and armaments procured with money generated off black market sales of fossil fuel. Hydrocarbon fuels and their reservoirs have been been the subject of murder and war for as long as we can remember.
With clean energy dirtied by corrupt governments and corrupt companies working in cahoots, we hold out hope that fusion technology will someday, perhaps by the late 2020's, replace man’s dependence on fossil fuels. When that someday comes, it will save all of us consumers a lot of expense, as fusion tech is energy on the cheap, like you can’t imagine. Jobs lost to the sea-change, will — under the right leadership — be regained.
Whether you like fossil fuels or not, nobody with any semblance of a sensory system likes pollution of course … except, that is, for bankers. Too Big To Fail bankers have long eyed an opportunity to monetize fossil fuel pollution to fatten their behinds — they just haven’t had a chance to harvest that fat, yet. Matt Taibbi explored the intersection between ‘mega-banking’ and so-called ‘man-made global warming’ quite a bit in the Rolling Stone article: The Great American Bubble Machine — [how] Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression, and [how] they’re about to do it again(scroll down to: “BUBBLE #6: Global Warming” if you’d like to see his input on the matter).
The exchange of cap-and-trade/carbon-credits is a place of securitization (and profit) that bankers want to take their climate change/global warming agenda to — much like they did with their ‘affordable housing’ agenda, via securitized mortgages of the subprime kind. A securitized energy exchange could be worth many tens of billions of dollars of revenue to Wall Street, annually. As for Wall Street insistence that it also cares about polar bears having enough ice to perch on… look, when we hear any of Goldman Sachs’ executives (especially) voicing concern for the environment, it always gets us laughing, like the time Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein did HERE. Why, because while you and I embrace the idea of keeping our planet clean and pristine for unselfish reasons, there are also those who’ve made “clean and pristine” an agenda for purely selfish ones.
Again, the business of ‘cap-and-trade/carbon-credits’ could be worth gazillions to Wall Street if the megabanks have their way, and megabankers have purchased just about everybody they can, to one day have their way. You’ll have an inkling of who’s bought-and-paid-for by a simple measure: by whether they practice what they preach, to protect the environment that they say they hold so dear.
Needless to say, when bankers, their surrogates, and their proxies say they care about the welfare of your great-grandkids, or the well-being of polar bears, the marine life they eco-depend on and the fish they feed on, you know something’s fishy.
The meltdown in Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactor, that began March 2011, is (as of this writing) an ongoing hyper-contaminant of our Pacific Ocean at the rate of 200+ tons per day, with 300 tons of contamination per day reported ‘officially’ in late 2013, per Reuters. Yet, neither banker nor proxy talks about it. Perhaps because there’s no money to be made in it, that they can think of.
After the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s chairman, Takashi Kawamura, suggested dumping 777,000 tons of radioactive Fukushima water into the Pacific Ocean, President Barack Obama, Establishment environmentalists, and the Mainstream Media remained eerily silent. Normally, they’d raise a storm over any bombardment of the environment.
(FYI: 5 of 6 Fukushima plants were General Electric Mark 1 reactors; 35 years ago, their design was found to be defective by GE’s own evaluators, who resigned in protest, after their evaluation got shelved; GE’s CEO has figured prominently inside both the Obama & Trump Administrations.)
In Oct 2015, Eco-Business reported that carbon emissions from Indonesia’s peat fires — greenhouse gases from peat fires in Borneo and Sumatra, specifically — exceed those of the entire US economy. We don’t see that from any of the talking heads in the Establishment or the mainstream media.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It is the primary emission blamed for climate change by bankers and their spox’s. Yet, at the heart of the continental United States is our very own super-CO2-spewing super-volcanic Yellowstone National Park — a 2008 field campaign highlighted by the United States Geological Survey, a government agency, found that Yellowstone’s Brimstone Basin released 277 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the ground PER DAY.
China has long promised to cap and reduce carbon emissions, but done the 180-degree polar opposite. The New York Times would in Nov 2015 detail how 155 coal power plants got approval for construction in China in just the first 9 months of 2015, equating to 40% of the operational capacity of all the coal power plants in the entire United States.
In 2016, U.S. coal production totaled 728 million short tons. (1 short ton=2,000 pounds, compared to 1 metric ton, or tonne, being equal to 2,205 pounds.) In 2016, China’s coal production totaled 3,210 million metric tons, or 3,539 short tons — almost 5 times that of the U.S.
Just one of China’s many big coal producing companies, Shenhua Group, employed almost 200,000 coal miners — that’s more than 2.5 times the number of coal miners you’ll find in the entire U.S. coal mining industry.
Eleven other countries (other than America, that is) produced 6,692 million short tons of coal in 2016 — about 9.2 times U.S. output that year.
That the biggest polluters on earth, like China under communist rule, might diplomatically nod to, but never agree to (much less abide by) cap-and-trade and the exchange of carbon credits, goes largely unmentioned.
That Chinese government officials routinely dismiss global warming as a “pseudo science” is lost in translation. That Russian government officials routinely dismiss global warming as a “bogus science” is lost in translation, as well.
No problem of any kind, affecting the Earth as a whole, can ever be solved by a few dozen countries if the other ‘196 countries minus those few dozen’ dismiss it, or outright laugh it off. Of course, the bankers at Goldman Sachs know that — but there’s gobs of money to be made in even the few dozen countries going it alone, so they’re going for it anyway. Their emissaries, some of whom posed for this most regal photo at the Paris climate summit of Nov 2015, are not just their mouthpieces, but also their marionettes.
That said, onto a little bit about sunspots now … (note: given that we cannot independently verify the accuracy or veracity of the statements below, do NOT consider the following to be an endorsement of the opinions presented, but merely a presentation of them for you, the reader, to accept or reject) …
Sunspots, we’re told, define solar cycles. We’re told Solar Cycle 24 began Jan 4 2008. Estimates have Cycle 24 terminating 2019/2020. It’s Cycle 25 that’s been garnering inordinate attention.
Andrés Munoz-Jaramillo, an astrophysicist who studies the solar-magnetic cycle at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has said: “There is no scientist alive who has seen a solar cycle as weak as this one.”
Not quite, for there’s Dr. David Hathaway, head of solar physics research at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, who had this to issue about what he thinks might be in store for us: “Solar Cycle 25 could be one of the weakest in centuries.” Sourced from NASA’s archives, dated 2006: The Great Conveyor Belt is a massive circulating current of hot plasma within the Sun, with two branches to it — north and south. “Normally, the conveyor belt moves about 1 meter per second — walking pace,” explains Dr. Hathaway. “That’s how it has been since the late 19th century.” In recent years, however, the belt has decelerated to [as little as] 0.35 m/s in the south. “We’ve never seen speeds so low.”
Theory and observation has it that the speed of the belt foretells the intensity of sunspot activity about 20 years into the future. A slow belt means lower solar activity; a fast belt means stronger activity. Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle. Using historical sunspot records, Dr. Hathaway has succeeded in clocking the conveyor belt as far back as 1890. The numbers are compelling. For more than a century, “the speed of the belt has been a good predictor of future solar activity.” If the trend holds, Solar Cycle 25 could be, like the belt itself, “off the bottom of the charts,” says the solar physicist.
In late Oct 2013 the BBC would publish a bleaker prognosis in this finding by Michael Lockwood, a professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading’s solar sciences facility in the United Kingdom:
“The late 20th century was a period when the sun was unusually active and a so called ‘grand maximum’ occurred around 1985. By looking back at certain isotopes in ice cores, Prof. Lockwood has been able to determine how active the sun has been over thousands of years. Following analysis of the data, he believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years. He found 24 different occasions in the last 10,000 years when the sun was in exactly the same state as it is now — and the present decline is faster than any of those 24.”
During the first six months of 2011, various observers at NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and the National Solar Observatory, all independently suggested or articulated the possible coming of an era of solar-activity-based planetary cooling.
Some scientists point to Solar Cycle 26, after the year 2031, as the potential starting point to a period of ‘frigid cold’ that they think could be upon us for decades.
There have been a number of protracted solar ‘grand minima’ in the last two thousand plus years: the Homer minimum (reportedly lasting between 800 B.C. and 900 B.C.), the Oort minimum (between 1010 A.D. and 1050 A.D.), the Wolf minimum (between 1280 and 1350), the Spörer minimum (between 1450 and 1540), the Maunder minimum (between 1645 and 1710), and the Dalton minimum (between 1790 and 1820).
During the Maunder Minimum, between 1645 and 1715, much of humankind experienced bitterly cold winters and significantly cooler-than-normal summers. In that Little Ice Age, as it came to be called, commerce ground to a halt as ships were frozen in at ports, or frozen out of ports. Crops were destroyed en masse, and a great many died from the cold, disease, and famine. Just prior to the Maunder, and throughout the event itself, sunspots on the solar surface were very few and far between, and at times vanished entirely for prolonged periods.
That we are in for a repeat, is a thesis supported by some and refuted by others. There are astrophysicists in support of a coming super solar minimum, and then there are climatologists who are adamant that the Maunders have arisen partly to undermine their climate change agenda. Who’s right, who’s wrong, time will tell.
But that ‘time’ may, however, be siding with statistics, at least so far. Consider:
Back in January 2013, NASA would — in a report entitled “Solar Variability and Terrestrial Climate” — write…
Matt Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory predict that by the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Independent lines of research involving helio-seismology and surface polar fields tend to support their conclusion.
Then, five years later, in December 2017, NASA would record evidence that demonstrated solar brightness, energy output, and sunspot activity, to all be in sharp decline. Moreover, in vindication of Penn & Livingston’s prediction, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Space-Weather station reported 96 days of sunspot INACTIVITY throughout 2017.
96 days corresponds to 26% of a calendar year.
Said another way, there was no observable sunspot activity during 26% of calendar year 2017.
In contrast, in 2016 there was no observable sunspot activity during only 9% of the calendar year.
And, in sharp contrast, in 2015 there was not even one day to be found that was devoid of observable sunspot activity.
Again, while Main Street Gov takes no side in the argument of whether we’re in for warming or cooling, or even normalcy, what we do know is this: if the Sun does go into a state of relative deep-sleep or even partial-hibernation, it will be disruptive, not just for northerners who’ll be the most temperature-impacted, but also southerners in (shall we say) a migratory sense. Details ahead.
If sunspot activity resumes, and things get back to normal, great. But, either way, the nation could use the uncertainty to re-do its ailing and aging infrastructure, to build everything from cars to furnaces and fireplaces better, to find alternative sources of energy, to advance hydroponics and new ways of agriculture, to promote the healthy and humane treatment of livestock in order to strengthen their endurance in inclement weather, and thus prepare for a natural disaster of the future, while employing many millions of new workers to get there.
If the siren call of an impending Mini Ice Age ends up a false alarm or not, all of the aforementioned will end up a win-win for America, and bring about a betterment of American lives overall.
Among the many observers to recognize the aberrational (albeit cyclical) solar phenomena of recent years, is Martin Armstrong.
Martin Armstrong is both hated and loved, depending on who you are. We tend to like the guy, and admire his intellect (you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone as well-versed in the understanding of how finance, science, and history, all interact and combine).
Anyway, Mr. Armstrong’s “computer” and its “program” have precisely predicted just about everything important there’s been to predict in the years he’s been allowed his freedom — for more on that, see the trailer for The Forecaster here:
Or here:
Although he’s not outright confirmed it as of yet, perhaps because his computer program hasn’t signaled that confirmation as of yet, Martin Armstrong still seems inclined to think a super solar minimum will be upon us in relatively short order. Again, the chronometer he refers to has been uncannily exact, eerily on-point, at foretelling cyclical turning points in the global economy. In light of that track record, those who takes his forecasts lightly do so at their own risk.
If it happens, an intense solar minimum will not be fun. Far from it.
Alaska may become inhospitable to business and commerce through much of its winter. Canada, Scandinavia, major economies may contract like they’d never contracted before.
With much of the northern contiguous states subjected to wintry blizzards, lasting days, and possibly bone-chilling wind chill factors, lasting weeks, everything that northerners know and take for granted most of the time, like round-the-clock electricity, could be put to the test.
The damage to farms and crops up north could be substantial.
The potential exodus to the south of taxpayers and taxpaying entities, could bankrupt cities at the highest latitudes, and leave wide swathes of the north desolate.
Meantime, southern states like Florida and Texas — the only two states in the American south with no state income taxes — could magnify in population.
Mr. Armstrong’s computer program says the United States will fracture at some point on the other side of 2032.95 — i.e. Dec 13 2032, a turning point in his calendar of economic cycles. To our knowledge, he’s published no specifics as to whether that ‘other side’ will be measured in years that are few in number, or many in number.
If an acute solar minimum comes to pass, we can see why secession may gain traction — because, to allow migration of liberals into conservative heartland, would be political suicide for conservatives ruling that heartland.
A pause is warranted here. Remember, we are raising this specter to provoke debate. With that in mind, we ask that you stretch your imagination here…
If it happens to the degree of severity that some portend, a Maunder Minimum could alter the nation’s political contours, tear boundaries, and potentially alter America’s map itself.
Take for example the following adverse (and hopefully unlikely) situations: If the liberal northeast starts heading south in search of warmth, will the Sunshine State or the Lone Star State, packed with conservative legislators in Tallahassee and Austin, not consider the influx of ‘lefties’ (who’ll vote) an existential threat to their continuance in power?
What will Alabama and Mississippi think about New York City migrating their way? What will a South Carolina or Louisiana think of a Massachusetts migrating their way? Could upset the balance of things.
For the sake of humor, at least, imagine the following scenarios:
Imagine residents of North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Nebraska having, in such a Divided States of America, an easier time crossing “south of the border” into Oklahoma, than (say) a travel-document-holder from New Jersey.
Also, in a Divided States of America, imagine a visa officer, representing the southwest, asking some guy applying for an entry visa, from the northeast, where that visa applicant stands with respect to the Second Amendment, and demanding to see a firearms license or a permit-to-carry, or even a cell phone video of him firing off a couple of rounds at the range, to prove the dude meant it when he gushed, “Oh, yeah, I believe in that Second Amendment thing, totally! Best Amendment ever … I swear … totally!”
All kidding aside, just in case this severe solar minimum is inevitable, and solar intensity nosedives into a lapse lasting a very-very long time, the country under the leadership of its government must begin preparations soon — because it will take a whole lot of years to finally be ready for such an extraordinary eventuality, were it come to pass.
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