The total number of spotless days in this solar minimum exceeds 500 days since the last maximum. The number of blank days in this cycle now makes this sunspot cycle the longest since cycle 9 in 1848.

In fact, a blank sun was seen by astronomers for more than 260 days during 2008, making last year the second blankest year of the last century. Sunspot activity was also lacking throughout 2007.

So, if the sun stays quiet for a few more months we will begin to rival the activity of the sun in the early 1800s. It was the last time the earth has experienced such low solar activity and the result was dramatic global cooling referred to as the Dalton Minimum .

In general, long sunspot cycles are an indicator of global cooling. Short cycles herald a warm global temperature indicator. The Dalton Minimum actually started with a skipped solar cycle and coincided with a very long solar cycle 4 from 1784-1799.

So, what does this lack of sunspot activity on the sun really mean? The answer is still unknown but there is one thing that we do know. We know that there was only one scientific paper that predicted this current trend in sunspot activity before it all began.

However, the paper was ridiculed after it was released in 2005 and denied publication.
The paper was released during the active sun in 2005 and the scientific community rejected the paper as being too controversial.

This controversial paper was based on the research of a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) at Kitt Peak in Tucson, Arizona, William Livingston and Matthew Penn.

The researchers looked at magnetic changes in the sun by analyzing data from sunspot observations over a 15-year period from 1990 to 2005. In total, over 1000 sunspots were measured. It was certainly a small sample size but nevertheless the researchers did discover an interesting trend.

Livingston and Penn discovered that the magnetic field of sunspots were decreasing rapidly in 2005 from observations made in the late 1990’s. A projection of a continued decline in the magnetic field of sunspots would mean that by 2015 there would be no visible sunspots on the face of the sun.

So, the solar cycle would effectively be “put on hold” in the year 2015. It would remain on hold until the unknown mechanism driving the process decided to start up again. The result is that by 2015 there would be no visible sunspots.

The conclusion of their research was certainly controversial and it was also the title of their work: “Sunspots may vanish by 2015". It should again be noted that their paper only considers data from 15 years worth of sunspots, that’s only just a little more than one cycle. Data over several sunspot cycles could certainly be seen as more conclusive in the scientific community.

However, what if the conclusions in the paper are correct and we are about to enter a sunspot minimum with the regular sunspot cycle placed on hold in a few years time? After all, it has happened before during both the Maunder and Dalton Minimums and our current sunspot activity is certainly trending that way.

It would mean much colder times lie just ahead on a scale that would mean devastation for agriculture and the global economy. Indeed, the problem will become even worse if billions of dollars were already being spent in an attempt to prevent a future global warming event.

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