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My February birthday fund-raising campaign for this website, Behind the Black, is now over. Despite a relatively weak initial three weeks, the last week was spectacular, making this campaign the second best ever.

 

Thanks to every person who donated or subscribed. It continues to astonish me that people who can read my work for free like it enough to donate money voluntarily. Words cannot express my appreciation for that support, especially in these uncertain times.

 

If you have been a regular reader and a fan of my work and have not yet donated or subscribed, please consider doing so. I take no ads, I keep the website clean from pop-ups and annoying demands (most of the time). Thus, I depend entirely on my readers to support me. Though this means I am sacrificing some income, it also means that I remain entirely independent from outside pressure. By depending solely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, no one can threaten me with censorship. You don't like what I write, you can simply go elsewhere.

 

You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
 

3. A Paypal Donation:

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5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
 
Behind The Black
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The Sun continues to hiccup

It’s sunspot time again! On Monday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the sunspot activity for the Sun in February. I am once again posting it here, below the fold, with annotations.

Like it did in January, the Sun’s second peak of the solar maximum continued to beat its first peak, an unprecedented event. Though activity dropped slightly, it still remained above prediction and was only slightly below the first peak’s maximum. Overall, the second peak has been much stronger than the first, something that scientists have never seen before. In the past, when the Sun had a double peaked solar maximum, the second peak was always weaker. Not this time!

February Solar Cycle graph

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

The second peak in sunspots is the result Sun’s continuing process of flipping its magnetic field polarity, an event that occurs approximately every eleven years. In this particular maximum the northern hemisphere has mostly completed its flip (the first peak), while the southern hemisphere has trailed behind and is only now getting it done (the second peak). See this article for an excellent explanation of this process.

Despite the activity and the unusually strong second peak, it is important to emphasis that this is still a relatively weak solar maximum, the weakest in a hundred years. To show this, look above at how low the numbers are in the second peak compared to the green prediction curve, which was the high prediction made by scientists in April 2007. And even this high prediction still predicted that the maximum would be less than the previous maximum in 2000-2001. The graph below, showing the magnitude of all the solar cycles since Galileo, makes it even clearer:

Solar cycle record

Why this cycle is behaving as it is remains a pillar of the uncertainty of science. And another illustration of that uncertainty is the effort by the solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center to make believe the data they are recording now is actually their prediction from 2009. As I have documented repeatedly, they keep changing their prediction to match the data, and then make it look like the revised number was their prediction all along by not archiving the earlier predictions. I however get screen captures, and can show that they have essentially been guessing since 2009, with their predictions for the peak sunspot number to have ranged from anywhere between the 59 to 99. You could flip a coin and get as good a prediction.

They have now upped their number again, the third month in a row, from 69 to 70.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

One comment

  • Kelly Starks

    I wish I thought AGW was true – looks like we’re going to need to find a way to warm a cooling globe.

    ;/

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