Late last week NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center released its monthly update of the ongoing solar cycle sunspot activity, covering February 2012. Though I am slightly late in posting it, as I do every month, you can now see the full graph below the fold. I have also created a close-up of the graph’s relevant area, shown on the left, because it is hard to decipher what is happening on the full graph.

Since the Sun began it ramp up to solar maximum back in 2009, the pattern has been consistent, two steps forward, one step back. First there are several months in a row in which the number of sunspots show a steep rise, followed immediately by several months in which the sunspot numbers decline just as steeply, though by not as much. All told, since 2009 we have seen this pattern repeat four times.

February’s numbers have continued that pattern.

After a steep plunge in January, the February numbers have once again rebounded, though as has been the general pattern for the past five years, the overall sunspot count remains far below prediction. Though we have seen in the past week some of the strongest solar flares and coronal mass ejections since 2006, the Sun continues to struggle to produce sunspots.

We are now less than a year from the predicted peak of the solar maximum, a sunspot number of 59 in early 2013, as predicted by the solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center. This would make this maximum the weakest in a hundred years.

As I have noted repeatedly over the past five years, whenever the Sun produces fewer sunspots, the Earth’s climate appears to cool. Why this happens remains very unclear, as the Sun’s actual dimming as measured by satellites over the past forty years is far too small to account for the cooling. Yet, the link between changes in the sunspot cycle and climate temperature seems somewhat strong, even if we have no clear understanding why that link exists.

Hopefully scientists will finally be able to solve this mystery in the next decade. Not only are they finally aware of the question, they finally have the proper tools (on the ground and in space) to solve it.

It is very important that they do. Some solar scientists think that the Sun is about to enter another Grand Minimum, when there will be no sunspots for decades. If that happens, and the climate cools as much as it did the last time there was a grand minimum, in the 1600s, then all the climate predictions of the past two decades — predicting a strongly warming Earth — might turn out to be very wrong.

And remember, if you don’t get a summer you can’t grow crops. A cooling climate is almost certainly a far more harmful thing to human society than a warming climate.