Time for our monthly sunspot update, based on NOAA’s monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. I have posted that graph below, but have added some extra details to provide some context.

June saw the highest sunspot count in a month since September 2002, when the Sun was just beginning its ramp down after its solar maximum that reached its peak in late 2001. From that time until now, the Sun has been in a very prolonged quiet period, with two solar minimums that were overly long and a single solar maximum that was very weak with a extended double peak lasting almost four years.

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community for the previous solar maximum. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007 for the previous maximum, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The blue curve is their revised May 2009 prediction. The red curve is the new prediction, first posted by NOAA in April 2020.

The June numbers not only continued the pattern since the end of the solar maximum in 2020 of being far above the 2020 prediction by NOAA’s panel, the numbers far exceeded that prediction’s margin of error, as shown by the the grey area around the red curve.

The graph to the right extends NOAA’s graph back to the 2002 solar maximum, the last strong maximum. The red line makes clear the comparison of July’s high activity with that of September 2002.

It now appears that the high activity seen since the beginning of this ramp up to the upcoming solar maximum is no fluke, and that the consensus prediction of NOAA’s solar science panel of a weak maximum in 2025 will be wrong.

Instead, it appears that the dissenting prediction by a handful of other solar scientists who in 2020 predicted a very high maximum in 2025 will turn out more correct, even though those same scientists recently pulled back on their own prediction, saying they now expected the maximum to come one year early, in 2024, and that the maximum will not be as intense as they predicted, though still higher than NOAA’s prediction.

Regardless, I would not bet much money on the predictive powers of either camp. To once again quote my update in April:

These predictions are based solely on past behavior, not on any understanding of the true fundamental causes for this sunspot cycle within the Sun’s magnetic dynamo. That the dissenters are now adjusting their prediction to make it align more with what has happening is not an indication of their knowledge, but actually shows us how little they know. They simply change their prediction to fit the facts, as the facts change.

Though solar researchers know a lot more about the Sun’s behavior since the beginning of the space age, they really do not yet understand anything, on that fundamental level. It is still possible for the Sun to calm down and produce a weak maximum in 2025, or a very strong one, even stronger than predicted by the dissenters. Until we discover why the Sun’s magnetic dynamo undergoes this cycle, no prediction can be relied on with much faith.

Meanwhile, this high activity will likely impact the Earth’s climate, as circumstantial evidence has suggested in the past. Less activity aligns with a cooling in the climate, and more activity aligns with warming. Thus, any warming detected in the next decade might be caused not by human-caused global warming — which I guarantee every leftwing political activist will claim — but by the Sun itself.

Sadly, because the ongoing climate data has now been corrupted so badly by the global warming activists in the government facilities that record the data, it will be almost impossible to pin down what is really happening. To prove global warming, these dishonest scientists have for years been slowly adjusting past records downward, with no justification, to make it appear the climate is warming. Those unjustified changes will make it impossible to determine how much of the future warming was caused by real environmental factors, such as the Sun, or by false manipulations by these crooked scientists.