My monthly sunspot update today will have less to do with the Sun’s sunspot activity itself — which continues to show a very very slow decline from a peak in August 2024 — and more to do with more games-playing by NOAA solar scientists to fool the public into believing they know more than they do.

Below is my annotated version of NOAA’s monthly graph showing the amount of sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Sun. This graph is significantly different from the graph that NOAA’s scientists have issued for the past few years, with all the changes designed to make it seem as if these scientists’ predictions are on the money, when they have been entirely wrong now for two solar cycles in a row.


The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community for both the previous solar maximum as well as the ongoing 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.

I have also annotated this graph to indicate the changes these government NOAA scientists have made. First, their default graph visible to the public no longer includes the red curve showing their failed prediction for this solar maximum. To see it you have to click on the vaguely labeled “Add/remove series” drop-down box on the lower right.

Second, and more egregious, these scientists added a new prediction — the blue line surrounded by a multi-colored range indicating margin of error — suggesting they now think the solar maximum is over and that the Sun is starting its ramp down to minimum. Only if you dig into the webpage in one of the explanatory tabs below the graphs do you discover that this new prediction was added last month as “a recalibration of the 2019 Panel prediction based on new observational data.”

In other words, it ain’t really a prediction. All they have done is to extrapolate the present decline during the past four months, even though there is no clear evidence to justify that extrapolation. In the previous solar cycle the Sun also started a similar decline, and then activity leaped upward again, producing a double-peaked maximum. Moreover, the extrapolation will result in an extremely short maximum, which will be especially unprecedented because short maximums have routinely been associated with high maximums, not the relative weak maximum we are presently experiencing.

NOAA’s scientists have simply produced a new “prediction” based solely on recent data, because their original prediction simply failed. This games-playing allows these scientists to fool the public into thinking they know what’s going on. What it really tells us is that they continue to guess, but spin those guesses so that they can hide their ignorance.

It is possible the changes to the graph above were made to protect their jobs. The Trump effort to shrink the federal government has made it clear that NOAA is in its sights, with its climate-based researchers a major target. By hiding the failure of their previous predictions they might convince Trump and DOGE officials to leave them alone.

I say, go after these people with a chainsaw. There are certainly too many people employed here. Worse, their track record, that I have documented repeatedly in the past fifteen years suggests they play games with data not only to burnish their reputation and abilities but also to falsify the data in order to strengthen the unproven theory that humans are causing the climate to warm.

As for the solar sunspot cycle, we still have no idea what will happen in the next year. The Sun could be ramping down to minimum, as the NOAA scientists now claim. Or its sunspot activity could jump back up, as it did in the previous maximum. We will simply have to wait and see.