Phil Berardelli: I’ve read a number of papers that proposed the same thing you do. However, in November and December we definitely had strong enough activity to have been spotted by those first telescopes in the 1600s.

The bottom line remains: No solar scientist in the world has the faintest understanding of the actual reasons the Sun’s dynamo causes these cycles. All they do is predict based on past events. With such a limited understanding, no prediction is really nothing more than a guess.

It occurs to me that back during the previous Maunder Minimum the telescopes trained on the sun had no greater resolving power than what is displayed on that image. So, it’s possible the sun was exhibiting the same amount of activity back then, but observers weren’t able to record the tiniest sunspots.

That isn’t to say we’re in a new grand minimum, but it’s possible. In any event, when I was covering the topic, the solar scientists I contacted were predicting the phenomenon to begin around 2030. It might be starting up early.

While this is a slow process (watching changes in cycles) it seems to me to be an extremely important topic.