It is the beginning of the month, so it is time for my monthly sunspot update. According to NOAA’s June update of its monthly graph of the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere, the amount of sunspots in May surprised us once again by increasing upward, though the totals continue to be below prediction.
That graph is below, annotated with extra information by me to illustrate the larger scientific context.
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NOAA’s chart of sunspot activity.
Click for the most recent update.
The uncertainty of science: Scientists doing a new analysis of more than forty years of solar data have concluded that some form of “subsurface structural changes associated with successive 11-year [sunspot] cycles” are taking place, with those changes “ever more progressively confined just beneath the solar surface.”
Using almost 40 years of helioseismic data from six telescopes around the world in the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON), the researchers uncovered a gradual change in structure just beneath the surface that has spanned multiple cycles, with the current solar cycle 25 showing particularly strong signatures of these changes.
Lead author Professor Bill Chaplin, from the University of Birmingham, said: “The Sun has its own ‘active biorhythm’ creating rising and falling magnetic activity that shapes space weather. However, traditional surface measures don’t capture the full story – that the Sun may be entering a different mode of behaviour unfolding over decades.
“We have uncovered evidence of systematic changes in the solar activity cycle. Crucially, magnetic activity is becoming more tightly confined near the surface with each cycle.”
The confinement appears to be within the first 600 miles below the surface, which for the Sun is barely skin deep.
In reading the paper [pdf], it is very clear they have detected these changes, but are as yet unable to apply them to any larger fundamental processes. They are observing the Sun change, but don’t know why. It could be simply random fluctuations of behavior, or it could be part of the Sun’s normal behavior related to its magnetic field and the nuclear fusion that makes it burn.
In either case, this lack of deeper understanding means it is impossible as yet to predict what will happen next, or how those future changes will impact us here on Earth.
For only the second time since I started this website in 2010, I forgot last month to do my monthly sunspot update. No matter. The Sun’s behavior in producing sunspots in the past two months was actually amazingly similar, so doing both months at once works.
According to NOAA’s monthly graph of the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere, the amount of sunspots in both March and April continued to be low, well below the predictions put forth by NOAA’s panel of scientists in their April 2025 prediction.
That graph is below, annotated with extra information by me to illustrate the larger scientific context.
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The uncertainty of science! It is the start of the month, and thus time for another sunspot update, using NOAA’s monthly graph of the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere, updated by NOAA to include the activity in February but annotated with extra information by me to illustrate the larger scientific context.
Last month I lambasted NOAA’s solar science panel for its consistently failed predictions, and made a tentative prediction of my own, suggesting the ramp down to solar minimum might not be occurring as they had predicted in April 2025.
This month I can lambast myself, because the Sun in February saw a significant drop in sunspots, including three consecutive days in which the Sun was blank of spots, for the first time since 2022. This drop supports the NOAA panel prediction and makes my prediction look foolish, but it also suggests the ramp down is continuing to go faster than predicted.
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Fake leftist scientist Michael Mann
In the never-ending legal battle between fake climate scientist Michael Mann and his critics, Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn, Mann has once again lost badly in an appeal to a higher court, with the Superior Court in DC not only ruling that Mann must immediately pay Simberg and Steyn a total of more than $27K in court costs and fees, but blasting Mann for his lies to the court during the proceedings.
The fact remains that Dr. Mann throughout this litigation complained that he suffered lost grant funding directly stemming from the defamatory statements of Messrs. Simberg and Steyn, while providing very little in the way of specifics about the dollar amounts of his losses directly attributable to the statements (such as corroborating testimony from percipient witnesses), all while promising to illuminate the Court at trial. At trial, Dr. Mann elected through his attorneys to present to the jury a blown-up demonstrative, without redaction or explanation, a demonstrative intentionally prepared for its use at trial, which included a budget (loss) amount of $9,713,924.00, when the correct amount, previously corrected during a third round of discovery, was $112,000.
…the Court simply cannot condone such bad faith litigation tactics, particularly in a case that had been zealously litigated across several years and a case involving complicated facts. Thus, the Court’s ruling must stand. It is the Court’s duty to punish and deter bad faith litigation tactics.
In other words, Mann didn’t simply falsify his scientific results, using false data in his infamous hockey stick graph to create the illusion of human-caused global warming, when Simberg and Steyn called him out on this fake science, he tried to sue them using more fake data that was quickly revealed in discovery to be outright lies.
The court has thankfully decided it cannot tolerate such behavior.
What must be understood about Mann is that he is a very typical leftist radical, who thinks that because his cause is just and good, he is somehow immune from any consequences for bad behavior. Such leftists increasingly believe they are allowed to lie, cheat, defame, and even sometimes commit violence, because anyone who disagrees with them is evil. Mann did not do the last item (though many other leftists now are), but he did all the others, and truly believed he could get away with it. He is now finding out otherwise.
Another year, another month, another sunspot update! Time to post my monthly update of the never-ending sunspot cycle on the Sun, using NOAA’s own monthly update of its graph of sunspot activity and annotating it with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.
The green dot on the graph below indicates the level of sunspot activity on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere during the month of December. Unlike November, when activity plunged, in December the sunspot count recovered, producing more sunspots, though the number still reflected the ramp down to solar minimum that NOAA’s panel of solar scientists had predicted in April 2025 (as indicated by the purple/magenta line).
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Click for original.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sentinel 6B satellite, launched a month ago, has now released its first sea-level data.
Following its launch on 17 November 2025, the first data from Sentinel-6B was captured on 26 November by the satellite’s Poseidon-4 altimeter. The image [to the right] is a combination of altimeter data from both the Sentinel-6 sea-level tracking satellites: Sentinel-6B and its twin, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, which was launched in 2020. The image shows the Gulf Stream current in the North Atlantic Ocean, off the eastern coasts of the US and Canada.
The Gulf Stream is a hugely important area of the North Atlantic Ocean, not only for the role it plays in global weather patterns and climate, but also because it’s a busy shipping route as well as a key ecosystem for marine species and therefore an important fishing zone.
What makes this particular government press release unusual is that though it is about a climate-related satellite, it makes no mention of global warming and how the sea level rise that has been recorded by the string of similar orbital satellites going back to 1993 is going to eventually drown us all. Maybe that’s because that total rise measured since 1993 equals only about 4 inches. That’s 4 inches of rise detected in more than three decades. At that rate, a little over an inch per decade, it will take centuries to drown anyone, but only those who refuse to walk a few feet to higher ground.
It could be the scientists and government PR hacks that are involved in writing this release also realized that the gig is up, and everyone now knows it, and it would only embarrass them further to push the global-warming hoax again.
It is the start of another month, so it is time again to post my monthly update of the never-ending sunspot cycle on the Sun, using NOAA’s own monthly update of its graph of sunspot activity and annotating it with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.
The green dot on the graph below indicates the level of sunspot activity on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere during the month of November. And once again, the Sun surprised us, producing far less sunspots than expected, based on the April 2025 prediction by NOAA’s panel of solar scientists (as indicated by the purple/magenta line).
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SpaceX tonight successfully launched Sentinal-6B, a NASA radar satellite designed to measure the global sea level, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The first stage completed its 3rd flight, landing back at Vandenberg.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
150 SpaceX (a new record)
70 China
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 150 to 117.
Note that until SpaceX began to up its launch rate significantly in 2022, the entire global rocket industry — run entirely by governments — never completed more than 135 successful launches in a single year, and usually failed to make 100 launches. SpaceX is now proving that those global numbers over more than a half century were indicative of the failure of those governments. Those governments controlled everything, and so they prevented innovation, competition, and new ideas.
The transition to capitalism and freedom since 2010 has finally begun to open up space for everyone.
Another month has passed, and so it is time for my monthly update on the never-ending sunspot cycle on the Sun. using NOAA’s own monthly update of its graph of sunspot activity and annotating it with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.
The green dot on the graph below indicates the level of sunspot activity on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere during the month of October. Not only did the number of sunspots decline from the count in the previous month, as predicted in April 2025 by NOAA’s panel of solar scientists (as indicated by the purple/magenta line), it dropped below their prediction.
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The uncertainty of science: Though the climate science community had predicted that last year’s hurricane season was going to be one of the most active ever, a new study published two weeks ago in Geophysical Research Letters of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) found that the 2024 season did not behave as predicted. It ended up producing about the predicted number of hurricanes, but did so only because of a sudden rise in activity near the end of the season, after a long lull with almost no activity. From the study’s conclusion:
As has been noted throughout this study, the lull was immediately followed by one of the busiest ends to an Atlantic hurricane season on record, including two major hurricane landfalls in Florida (Helene and Milton), resulting in more than 250 fatalities and $100 billion in damage (National Centers for Environmental Information, 2025). Though the final overall number of hurricanes and major hurricanes were aligned with the seasonal forecasts, the extremely busy beginning and end to the season and marked lull in the middle highlight just how unusual the season was.
Last year’s prediction was not the first to be incorrect, though this time the error was in how the season unfolded instead of the total numbers. In the past two decades — since Al Gore prophesied that global warming would cause a gigantic increase in violent storms — NOAA has repeatedly called for very active hurricane seasons, and repeatedly those predictions have turned out wrong. In fact, from 2006 until 2018 there were almost no major hurricanes at all, the exact opposite to what Gore had foretold. Since then the seasons have returned to more normal numbers, but the predictions of the scientists have continued to be no better than throwing a dart at a wall while wearing a blindfold.
The ongoing 2025 hurricane season is following this same pattern. In May 2025 NOAA predicted this year would be a very active hurricane season. Instead, this season has matched those from 2006 to 2016, in which no hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. and the number of strong hurricanes was almost nil.
The season of course is not yet over. We could see a burst of activity in the next few months, similar to what happened in 2024. Nonetheless, the important takeaway from this story is that the scientists who claim to know what is going to happen simply don’t know anything. They are guessing, because as the paper above admits, the Earth’s weather and climate are incredibly complex, and our understanding of it is still in its infancy.
Remember this when you read the next “We’re all gonna die!” prediction touted in the propaganda press.
It is the start of the month, which means it is time for my monthly sunspot update, using NOAA’s own monthly update of its graph of sunspot activity and annotating it with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.
This graph is below, with the green dot showing the sunspot number for activity on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere in September. As you can see, the count closely matched the April 2025 prediction by NOAA’s panel of solar scientists, which posited that the Sun was finally beginning its ramp down from solar maximum (as indicated by the purple/magenta line).
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Climate activist Michael Mann
Though he has claimed to be a climate scientist for decades, Michael Mann at the University of Pennsylvania has been proven time and again to merely be a leftwing global-warming activist, faking data to make it appear the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing global warming, falsely claiming he was a Nobel laureate winner, and acting to destroy the careers of anyone who challenged the veracity of his research.
Sadly, when these facts were discovered almost two decades ago, about the time the climategate emails were released, the climate science community ignored the facts (a very bad thing for scientists to do) and acted to defend Mann. Thus he was able to continue to publish while keeping his job as a professor in academia, first at Pennsylvania State University and then at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mann’s ability to survive fraud and abuse of power however has finally come to an end, and it did so because he decided to go on line after Charlie Kirk was assassinated to joke about that murder and to slander Kirk by reposting comments that called Kirk “head of Trump’s Hitler Youth.”
Though Mann subsequently denied that was what he was doing, deleting some of his worst tweets while claiming to condemn such violence, it appears no one believes him. As a result, he announced yesterday that he resigning his position at Pennsylvania University in order to become a full time political activist. From his resignation statement:
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According to a detailed New Zealand news report today, the failed MethaneSat climate satellite — funded and operated by the Environmental Defense Fund — apparently had significant problems during its short fifteen month life-span, going into safe mode many times, before failing completely last month.
An earlier report from this same news outlet described more fully the issues — which began in September 2024 only about six months after launch.
The mission’s chief scientist has now said more intense solar activity because of a peak in the sun’s magnetic cycle has been causing MethaneSAT to go into safe mode. The satellite has to be carefully restarted every time.
There has also been a problem with one of the satellite’s three thrusters, which maintain its altitude and steer the spacecraft. MethaneSAT says it can operate fully on two thrusters.
It appears there is a lot of unhappiness in New Zealand for spending $32 million on this project that was designed, built, and operated by an environmental activist organization with little space experience.
What is clear now is that the spacecraft likely got relatively little data during its fifteen month life span.
The uncertainty of science: A science paper released yesterday suggests that the ozone hole over Antarctica that scientists have been tracking for almost a half century is caused mostly by the solar cycle and the accompanying fluctuations in cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere, not the release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that used to be used in aerosol spray cans.
The graph to the right, from figure 2 of the paper, illustrates the data. The red line is the ozone hole fluctuations predicted by the paper’s model, labeled “CRE Theory”, based on the increase of cosmic ray radiation during solar minimum. The blue, black, and green lines indicate the actual fluctuations of ozone and temperature in the lower stratosphere where the ozone layer exists. As you can see, the model and actual fluctuations match quite closely. From the paper’s abstract:
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As I have done since I started this website fifteen years ago, I post at the start of every month an update of the Sun’s ongoing sunspot activity, using the update that NOAA posts each month to its own graph of sunspot activity but annotated by me with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.
Below is that graph, showing that in June sunspot activity rebounded upward somewhat from the shocking drop in activity that occurred in May.
Click for original movie.
Launched in early 2024, the Pace orbiter was designed to track the evolution of the leaves of trees globally throughout the entire year. NASA has now released the data from the first twelve months, showing the seasonal changes of trees as the Earth rotates the Sun and the seasons change globally.
The map to the right is a screen capture from one of many videos showing these changes. The green indicates the global spread of tree cover in the middle of August in the northern hemisphere as well as in the equatorial regions of South America and Africa. Other movies focusing on North America, South America, Europe, India, etc, can be viewed here.
PACE measurements have allowed NASA scientists and visualizers to show a complete year of global vegetation data using three pigments: chlorophyll, anthocyanins, and carotenoids. That multicolor imagery tells a clearer story about the health of land vegetation by detecting the smallest of variations in leaf colors.
…Anthocyanins are the red pigments in leaves, while carotenoids are the yellow pigments – both of which we see when autumn changes the colors of trees. Plants use these pigments to protect themselves from fluctuations in the weather, adapting to the environment through chemical changes in their leaves. For example, leaves can turn more yellow when they have too much sunlight but not enough of the other necessities, like water and nutrients. If they didn’t adjust their color, it would damage the mechanisms they have to perform photosynthesis.
In the visualization, the data is highlighted in bright colors: magenta represents anthocyanins, green represents chlorophyll, and cyan represents carotenoids. The brighter the colors are, the more leaves there are in that area. The movement of these colors across the land areas show the seasonal changes over time.
You can read the full paper describing the first year’s data here.
The Trump budget presently funds Pace for two more years of observations, at about $26 million per year. This is an obvious example of a satellite whose life should be extended for as long as possible. This long term data would likely confirm other data that indicates the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is greening the Earth, helping plant life that provides us oxygen to breath and food to eat.
To do so, however, other cuts in NASA will have to be found to pay for that extension. I once again wonder about the half a billion NASA spends for its “Mission Enabling Services”, which covers NASA’s human resources division, public relations department, and its equal opportunity division, as well as other more useful departments. Surely some money from these bureaucratic divisions could be found to finance this actual useful research.
It is the start of the month, so it is of course time for my monthly report on sunspot activity, based on the update that NOAA posts each month to its own graph of sunspots activity. As I have done since the start of Behind the Black in 2010, I take that graph each month and annotate it with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.
Sunspot activity in April did nothing to tell us anything about the Sun’s future activity. It rose slightly, but not by enough to suggest that the prediction put forth last month by NOAA scientists that the ramp down to solar minimum has begun is wrong.
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Schmidt’s data tampering, as documented in 2016.
As part of the Trump administration’s aggressive effort to trim the federal budget as well as shift the research focus at the federal government’s many science agencies, on April 24, 2025 it revealed that it has canceled the building lease for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York that has existed since 1961 and in 2016 and 2017 was found to be tampering with past climate data with no explanation, lowering past temperature numbers while raising more recent ones in order to make the data fit the as-yet unproven theory that human activity is causing global warming.
Those “adjustments” have never been justified in any way. Nor has Gavin Schmidt, the man who heads GISS, ever done anything to correct them. Moreover, when his office was accused of this tampering in 2016 he not only refused to fix or justify the changes, he responded by claiming “planetary warming does not care about the election.” In the years since it has been his office that annually declares each year “the hottest on record,” using these tampered numbers to do so and demonstrating that he has been acting not as a real researcher but as a political operative of the global warming crowd.
Though the office lease is being canceled, GISS has not been shut down, as of now.
While NASA is terminating the lease on the GISS offices, it is not closing the institute itself. Lystrup said in the email that it will help employees move “to remote work agreements in the short-term as the agency seeks a new, permanent space for the team.”
I suspect this statement is merely designed by Trump officials to dampen the screams of opposition against its actions. It is very likely GISS is going away, and most of its employees will have to find new jobs.
The hope is that new scientists can be hired to review these tampered numbers and get them fixed so that climate research in the future can proceed with reliable data.
According to the budget data that was leaked anonymous last week, the Trump administration is proposing a major restructuring of NOAA’s satellite operations, shifting from building geosynchronous weather/climate satellites in partnership with NASA to focusing on buying weather data from commercial smallsats.
The plan would initially reduce NOAA’s program by two-thirds.
The document suggests NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) “immediately cancel all major instrument and spacecraft contracts on the GeoXO program,” saying the projected costs are “unstainable, lack support of Congress, and are out of step with international peers.”
GeoXO is a $19.6 billion program that includes six satellites and ground infrastructure to significantly enhance NOAA’s ability to monitor weather, map lightning, and track ocean and atmospheric conditions over decades. To maintain observations from geostationary orbit at the conclusion of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-R Series, the White House memo calls on NOAA to “immediately institute a major overhaul to lower lifecycle costs by 50 percent” with annual costs below $500 million, while remaining on schedule to launch the first satellite in 2032.
Rather than expanding the geostationary constellation to include satellites over the East, West and Central United States, the proposal includes only East and West satellites like the GOES-R Series. OMB also recommends an immediate end to NOAA relying on NASA to help it acquire weather satellites.
Maybe the most controversial recommendation calls for NOAA to focus on gathering daily weather data while ending its monitoring of long term ocean and atmospheric climate trends.
The shift from NOAA-built satellites to purchasing weather data from commercially launched and built satellites makes great sense, and is the most likely part of this plan to get implemented. Similarly, ending NOAA’s reliance on NASA will help streamline the fat from both agencies.
Whether the Trump administration can force an end to NOAA’s climate gathering operations is less clear. The politics suggest this will be difficult. The realities however suggest that a major house-cleaning in this area is in order, as there is ample evidence that the scientists running this work have been playing games with the data, manipulating it in order to support their theories of human-caused global warming.
