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.
» Read more
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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The French Guiana spaceport. The Diamant launchsite is labeled “B.”
Click for full resolution image. (Note: The Ariane-5 pad is now the
Ariane-6 pad.)
France’s space agency CNES, which has taken back management from Arianespace of the French Guiana spaceport it owns, has now been found liable for destroying a protected habitat as it began construction to upgrade the old abandoned Diamant rocket launch site into a pad for several of Europe’s new commercial rocket startups.
In March 2022, the regional environmental authority of French Guiana (DGTM) formally informed CNES that it could not begin demolition or earthworks at the Diamant site without first securing the legally required species and water-law authorisations. Despite this, the agency leveled the area in the preceding weeks, with the environmental NGO CERATO discovering the destruction in April 2022.
In August 2022, the DGTM carried out an unannounced inspection of the Diamant site and found further destruction of protected habitats linked to the agency’s PV2 solar farm project. In October 2022, the PV2 project manager informed DGTM that CNES had known about the presence of protected species on the PV2 site since 1 July 2022, yet began earthworks anyway.
In response to repeated flouting of DGTM procedures, the Prefect of French Guiana, the top regional authority, issued a stop-work order requiring CNES to halt all works at both sites.
It appears this stop-work order has contributed to delays in construction. The news now is that the case appears to have been settled.
The agency has been ordered to repair the damage within three years or face a fine of €50,000. It will also be required to finance ecological compensation actions elsewhere on the grounds of the Guiana Space Centre. The conclusion of the lawsuit will allow the agency to fully resume construction at the site, which it had been ordered to stop in late 2022.
In other words, CNES has been told to spend money elsewhere at the spaceport to make the local environmental authorities happy. It remains unclear how these delays have or even will impact the plans of the Spanish rocket startup PLD, which hopes to do the first orbital launch of its Miura-5 rocket from this site in 2026. PLD expects the first flight-worthy Miura-5 to be delivered to French Guiana early next year, so the delays in French Guiana have not yet effected its plans. That might now change if the site won’t be ready as planned.
This whole story however does indicate a fundamental problem within all of Europe’s space regulatory infrastructure that in the future is likely to hinder the development of its new commercial space industry. Europe’s leadership likes its red tape, and has done nothing to reduce it as it has shifted from the government-run model (where it controls and owns everything) to the capitalism model (where it buys what it needs from an independent competing private sector).
Chicken Little strikes again!
It appears several local politicians as well as the typical anti-everything activists are expressing opposition to Blue Origin’s request to renew its permit to dump waste water at its Florida launch facility.
Some county commissioners have concerns about the proposal because of how much money and effort has gone to cleaning up the Indian River. “That’s really troubling to me especially when we are spending so much money as a community on the half-cent sales tax and the save the Indian River Lagoon tax,” said Brevard County Commissioner Katie Delaney.
Space experts say large-scale companies don’t necessarily follow rules and regulations put on them. “There has been all sorts of industrial waste issues associated with the aerospace industry not just here in Florida but all across the country,” Florida Tech space professor, Don Platt, said.
The water is likely that used during launches to dampen the shock produced by the rocket’s engines, and like SpaceX’s systems, is almost certainly potable and harmless. This is also a permit that Blue Origin obtained five years ago and has used without harm during all its launchpad tests and launches.
None of this whining really matters, as it appears the county commission has no authority over the matter. The permit was issued by the state’s environmental department which will almost certainly approve the renewal. It is just unfortunate that these whiners almost always get positive coverage from our propaganda press. In this case the local Fox affiliate that reported the story clearly made no effort to research anything. It just simply spouted back the grumbles of these politicians and activists.
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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Figure 2.1-1 of the final environmental assessment report
The Space Force on October 10, 2025 announced it has now finalized and approved the environmental assessment that will permit SpaceX’s to increase its launch rate at Vandenberg to as much as 100 times per year.
The DAF [Air Force] has decided to increase the annual Falcon launch cadence at VSFB [Vandenberg] through launch and landing operations at SLC-4 and SLC-6 [the two SpaceX launchpads], including modification of SLC-6 for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles to support future U.S. Government and commercial launch service needs. The overall launch cadence will increase from 50 Falcon 9 launches per year at SLC-4 to up to 100 launches per year for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy at both SLCs combined. Falcon Heavy, which has not previously launched from VSFB, would launch and land up to five times per year from and at SLC-6. The DAF will authorize SpaceX to construct a new hangar south of the HIF [SpaceX’s horizontal integration facility] and north of SLC-6 to support Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy integration and processing.
You can read the full environmental assessment here [pdf]. The map to the right, from the assessment, shows the location at Vandenberg of the two SpaceX launch sites. SLC-4 (pronounced “slick-four”) is the pad SpaceX has been using for years to launch Falcon 9s. SLC-6 was originally built for the space shuttle but never used for that purpose. Subsequently ULA leased it to launch its Delta family of rockets. When that rocket was retired SpaceX won the lease to reconfigure the site for both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches.
The Space Force apparently decided to ignore the objections of the California Coastal Commission as well as a number of anti-Musk leftwing activist groups. And its decision is well grounded in facts. The report documents at length the lack of any consequential environmental impacts from the increase of launches, which is further supported by almost three quarters of a century of actual use.
The decision is also well founded in basic American culture and law. The Space Force as a government agency must act as a servant of the American people, in this case represented by the private company SpaceX. It must therefore do whatever it can to aid and support that company, not put up roadblocks because it doesn’t like what the company proposes.
At least under Trump, this is the approach the Space Force is taking. I fear what will happen if a Democrat regains the presidency, based on the radical and enthused communist make-up of that party today.
