The sunspot record is the oldest, unbroken, and most broadly testable body of scientific knowledge that we have as a species. From the invention of the telescope, anyone, anywhere on Earth, could catalog the number, placement, and timing of sunspots. We know it’s good, we know it’s accurate.
So to sully it by taking a graph of sunspot data and just chopping up the Maunder Minimum and pasting it onto the future, as though we somehow “know” what’s going to happen, magically, in the future, is a calumny of the highest order. We have no fucking clue what’s going to happen. We can get a broad idea, based on the current location of planets within the Sun’s magnetosphere with respect to their placement in previous supercycles, sure. But we don’t know. We have no clue how long a future minimum will last nor how it will look, but the chart above just copies and pastes. It should be removed solely for that.
I really don’t like that chart, since it’s copying and pasting the old observations and claiming they’ll magically happen again.
It's just forecasting Tallest; weathermen do it all the time and they are right a good 33% of the time ;)
The sunspot record is the oldest, unbroken, and most broadly testable body of scientific knowledge that we have as a species. From the invention of the telescope, anyone, anywhere on Earth, could catalog the number, placement, and timing of sunspots. We know it’s good, we know it’s accurate.
So to sully it by taking a graph of sunspot data and just chopping up the Maunder Minimum and pasting it onto the future, as though we somehow “know” what’s going to happen, magically, in the future, is a calumny of the highest order. We have no fucking clue what’s going to happen. We can get a broad idea, based on the current location of planets within the Sun’s magnetosphere with respect to their placement in previous supercycles, sure. But we don’t know. We have no clue how long a future minimum will last nor how it will look, but the chart above just copies and pastes. It should be removed solely for that.