Originally posted October 20, 2004

Give me a break!

I hear now the board that’s used in a classroom can’t be called a black board or a white board. From what I understand, it’s derogatory to blacks or to whites if you use that kind of descriptive words – it’s either chalk board or marker board.

I guess it’s a good thing that there’s not anyone that might be traumatized by the use of the words chalk or marker.

I don’t know what you would call the boards then.

And I guess we’re supposed to call flip charts something other than that because flip is a word that is offensive to Filipinos.

Granted, it’s not right to use a word in a derogatory manner like that when using it to refer to an ethnic group.

However, when did black become a derogatory term for blacks and white become a derogatory term for whites?

What am I supposed to call a back flip or flipping a burger (or the finger)?

Sometimes some peoples’ ideas of what is politically correct are just so retarded! ¹

Oh! sorry!

I meant, so MR!

What’s MR?

I understand it’s the politically correct term for mentally retarded.

I guess it’s politically okay to use an abbreviation in this case because they, the MR, can’t spell.

Give me a break!

Our society is carrying politically correctness to ridiculous extremes. Yes, we need to be sensitive to what is hurtful to others.

However, sometimes the folks that think these things up need a reality check.

1. Around the 1960s, “retard” and “retarded” began to be commonly used in place of “moron”, “idiot”, “cretin,” and “imbecile,” – terms that were perceived to be offensive. Since then, the terms “handicapped” (United States) and “disabled” (United Kingdom) have replaced “retard” and “retarded.” The term “mental retardation,” written in many of the United States’ laws and documents, with the approval of Rosa’s Law, will be phased out with “intellectual disability” replacing it. – Wikipedia (accessed June 15, 2019)

Publication history:

• October 20, 2004 – original publication on North Farnham Freeholder
• February 26, 2011 – Recovered from my abandoned North Farnham Freeholder blog at the Internet Archive WayBackMachine and saved to original publication date on Exit78
• June 15, 2019 – Updated and republished

Popular Song of the Week

Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival

Some events of the week

• June 8 – President Nixon announces that 25,000 American troops will be withdrawn from the Vietnam War by the end of September.
• June 9 – Republican President Nixon’s nominee Warren E. Burger is confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by the Democrat-dominated United States Senate, 74 to 3.
• June 10 – A column of Soviet troops and tanks crosses the border from the Kazakh SSR (now the nation of Kazakhstan) into the Xinjiang autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China, moving through the Yumin, and shots are exchanged between Chinese borders guards and the invaders.
• June 11 – The first trip by sled across the Arctic Ocean is successfully concluded on the Norwegian island of Vesle Tavleøya after starting at Point Barrow Alaska on February 21, 1968.
• June 12 – For the first time in history, part of Niagara Falls is “turned off” for repairs and geological study for preservation of American Falls.
• June 13 – The “Amen break“, a 6-second drum solo that would become “the most sampled musical track of all time,” is recorded for the first time.
• June 14 – Dr. Joseph Weber announces the first detection and measurement proving the existence of gravitational waves, postulated by  Albert Einstein in 1916 as part of his general theory of relativity.

Be careful what you ask for.

In October 2004, near the end of the U.S. presidential election, I wrote, “Protest votes are meaningless, worthless, and wasted. They do not make a difference!”

That election was between George W. Bush and John Kerry, with Ralph Nader as a third party candidate, trailing far behind.

In November, Nader received 463,655 votes, for 0.38 percent of the popular vote, placing him in third place overall. Those who voted for him in this election made no difference in the end result of the election.

However, the election of George W. Bush, four years earlier in 2000, may have come down to votes that were neither cast for him nor his Democrat opponent, Al Gore, but, rather, to a minor party candidate, Ralph Nader – votes that were cast in a single state – Florida, which turned out to be that election’s tipping point state.

On election day , November 7, 2000, between 7:50 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. EST, all major television news networks (CNN, NBC, FOX, CBS, and ABC) declared that Gore had carried Florida’s 25 electoral votes – predictions primarily based on exit polls.  As actual vote totals came in through the night, the networks retracted their prediction when Bush began to take a wide lead.  Early in the morning of November 8, the networks declared Bush had carried Florida and had been elected president. With 85% of votes tallied and Bush ahead by over 100,000 votes, Gore privately conceded to Bush. By 4:30 a.m., with all of the votes in, Bush’s lead had dwindled to 2000.  The networks again retracted their predictions and Gore retracted his concession.

Without Florida’s 25 votes, Bush had 246 electoral votes and Gore had 250.  Wisconsin and Oregon were still too close to call, but their combined 18 electoral college votes were not enough to bring either candidate’s total up to 271 votes, the minimum need to win.  All interested eyes turned to Florida.

Florida’s results were close enough to trigger a mandatory machine recount under state law.  When completed, Bush’s lead had dropped to just 300 votes. Gore requested hand recounts, as provided under Florida State law, of Broward, Miami Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia counties ballots.

A five-week battle ensued over the ballots, rules, law, and courts.

When the recount dust settled, George Bush had defeated Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes.  Gore got Wisconsin and Oregon, but Florida put Bush over the top by one electoral college vote.

An election spoiler?

Ralph Nader had received 97,421 votes in Florida.  Several studies suggest that Nader’s participation was a critical factor in Bush’s victory, that Nader voters’ profiles more closely matched those of Democratic voters and, in the absence of Nader’s candidacy, those voters would have been more likely to vote for Gore than Bush.

A few thousand less “protest votes” for Nader might have placed Al Gore in the White House.

The background for the Final Results Electoral Map image is a butterfly ballot from Palm Beach County, Florida. (link accessed June 13, 2019)

What is required when the traffic light turns to yellow?

There is a bit of misinformation online about what the actual requirements are. A number of websites that I’ve reviewed say that you can receive a traffic ticket if a traffic light turns red while you are driving through the intersection. In most of the United States, this isn’t true.

The laws governing when a driver may enter an intersection on a yellow traffic light aren’t the same in every state.  Most states have a permissive yellow traffic light law, while others have a restrictive yellow law, of which there are two variations.¹

Permissive Yellow Law

• • A driver can enter the intersection during the entire yellow interval and be in the intersection during the red indication as long as the vehicle entered the intersection during the yellow interval. Under permissive yellow law, an all-red clearance interval must exist as a timing parameter to ensure safe right-of-way transfer at an intersection.

Restrictive Yellow Law

• • In one variation, a vehicle may not enter an intersection when the indication is yellow unless the vehicle can clear the intersection by the end of yellow.
  • In the other variation, a vehicle may not enter an intersection unless it is impossible or unsafe to stop.

After Yellow

After the yellow light, there is sometimes a time period – called the “red clearance interval” – between the time that the red light comes on and when the green light comes on for cross traffic to move.

Some Yellows are shorter than others

The Institution of Transportation Engineers has an equation for determining how long a yellow change light should be on.

So what does a driver do when the light turns yellow?

Do I stop or do I continue on through?  The area where you may be undecided is called by some the “dilemma zone” and it’s where thousands of crashes occur each year in the United States.

Eight states have restrictive yellow laws. In those states, if you are in the intersection when the light turns red, you can be ticketed for breaking the law – and you might be caught by a red-light camera. The restrictive states are Iowa, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oregon, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

In those states, if you can stop without hard braking, then stop when the lights go from green to yellow.  If you can’t, then continue on through the intersection – there shouldn’t be a need to accelerate.

Even in the other states, that’s probably a prudent approach.

1. Traffic Signal Timing Manual – Office of Operations, Federal Highway Administration (accessed June 10, 2019) This document has been superseded by a later edition, but the descriptions for the yellow law aren’t as good in it.

A Beginning

My first blog post was in 2004, almost 15 years go. It was a beginning.  I had no idea if it was something I would keep doing.¹

Sometimes my blogging has been sporadic.  Other times, it’s no more than sharing an image.  But, I’ve never stopped doing it

A huge number of blogs started up both before and after I did.  Most  no longer exist in any form, other than, perhaps, the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine.² While most of the blogs I used to follow no longer exist, some continue, with varying frequencies of posting. A few post daily.

A Renewal

I’ve started going through some of my old blog posts, many of which have problems.  I’m going to cleanup and, probably, repost an updated version of some of the better ones.  For these, I’ll have a redirect on the old post to send visitors to the new posts.

I’ll also cleanup some of the clutter.  When, and if, I get done, I’ll probably have quite a bit less than the 2700 posts that are currently listed as published.

Some of the earlier posts have no images or images that could be improved. On some posts, original images have gone missing.  Some of the “cleanup’” may be no more than adding a relevant image or two or replacing missing or less than optimum images.

1. That first blog post was on Blogger. The blog was called Skedaddle’s blog and was posted on Blogger on a blogspot.com domain. I didn’t care much for Blogger and looked at a number of different options, eventually settling for blogging using WordPress self-hosted.  Sometime in 2011, after I dropped that URL, someone else picked it up, using it for a blog that has a grand total of 3 posts, all of them in 2011.
2. I’ve used the WayBackMachine to retrieve quite a few posts that were lost for one reason or another, including those that were on my original blog.

September 2004

I don’t know which one I should be angry at, my friend or that damn doctor.

My friend didn’t take care of herself. On the surface she was a laid-back, easy-going person, seemingly without a care in the world – everyone’s friend. Yet very few of the people who knew her really knew how sick she was… and how depressed she was.

Several years ago she had heart related surgery. I don’t remember exactly what.

She didn’t take care of herself the way that heart patients are supposed to and had to have another operation.

She still didn’t take care of herself. Her health deteriorated.

We had met her and her husband when we joined a mixed league for bowling many years earlier. They were also just starting in the league and ended up being our bowling partners – and friends – for years.

As her health deteriorated, she was no longer able to bowl. Her husband stayed on the team, but another lady took our friend’s place.

Our friend developed diabetes, and didn’t take care of herself.

She was everyone’s friend, but very few people really knew her.

Part of the reason she didn’t see a doctor was that she knew she would be told that she would have to have more surgery. They still had debt from the previous surgeries. Her husband was self-employed and they didn’t have insurance.

She didn’t want to build up more debt.

She didn’t take care of herself.

She had suffered for years from depression.

A sore – a blister – developed on one of her feet.

She didn’t take care of herself.

The sore didn’t heal.

After several weeks she finally decided she had to see a doctor.

The sore had developed into something worse. She was a diabetic and had not taken care of herself.

The doctor was not a doctor she had seen before. It seems that whenever she would go to see a doctor, it would be someone different.

The doctor – I don’t know his name, and I’m not sure that I want to know his name – apparently really laid into her when he saw the condition of her foot.

He asked her – practically accusing her – if she was an alcoholic, an addict, if she was on meth.

He told her that the sore had developed into gangrene and that they probably wouldn’t be able to save her foot or her leg, and, “oh-by-the-way, you might lose your other foot, too.”

Years before, a lady that our friend knew had been hospitalized from complications arising from diabetes. She had a lot of problems, including the loss of both legs, before she died after a lingering illness.

Our friend didn’t want that to happen to her.

Our friend disappeared.

She was missing for two days.

Two days was the waiting period for a handgun.

________

I miss my friend, especially on Wednesdays, like today. On Wednesdays we go bowling.

My friend didn’t take care of herself. I miss her and I’m angry.

I don’t know which one I should be angry at, my friend or that damn doctor.

________

October 2007

I’m not angry any more. I just reflect on how unfortunate it all was.

Unfortunate that she didn’t take care of herself.

Unfortunate that the doctor wasn’t more humane in her instance.

Unfortunate for her husband who has had a host of problems in the time that’s passed.

Unfortunate for the poor soul that found her body.

________

June 2019

It’s been 15 years.

We think of her and her husband on occasion.  He remarried.  His new wife was a strange person, not like our friend at all.  He had difficulties both legal and financial over the years.  We haven’t seen him  in years.

I know of at least one doctor that was as uncaring about women and their health problems as the last doctor she saw. I don’t know if it was him, but I  can certainly imagine it.

The original of this article was one of my earliest blog posts, published September 15, 2004.  I republished it again, with some new thoughts at the end, on October 8, 2007.  Our friend died 15 years ago this month, so it’s appropriate to revisit and include a little at the end.

The previous posts redirect to this new one.

Hippie Group Walking on a Countryside Road¹

At the end of one of the most tumultuous and divisive decades in history, the summer of 1969, fifty years ago, has been called amazing, transformative, and historic. It was the time of counter culture, flower power and the sexual revolution – of baby boomers and the rejection or redefinition of traditional values.  In the later part of a period where America “tuned in, turned on, dropped out, grew up, woke up, blew up,”¹ 1969 saw, among other things,

• the first manned landing on the moon,
• the Manson family infamous murders of 8 people,
• Senator Ted Kennedy’s accident on Chappaquiddick Island and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne,
• the Woodstock music festival,
• President Nixon’s battle with a growing anti-war movement while the undeclared war in Vietnam and neighboring countries continued to rage,
• a first time reduction in forces there with the withdrawal of 25,000 troops, and
• in New York, the installation of the first ATM machine.

Except for that ATM in Rockville Center, New York, I remember all of them.

It was the summer before my senior year in high school.  My mom, step-dad, sister, and I lived in a small, very dilapidated house in Beaumont Place,  just outside and northeast of the city limits of Houston, Texas. Hot and sweltering,³ daily high temperatures were usually in the upper 90s as was humidity, often reaching 100% – and we didn’t have air conditioning!

That summer of ‘69 was so different in many ways from the world of today.

Our one telephone wasn’t really ours. It was actually the property of the local phone company, in our case, Southwestern Bell, part of the AT&T monopoly of phone systems in the United States and Canada.  Local calls were free, but any outside our immediate area – long distance calls – added charges to the monthly bill.  Cellular phones hadn’t been developed yet, though they had been proposed nearly 20 years earlier.  Federal regulations severely limited the radio frequencies that portable phone communications could use, so there was little motivation to develop the technology.

We only received the three local network stations on our single small color television. Cable TV wasn’t available for us and development  of consumer satellite TV had only just been proposed.⁴ Video recorders weren’t yet practical for the home market. Systems for playing games on televisions had yet to be developed, though a patent was filed that summer that would be part of the Magnavox Odyssey.⁵

During that long ago summer , we watched a lot of television – prime time shows in the evening, of course, but also daytime game shows, old reruns – Andy Griffith, I Love Lucy, etc. – and even soaps.⁶ And, of course, the news, where we saw reporting on the Apollo 11 mission, the continuing tragedy of the monster “police action” in southeast Asia, and the horrors that the Manson “family” committed in California. Like so many, we watched the live broadcast of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon.

So far as music, all we had was radio.  I don’t recall a phonograph or cassette tape player and we certainly didn’t have one of the 8-track tape players that were all the rage then.

Popular songs that summer included:

• Get Back (Beatles),
• In the Year 2525 (Zager and Evans),
• Aquarius/Let the Sunshine in (The 5th Dimension),
• Honky Tonk Women (The Rolling Stones),
• Sugar, Sugar (“The Archies”⁷),
• Crystal Blue Persuasion (Tommy James & The Shondells),
• My Cherie Amour (Stevie Wonder),
• Spinning Wheel (Blood, Sweat & Tears),
• Bad Moon Rising (Credence Clearwater Revival),
• Sweet Caroline (Neil Diamond),
• One (Three Dog Night),
• Good Morning Starshine (Oliver),
• In the Ghetto (Elvis Presley)

At 17 years old in ‘69, I was a smoker; had been since the year before when I got hooked using cigarettes to light 4th-of-July fireworks.  At that time, “tobacco firms were the single largest product advertisers on television”⁸ and their ads were just as extensive in print media.

Beaumont Place was not at all “racially” diverse in 1969.  A lower income unincorporated neighborhood 2 miles northeast of the Houston city limit, education was provided by Sheldon Independent School District (SISD).  In the 60s Texas oil economy, the population of Houston and the surrounding Harris County communities boomed.  The 1970 census would show the county to be made up of about 70% Anglos, 20% blacks, 10% Hispanics, and a negligible percentage of  Asians/other. Sheldon district, at nearly one tenth the area of Houston, was virtually 100% Anglo, with no black students and a very small number of Hispanics and Asians.

Transportation opportunities were pretty limited. We had one vehicle, a 1961 Plymouth station wagon not quite on its last legs, mainly used by my step-dad to get to and from work. The nearest metro bus stop was 6 miles away.  I did a lot of walking, mainly to and from Arthur’s, a small grocery store just a few blocks from home, where I had a part-time job at $1.30 an hour.⁹

I had some vague ideas about my future.

I always knew I was destined for college, though I didn’t have a clue how I would be able to afford it.  With all the body bags coming back from the Southeast Asia conflict, I had no interest in the military.  However, universal male draft was the law and the military decision might be made for me unless I had a  student deferment.

I wanted more out of life than what we had in that rundown Beaumont Place house, was more interested in a conventional middle class life than counter culture and flower power.  Dropping out was not an option for me in this Age of Aquarius.¹⁰   Somehow, I knew, I was going to have get an education or work experience that could lead to some sort of career.

Before all that, though, I had another year of high school to get through.

A lot has changed in 50 years.

I left Texas the last week of 1971 and have only been back to Harris County five times – twice in 1972 and then once each in 1973, 1986, and 2016.

The house we lived in that summer of 1969 has long been gone.  Arthur’s store, shuttered for many years, was also torn down in the last few years.¹¹

Sheldon school district is now the fastest growing district in the ten county Greater Houston metropolitan area.¹²  As of 2016, the ethnic mix in C.E. King High School was about 67% Hispanic, 26% black, and 7% white. From about 450 in grades 9 to 12 in 1969, the school’s enrollment was relatively stable from about 1990 to 2004 at under 1200 students, but has since grown to over 2100 students with 142 teachers.¹³

A huge change over the last 50 years has been how households are connected to the outside world.  AT&T’s telephone monopoly was broken up January 1, 1984 following a ten year anti-trust legal battle and less than 2 years after  commercial cellular phone service was authorized by the Federal Communications Commission in 1982.  Now, instead of a landline phone like we had in 1969, half of all households in the U.S. don’t have one, instead relying on cellphones.  Smartphones are found in more than 84% of homes and 80% have at least one laptop or desktop computer. A third of U.S. households have three or more smartphones.  Unlimited nationwide calling is standard for most cellular phone plans, but long-distance calling charges are still imposed on landline phone calls outside of one’s local calling area.¹⁴

Personal entertainment, too, has changed enormously beyond the basic TVs and AM/FM radios of 1969.  Cable and satellite providers deliver a wide variety of programming to home televisions that are of physical sizes unimagined in 1969.  Video rental stores, which didn’t even exist in 1969, have been supplanted  by streaming services that deliver TV series and movies on demand whenever viewers choose rather than at a scheduled broadcast time. Libraries of books and music can be contained on small devices that can fit in a pocket or purse.  And all of this is without talking much about that wonder of the modern world, the Internet, a modest form of which was achieved in 1969 with ARPANET, the interconnection of four university computers developed under the direction of the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).¹⁵

Having started smoking when I was 16, I was finally, after many, many attempts, able to stop in 1982,  just after I turned 30. Since Congress banned the airing of cigarette advertising in 1971, along with other measures designed to curtail tobacco usage, cigarette smoking by adults has steadily dropped.  In 1965, 42.4% of U.S. adults smoked.  By 2014, the rate had dropped to 16.8%.  “Public health officials are hoping to to drive that rate below 12 percent by 2020.”¹⁶

Still living in Beaumont Place after high school, transportation difficulties continued after I enrolled at the University of Houston. I eventually stopped attending classes part way through my second semester in the spring of 1971.¹⁷  The Vietnam war was still in progress as was the draft.  The order of calling men for induction in the service had been changed in 1969 from the “draft the oldest man first” method to a lottery. The lottery that applied to me was drawn on August 5, 1971.  My number was in the mid 200s, so it was very unlikely that I would be drafted.  I wasn’t going to need that college military draft deferral.

Late in 1971, while job hunting, I happened to see military recruiter offices in a shopping center in Baytown.  With the war still in progress, I had no interest in anything that might involve being on the ground in a war zone, so the only recruiter offices I stopped in were Air Force and Navy. The Navy guy had a brochure for a program that sounded interesting – nuclear power – and sea duty billets on submarines.

I had found a way to get work experience that did lead to a career.

1. Photo credit: william87 /Canva Pro
2. 1969, The Year Everything Changed – by Rob Kirkpatrick, page xvii, Skyhorse Publishing Inc., Jan 24, 2011 (accessed June 4, 2019)
3. August 1969 – Weather Underground (accessed May 29, 2019)
4. Direct broadcast from satellite to home TV – Popular Science, September 1969 , page 22 (accessed June 2, 2019)
5. Computer history-1969 – Computer Hope (accessed June 5, 2019)
6. Soap opera – A soap opera is an ongoing drama serial on television or radio, featuring the lives of many characters and their familial, platonic and intimate relationships. The term soap opera originated from radio dramas being sponsored by soap manufacturers. (Wikipedia; accessed June 4, 2019)
7. “Sugar, Sugar” is one of 16 animated music segments created to be shown on “The Archie Comedy Hour” on CBS-TV in 1969. The single was released in 1969, backed with “Melody Hill,” and quickly rose to the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, where it remained for 4 weeks, giving The Archies their first gold record (“Jingle Jangle” was their second gold record), and becoming the #1 song for 1969 according to Billboard magazine.
8. Congress bans airing cigarette ads, April 1, 1970 – Politico, April 1, 2018 (accessed June 4, 2019)
9. Not a very motivated worker, I didn’t get as many hours as some of the other employees.
10. “…most published materials on the subject state that the Age of Aquarius arrived in the 20th century.” – Wikipedia (accessed June 6, 2019)
11. I’ve looked at both locations on Google Street View several times over the last ten years or more.  For most of that time, the spot where the house sat was and empty lot, but it has since been developed.  The building that once housed the store was demolished more recently, leaving an overgrown empty lot.
12. Sheldon Independent School District – Wikipedia (accessed June 7, 2019)
13. C E King High School – Public School Review (accessed June 7, 2019)
14. Is the Concept of Long Distance Still Relevant? – Colin Berkshire, TalkingPointz, October 1, 2013 (accessed June 8, 2019)
15. ARPANET – SearchNetworking – TechTarget (accessed June 7, 2019) “ARPANET was the network that became the basis for the Internet. Based on a concept first published in 1967, ARPANET was developed under the direction of the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
16. Who still smokes in the United States — in seven simple charts – November 12, 2015 by Brady Dennis, Washington Post (paywalled) (Accessed June 7, 2019)
17. I finished a bachelors years later, after I had spent nearly 9 years in the Navy and had subsequently gone to work in a related civilian field.

When I was a kid, summer was June, July and August – the months we were out of school – but we’re often told that the official start of summer is June 21st.  What’s the deal?

Simply, there are two different methods defining the seasons.

In temperate and subpolar regions, four seasons based on the Gregorian calendar are generally recognized. The dates for the seasons depend on whether one is talking about meteorological  seasons or astronomical seasons as well as where on Earth one is.

Meteorological seasons

In 1780, an early meteorological organization, the Societas Meteorologica Palatina, defined seasons as groupings of three whole months as identified by the Gregorian calendar. This definition has been used in meteorology ever since.

Astronomical seasons

In the astronomical timing of temperate seasons, summer and winter begin at the solstices,^{1, 2} while spring and fall begin at the equinoxes.³ 

Length of seasons

The meteorological seasons are well balanced in length.  In the northern hemisphere, spring and summer are 92 days each, autumn is 91 days, and winter is 90 days, except on leap years when it is 91.

Astronomical seasons, on the other hand, are not as exact because of the elliptical nature of the Earth’s orbit.  Again for the northern hemisphere, spring is currently 92.75 days, summer is 93.65 days, autumn is 89.85 days and winter is 88.99 days.

The timing of the equinoxes and solstices are not fixed to the calendar, shifting six hours later each year, accumulating one full day every four years, when they are reset with the addition of an extra day on leap years.

‘Tis the season! – stay cool!

Endnotes

1. either the shortest day of the year (winter solstice) or the longest day of the year (summer solstice) – Collins English Dictionary (accessed May 25, 2019)
2. Either of the two times in the year, the summer solstice and the winter solstice, when the sun reaches its highest or lowest point in the sky at noon, marked by the longest and shortest days. – Oxford Living Dictionaries (accessed May 25, 2019)
3. either of the two times each year (as about March 21 and September 23) when the sun crosses the equator and day and night are everywhere on earth of approximately equal length – Merriam-Webster (accessed May 25, 2019)

Approaching what is called solar minimum, the Sun’s average number of sun spots is dropping towards zero, with 54% of the days so far in 2019 spot free.

Sunspot numbers are visible evidence of overall solar activity. Some think that lower sunspot numbers over the last decade are indicative of the beginning of an extended period of lower solar activity and, potentially, a cooling of the Earth.

On average, there is an eleven year solar cycle where the Sun goes from a quiet mode, with almost no sunspots for extended periods, to an active mode, where multiple spots – some huge – rage on the surface of the Sun. Since tracking began in 1755, there have been 24 solar cycles, with the current cycle – cycle 24 – coming to a close as the number of spotless days rises. 

“Solar maximum and solar minimum refer respectively to periods of maximum and minimum sunspot counts. Cycles span from one minimum to the next.”¹

Over time, cycle length and solar activity have varied significantly.  Sunspot cycles have ranged from as little as 8 years to over 14.  Solar activity is currently dropping from an exceptionally high level that began in about 1940.  The last period of similar magnitude was 9,000 years ago during the Boreal age.²

While it’s been proposed, thought and suggested that variations in solar activity affect climate, the current “scientific consensus” is that solar variation is but a minor driver for global climate change, “since the measured magnitude of recent solar variation is much smaller than the forcing due to greenhouse gases.”³ Some scientists think that an extended dip in solar activity during a period named the Maunder Minimum, which lasted from around 1645 to about 1715, intensified the Little Ice Age, a cool period that began in about 1300 and ended around 1850.⁴ As well, a lower rate of warming from 1998 to 2012 compared to the previous two to three decades has been attributed, in part, to reduced solar activity – “relatively weak solar activity made a small contribution to slowing surface warming in the early part of the new century.”⁵

While some studies suggest that solar activity will continue to weaken for an extended period and may produce cooling that could partially offset “disastrous effects of human-induced global warming,” other studies indicate that solar activity may be stronger during the next solar cycle.⁶

American and international scientists on NOAA’s Solar Cycle Prediction Panel (SCPP) say that the decline in solar activity amplitude, seen from cycles 21 through 24, is ending, with no extended Maunder-type minimum expected.  The panel expects “Solar Cycle 25 will be very similar to Cycle 24: another fairly weak cycle.” Cycle 24 is declining to its end, with minimum expected within months. “Solar Cycle 25 may have a slow start, but is anticipated to peak with solar maximum occurring between 2023 and 2026” with an amplitude range of 95 to 130, “well below the average number of sunspots.” An official Sunspot Number prediction curve for Cycle 25 will be released later this year.⁷

The official prediction curve may likely be similar in format to the 2007 projection for Cycle 24, below.⁸

Nearing cycle minimum, Cycle 24’s progression curve, below, shows that the cycle’s smoothed curve double peaks were below both the high and low prediction curves.

Solar activity is now the lowest it has been in a century while the period from 1950 to 1995 “had the highest solar activity in perhaps 1000 years.” If the  SCPP’s forecast of a Cycle 25 similar to Cycle 24 is wrong, how low might future solar activity get?   “There are already suggestions that solar activity is moving towards a grand minimum along the lines of the Maunder Minimum, or perhaps a less severe one, like the Dalton Minimum (see Figure 2). Grand minima are by no means rare; they have likely occurred 7–9 times over the Holocene period (see, for example,Figure 7). It is therefore interesting to consider if the Sun is currently moving into a new grand minimum or just a period of low solar activity, and to think about the consequences for the Earth’s climate.”⁹

I’ve looked at sunspot status quite often over the duration of Cycle 24, usually at the beginning of each month when the when the sunspot number progression is updated, and have seen a number of different predictions of future climate impacts of changes in solar activity.  One hypothesis predicts a sustained and significant cooling that will lower global temperature in the 2020s to that which prevailed in the 1980s. Another suggests that solar activity will fall 60% in 2030 to ‘mini ice age’ levels.

There have been a lot of articles recently speculating about the potential for global cooling – as well as others rejecting the possibility.

My personal thoughts on the matter is that these are all forecasts and hypotheses.  We’ll likely not know for sure until whatever is going to happen is shown by empirical data to be already in progress.

1. Solar cycle definition – Wikipedia (accessed May 21, 2019)
2. Cycle history, “Sunspot numbers over the past 11,400 years have been reconstructed using Carbon-14-based dendroclimatology.” – Wikipedia (accessed May 22, 2019)
3. Climate, IPCC consensus on climate change – Wikipedia (accessed May 22, 2019)
4. No Global Cooling Miracle: Sun’s Activity Lull Will Stop Soon, Study Suggests – Space.com, December 7, 2018 (accessed May 22, 2019)
5. Did global warming stop in 1998? – NOAA’s Climate.gov, September 4, 2018 (accessed May 22, 2019)
6. Mini ice age ruled out – India Science Wire, December 7, 2018 (accessed May 23, 2019)
7. Solar experts predict the Sun’s activity in Solar Cycle 25 to be below average, similar to Solar Cycle 24 – National Weather Service, April 5, 2019 (accessed May 24, 2019)
8. NOAA Predicts Solar Cycle 24 – SpaceWeather.com, May 8, 2009 (accessed May 24, 2019)
9. Force Majeure, The Sun’s Role in Climate Change – Heinrik Svensmark, ©2019 The Global Warming Policy Foundation, pdf (accessed May 24, 2019)