“NASA’s Sunspot Prediction Roller Coaster“. Christmas Guest pudding from Ira Glickstein about NASA’s solar cycle predictions, who concludes with a statement that might have been a helpful opening sentence: “I am not any kind of expert on Sunspots”.

The current solar cycle has proven unusually quiet and probably influenced by anomalies in 2003, making NASA’s predictions, based primarily on observed geomagnetic precursors, erratic. Those stupid scientists, thinking that their careful observations and analysis would be any match for a crank with Excel on his PC!

Glickstein thinks that after the publicity for the Algore film An Inconvenient Truth solar scientists “felt pressured to please their colleagues and superiors by predicting a Sunspot doozy that would presage a doozy of a warm spell.” That is the dumbest conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard of.

Ira Glickstein's amateur assessment of NASA's sunspot prediction. What data is the amusing dramatic blue trend showing? None. What a mess.