UPDATE: Even the Huffington Post is now allowing doubts about global warming to be posted. Wonders will never cease.
The global warming discussion has drawn attention to the sunspot cycle, which seems to be approaching a Maunder Minimum. This is a possible explanation for the warming and cooling cycles that have affected the earth for at least 250,000 years and possibly for millions of years.
Now, a new phenomenon that is probably related has been discovered. The Solar Wind is decreasing.
“The average pressure of the solar wind has dropped more than 20% since the mid-1990s,” says Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “This is the weakest it’s been since we began monitoring solar wind almost 50 years ago.”
The measurement of Solar Wind is a recent development of the Space Age.
“What we’re seeing is a long term trend, a steady decrease in pressure that began sometime in the mid-1990s,” explains Arik Posner, NASA’s Ulysses Program Scientist in Washington DC.
How unusual is this event?
“It’s hard to say. We’ve only been monitoring solar wind since the early years of the Space Age—from the early 60s to the present,” says Posner. “Over that period of time, it’s unique. How the event stands out over centuries or millennia, however, is anybody’s guess. We don’t have data going back that far.”
Another event has occurred that may add more information about what is happening. The Voyager spacecraft are about to leave the Heliosphere. They are very close to the limits and the Heliosphere is shrinking as the Solar Wind loses strength.
Some of most dramatic effects of the phenomenon may be felt by NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft. After traveling outward for 30+ years, the two probes are now at the edge of the heliosphere. With the heliosphere shrinking, the Voyagers may soon find themselves on the outside looking in, thrust into interstellar space long before anyone expected. No spacecraft has ever been outside the heliosphere before and no one knows what the Voyagers may find there.
The phenomenon we are witnessing may be far more important than global warming, which has been grossly exaggerated for political reasons.