I've rarely been accused of being dense, but like everything else human I am sometimes slow on the uptake. Which is just to say it took me an embarrassingly long time to make the connection between two of my recent papers: the one on Solar Minimum and the one on my personal health. In the latter, I listed four possible reasons for my malaise, but Solar Minimum was not one of them. I have now added it to the list, and I am about to tell you why.
To start with, we are in a surpassingly deep and long Solar Minimum, which some scientists are calling a Grand Solar Minimum. And we are coming off a Solar Cycle that was weak to begin with. That is, the last Solar Maximum was weak itself. So Solar activity has been feeble since about 2002. There is nothing to fear in this: I have shown it is simply a matter of the positions of the four Jovian planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). The Sun is not dying, no matter what you may have read in the media. But the short-term effects are very real nonetheless. You don't need to fear an apocalypse, but getting through the next year may be stressful for many of us. If you have felt enervated for the past year, you are likely to continue to do so for many months. Not until 2020 will things pick up, Sunwise.
