A SUMMER WITHOUT SUNSPOTS: Could northern summer 2019 go down in history as "the summer without sunspots"? From June 21st until Sept 22nd, the sun was blank more than 89% of the time. During the entire season only 6 tiny sunspots briefly appeared, often fading so quickly that readers would complain to Spaceweather.com, "you've labeled a sunspot that doesn't exist!" (No, it just disappeared.) Not a single significant solar flare was detected during this period of extreme quiet.

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Full story @ spaceweather link

So does this mean we're doomed?

I think not but I could be wrong. It's certainly a deep minimum on century timescales but it's not yet as deep as the Dalton or Maunder minima...

There is a possible cooling effect from increased cloud cover (and, hence, planetary albedo) caused by the increased cosmic ray flux leading to an increase in cloud condensation nuclei and that could, possibly, mitigate a fraction of the current greenhouse warming - but I guess not all of the stages and influences are known to the required accuracy in current climate models.

It remains an interesting observation though and will, no doubt, help future understanding of solar dynamical chaos.

Anecdotally it's been a cool summer in Ontaro. Pleasantly so

Not so happy for farmers

snip

Spring of 2019 was clearly frustrating to be a corn grower. Frequent rains and cool weather delayed planting for large parts of Ontario. A significant amount of corn was planted into June (Figure 1.), and many fields tasseled in early to mid-August, later then the middle to late July we normally expect. Naturally, the common question now is what are the risks to this late planted corn?

http://fieldcropnews.com/2019/09/ontari ... er-2-2019/

Seems Europe got the heat waves this year.

Toronto is in for a wetter than usual summer this year
https://www.blogto.com/city/2019/05/tor ... ummer-year
In its 2019 summer forecast, released this week, The Weather Network states that the region will almost definitely see cooler temperatures throughout the summer than it did last year,

THat's usually an El Nino pattern ,have not looked at enso lately

Cosmic ray fluxes to Earth have been monitored continuously since the mid 1960s at a station in Finland. As this Solar cycle continues to deepen, the daily flux from that site approaches record levels and is now posted graphically in the spaceweather.com left margin.

Cosmic Rays

Solar minimum is underway. The sun's magnetic field is weak, allowing extra cosmic rays into the solar system. Neutron counts from the University of Oulu's Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory show that cosmic rays reaching Earth in 2019 are near a Space Age peak.

In 2019 the sun had more spotless days (281) than any year since 1913 (311) - a list is available here and the 2019 figure is from todays' space weather.com:

Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 4 days
2019 total: 281 days (77%)
2018 total: 221 days (61%)
2017 total: 104 days (28%)
2016 total: 32 days (9%)
2015 total: 0 days (0%)
2014 total: 1 day (<1%)
2013 total: 0 days (0%)
2012 total: 0 days (0%)
2011 total: 2 days (<1%)
2010 total: 51 days (14%)
2009 total: 260 days (71%)
2008 total: 268 days (73%)
2007 total: 152 days (42%)
2006 total: 70 days (19%)
Updated 31 Dec 2019

I don't know why the two lists don't tally.

I'm also not going to predict any further doom and gloom but if current trends in human societal behaviour continue I'd expect the 2020 Nobel Prize for medicine to go to a homeopathist.