Solar Wind at a Minimum...

NASA held a news conference earlier this week, and this was the main topic:

The intensity of the sun's million-mile-per-hour solar wind has dropped to its lowest levels since accurate records began half a century ago...

The data they're talking about comes from the Ulysses spacecraft, which has long been in orbit around the sun.

There's much more to the story than just this carefully crafted statement from NASA, however. The solar wind they're referring to is “blown” outward from the sun by the pressure of the sun's radiation. The only reason why the solar wind would have diminished is because the sun's radiation output has diminished – which we already know from other measurments. So in that sense this new piece of data is completely unsurprising, but still useful as confirmation.

NASA gets a significant part of its funding as science grants, independently from the space program funding. The science grant gravy train has never been as magnificent as it has during these days of anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) fears. So NASA, for years now, has been very careful to craft its public presentations in such a way as to support AGW fears – they've got a lot of money riding on that. This week's press conference was a real problem for the message crafters, though, because you don't have to be particularly bright to figure out that if there's good evidence that the sun's radiation output is declining, then hey, that might just have something to do with the fact that the planet has been cooling for several years.

And if the planet is now cooling because the sun's radiation is lower, then perhaps the planet might have been warming earlier because the sun's radiation was increasing back then.

And maybe all this AGW talk is just a bunch of hooey.

But NASA doesn't like that answer very much, because then there's much less reason to fund all their AGW-related programs so lavishly.

Oops.