This is

is CBS I in the world. I'm John Baster.

Bob Zimmerman, he keeps the website behind the black.

We're going exploring to the surface of a star that is very important. We call it the

sun. It's a yellow dwarf. I'm told, don't use the word dwarf, but that's what it is. It'll

last billions of years more, and we don't know much

about it. We do know that now and again sunspots appear, and Bob Zimmerman keeps track of them and comes up with interpretations of what it means.

Bob, lots of sunspots, are we all going to die?

Yes, but that's always been the case. you know, we shouldn't panic.

However, I say do these Sunspot updates, what I'm doing is I'm taking the NOAA upgrade

update of its own monthly graph of the SunS South cycle and

we are presently ramping up to maximum and what happened in July they just released

the August upgrade update and that shows what happened in July.

And what did happen in July is that the sun produced more sunspots on its surface, on its

earth facing hemisphere in the month of July of this year

more sunspots than we've seen in almost a quarter century. The last time the sun produced

this many sunspots in a month was back in December 2001.

That's not the last maximum. That's the maximum before that. The maximum in between never came even close to this. Now what's

interesting about this is the prediction by the solar sciences community on what

would happen in this maximum, what they thought was going to happen and I've got graphs on behind the black to show that and I discuss it at length because it really tells us a great deal not only of how little we know about the sun but the nature of science itself and how we mustn't

can see scientists as seers who can see the future they are as much in the

dark as we are in this case much in the dark as we are.

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