In Cecil’s article, “When’s the best time to see the aurora borealis?”, Cecil states:
But the column was written December 6, 1974. That left enough time for 2 complete 11-year cycles before 2001, no matter where the sun happened to be when the article was written.
Here’s the chart showing when the maximums actually happened: File:Solar-cycle-data.png - Wikipedia The sun was already getting pretty close to a 3rd maximum in 2000.
*** Ponder
Don’t forget that columns are often updated for release in books and stuff. It would take somebody of really low intelligence not to be able to add 22 to the current year.
Still, even with this being updated in 199x, the fact that the maximum was going to be in 2000 does suggest that Cecil goofed by forgetting that the millennium would start in 2001. But that is not a math error.
The online column must have been updated somewhere along the way but not very recently. In my dead-tree copy of the book (printed in 1989) the passage reads “Unfortunately, that won’t happen again until 1990 or so.”
Last I heard, we are missing almost all the sunspots for the current cycle. (Minimum was 2007 or so?) Last time that happened, in the 1600’s, the weather took a turn for the worse for a few centuries. Anyone notice the last 2 summers have been pretty miserable unless you live on the west coast?
