Sunspot inflation

An interesting post at Watts Up With That regarding the "new" way to count sunspots (since around the 1850's). Sunspots are an indication of solar activity and the more sunspots, the more energy the sun is giving off (warming the Earth). From Dr. Leif Svalgaard:

Counting Sunspots and Sunspot Inflation
The official sunspot number is issued by SIDC in Brussels http://sidc.be/sunspot-data/. The [relative] sunspot number was introduced by Rudolf Wolf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Wolf in the middle of the 19th century. He called it the �relative� number because it is rather like an index instead of the actual number of spots on the Sun. Spots occur in groups [which we today call �active regions�] and Wolf realized that the birth of a new group was a much more significant event than the emergence of just a single new spot within a group, so he designed his index, R, [for any given day] to be a weighted sum of the number of spots, S, and the number of groups, G, giving the groups a weight of 10: R = S + 10*G. The number of 10 was chosen because on average a group contains about 10 spots, and also because it is a convenient number to multiply by.

This scale was fudged a bit, first by Wolf to adjust for different sizes of telescopes and then later by Wolf's successor, Alfred Wolfer. Wolfer did his adjustments during the 1870's and the two numbers ran concurrently for twenty years so a good correlation was developed. And now things get interesting:

Applying the same formula to data after 1945 gives us the lower panel. Under the assumption that the Sun did not know about Waldmeier we would expect the same relationship to hold, but in fact there is an abrupt change of the observed vs. the expected sunspot numbers between 1946 and 1947 of [you guessed it] 20%. Several other solar indicators give the same result. So there are several smoking guns.

And more:

A somewhat disturbing [to many people] consequence of the correction of the official sunspot number is that there is now no evidence for a Modern Grand Maximum [�the largest in 8000 years� or some such].

I chopped a lot of stuff out of these excerpts -- what piqued my interest is that there is growing evidence that we may be heading for another Maunder Minimum (proposed name is the Eddy Minimum, more here) - several hundred years of substantially cooler weather. Solar cycle 24 has been stalled for several years and there has been no warming since around 1998. An excellent read if you are into that sort of stuff. The comments are great too...