This article is trash. There's a solar max every 11 years. There are flares and coronal mass ejections associated with near-max conditions, although they can

This article is trash. There's a solar max every 11 years. There are flares and coronal mass ejections associated with near-max conditions, although they can happen at almost any point in the solar cycle; this has been the case for centuries. But nobody can predict whether the flares and CMEs will be historically intense this cycle; known science does not support such predictions. We didn't predict the weird "double dip" in Cycle 23 (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/28mar_oldcycle/ http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/28...). And the SEC (http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/ http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/) has predicted cycle 24 will be a dud. It's a crap shoot anyway -- the significance of a particular flare or CME for Earth depends on lots of chancy factors, not least, whether the CME is pointed at the Earth or not. The rotational period of the Sun is 28 days; +/- 1 day means the CME misses Earth.