Freeman Dyson, May, 2016 - I watched Mercury transiting the Sun. The striking fact was not the little black image of Mercury but the total absence of sunspots. I have seen many transits before this one, but never without sunspots. It seems the sun has gone to sleep as it did in the Maunder Minimum in the seventeenth century. In the seventeenth century we had the Little Ice Age and now we have the pause in global warming. Evidence getting stronger that the Sun is a big player in the climate story.
