The first interesting bit of information tended to confirm my overall 'eyeballing' of the sun's high energy activity since the days of Yohkoh, SOHO and Trace. Matt Penn has been studying the magnetic fields around sunspots for 17 years and he's observed those fields getting progressively weaker over time, not just rising and falling with the solar cycle. This indicates that the sun works on "longer cycles" than just 11/22 year cycles. There was even talk about the Mauder minimum and the eventual lack of sunspots if the weakening trend continues. Interesting material.
The other point of note was the fact that 5 years after the convection speeds of the mainstream model been shown to be off by two whole orders of magnitude, they still rely upon convection to generate the strong magnetic fields which supposedly 'reconnect' at the surface. Nothing like glossing over a *major* problem with your model as though nothing's wrong with it.
The complete lack of electricity made the whole thing come off 'electrophobic' of course, particularly since they continue to dumb everything down to magnetism, and they're still using pseudoscience to model high temperature plasma events in light plasma, decades after Alfven's double layer paper made the whole concept irrelevant and obsolete.
Nothing much new has changed in terms of mainstream solar theory, but the diminishing magnetic field strengths around sunspots seems congruent with my own observations as it relates to active regions in the solar atmosphere. The electrical activity just doesn't seem to be as 'active' in the active regions as they were a couple of cycles ago. We observed more explosive types of events a few cycles ago. We still get a few CME's every now and then, but the active regions today seem to be less active than than before.
I'm still dismayed at the mainstream's complete electrophobic attitude when it comes to solar physics. I can't even look at a high energy image of the sun and not see the electrical activity inside those active regions and inside those coronal loops. It's amazing that they can discuss things like planetary aurora and not talk about the electrical activity that Birkeland used to create them in his lab.
To me it was very telling that five entire years had gone by since SDO blew mainstream solar model convection predictions out of the water. Even to this day they continue to bury their collective heads in the sand (plasma) as it relates to the diminished strength of the magnetic fields that should be produced by such slow convection. They didn't miss the prediction by a little bit either, they missed it by two whole orders of magnitude. They simply failed to even mention that little problem.
You'd think that revelation would have been the final nail in the coffin of the pseudoscience of 'reconnection theory, but obviously that's not the case. They just ignored the slow convection problem entirely, and they couldn't sustain a full sphere 'hot' corona with "reconnection" if their lives depended on it. Meanwhile Birkeland and his team build working models of a hot corona over a century ago.
Oy Vey. Nothing much has changed, but I did find the magnetic field strength changes to be rather interesting. At least the mainstream is aware that the sun's 'cycles' are more complex than they once imagined. It does open up the door for 'external circuit changes" having a tangible effect on solar activity, but I'm sure they'll try to internalize the magnetic field changes.
