(The Economic Collapse Blog)—The giant ball of fire that our planet revolves around has been far more active than scientists originally anticipated this year, and that could have very serious implications for all of us in the months ahead. Fluctuations in solar activity affect our climate more than anything else does, and we also tend to see more earthquakes when solar activity is at elevated levels. The current solar cycle is supposed to reach a peak at some point during the next 12 months, but so far there are no signs that solar activity is slowing down. In fact, the average number of sunspots that we witnessed last month was the highest that we have seen since 2001…
The average number of sunspots reached 215.5 in August, according to the Solar Influences Data Analysis Center at the Royal Observatory in Belgium. It’s the highest number since Sept.-Dec. 2001, according to SpaceWeather.com. July’s total was 196.5. Last month, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center issued a preliminary statement that solar activity is at its highest since March 2001.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Scientists were originally projecting that we would see about half as many sunspots during the month of August…
Experts had predicted that August would only see half as many sunspots, indicating that the solar maximum is imminent, and it may be more active than anticipated, possibly bringing intense solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
The number of sunspots has been increasing at an exponential rate for the past couple of months. Hopefully we will get a reprieve here in September.
Because if we don’t, we could see more severe geomagnetic storms like we did in May…
In May 2024, Earth experienced its strongest geomagnetic storm in over 20 years, with auroras visible much farther south than usual, including regions as far as Florida and Mexico. If another large sunspot appears around the time of the September equinox, it could lead to a similar or even stronger event.
When a very large geomagnetic storm occurs, it can disrupt our lives in countless ways.
Back in May, even farm equipment was dramatically affected…
Ronald Rabon, the owner of Double R Farms, said back in May when the G-5 extreme solar magnetic levels occurred, he was out spraying his cotton field when his equipment started acting up.
“I didn’t know what was wrong with it,” Rabon said. “All I knew, it was, and you could get it straightened up and go for a few minutes. And it might go 20, 30 minutes and whatever minutes from then, all of a sudden, you’d be going through the field and it might just take a left.”
Rabon said one of the biggest problems with the solar flares is preventing his sprayers from being accurate. His GPS uses precise alignments for spraying, and when knocked out of its track, could overspray his crop and kill it.
Of course if our planet is hit by a large enough storm, it could fry power grids, take down the Internet, and cause massive societal problems all over the world. Hopefully such a scenario will not play out any time soon.
All of the solar activity that we have been witnessing is also the primary reason why there has been so much intense heat this summer…
Summer broke global heat records for the second straight year, scientists have confirmed — putting 2024 firmly on track to be the hottest year in recorded history.
The period between June and August — summer in the Northern Hemisphere — was the world’s hottest such period since records began in 1940, according to data published Friday by Copernicus, Europe’s climate change service.
Much more importantly, there tends to be a lot of seismic activity when solar activity is very high, and that is precisely what has been occurring.
In particular, a lot of experts are quite alarmed about all of the shaking that we have seen in California lately…
Residents in California experienced a swarm of five earthquakes within the last 48 hours.
A 4.4-magnitude was felt in the north around Lake County on Saturday and two more struck the area the following evening, ranked as a 2.7 and 2.8-magnitude.
Locals in southern California also reported two more quakes on Saturday, with the largest ranking a 3.9-magnitude.
Within the past 7 days, there have been more than 900 earthquakes in California and Nevada.
As I discussed the other day, I am extremely concerned about the instability that we have been witnessing on the west coast.
This is something that I will be watching very, very closely during the months to come. In my brand new book, I explain why I believe that we have entered a time when we will see historic earthquakes of absolutely epic proportions.
Of course it isn’t just the U.S. that will be affected.
There has also been a lot of shaking south of the border lately too. On September 6th, a gigantic crack in the Earth that suddenly opened up actually swallowed four cows…
A large earth crack opened in Ejido J. Cruz Gálvez, located in the Hermosillo municipality of Sonora, Mexico, on September 6, 2024, swallowing four cows.
The crack is reported to be approximately 3 km (1.8 miles) long and 1.5 m (5 feet) wide, with a depth of 4 m (13 feet) in some sections.
According to the rancher who recorded a video of the crack, it swallowed four cows. Local authorities have not yet issued any statements regarding the matter.
It is not normal for a crack in the Earth that is 3 kilometers long to appear out of nowhere.
When will people finally start to wake up?
Our planet is becoming increasingly unstable, and this should deeply alarm all of us.
Meanwhile, the skies above our heads are becoming increasingly active as well.
For example, a giant space rock that is “approximately the size of two football fields” will come flying by our planet on September 15th…
An asteroid approximately the size of two football fields is set to make a close approach to Earth this month. According to the New York Post, the 720-foot-wide asteroid named 2024 ON, will pass around 620,000 miles from our planet on September 15. While this distance might seem vast, it’s remarkably close in astronomical terms – equivalent to just 2.6 times the distance between our planet and the Moon. However, it poses no threat to Earth.
The good news is that this particular giant space rock is definitely going to miss us. In the future, we may not be so fortunate.
So much is happening in the skies above our heads, but most of the population is not paying attention.
Unfortunately, it is just a matter of time before major events start to happen that none of us will be able to ignore.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
