 |
 |
 |
 |
#1342925 - 05/06/12 02:52 PM
Space weather expert has ominous forecast
|
Chicago Jesus
Senior Member
Registered: 01/16/12
Posts: 6188
Loc: Cocktails with Regie and Tiger
|
Space weather expert has ominous forecast
Mike Hapgood, who studies solar events, says the world isn't prepared for a truly damaging storm. And one could happen soon.
By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Time
May 4, 2012, 7:26 p.m.
A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt.
This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before — and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England.
Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms. But the world is still not prepared for a truly damaging solar storm, Hapgood argues in a recent commentary published in the journal Nature.
Hapgood talked with The Times about the potential effects of such a storm and how the world should prepare for it.
What exactly is a solar storm?
I find that's hard to answer. The term "solar storm" has crept into our usage, but nobody has defined what it means. Whether a "solar storm" is happening on the sun or is referring to the effect on the Earth depends on who's talking.
I prefer "space weather," because it focuses our attention on the phenomena in space that travel from the sun to the Earth.
People often talk about solar flares and solar storms in the same breath. What's the difference?
Solar flares mainly emit X-rays — we also get radio waves from these things, and white light in the brightest of flares. They all travel at the same speed as light, so it takes eight minutes to arrive. There are some effects from flares, such as radio interference from the radio bursts.
But that's a pretty small-beer thing. The big thing is the geomagnetic storms [on Earth] that affect the power grid, and that's caused by the coronal mass ejections [from the sun].
Coronal mass ejections are caused when the magnetic field in the sun's atmosphere gets disrupted and then the plasma, the sun's hot ionized gas, erupts and send charged particles into space. Think of it like a hurricane — is it headed toward us or not headed toward us? If we're lucky, it misses us.
How are solar flares and coronal mass ejections related?
There's an association between flares and coronal mass ejections, but it's a relationship we don't quite understand scientifically. Sometimes the CME launches before the flare occurs, and vice versa.
What happens when those particles reach Earth?
There can be a whole range of effects. The classic one everyone quotes is the effect on the power grid. A big geomagnetic storm can essentially put extra electric currents into the grid. If it gets bad enough, you can have a complete failure of the power grid — it happened in Quebec back in 1989. If you've got that, then you've just got to get it back on again. But you could also damage the transformers, which would make it much harder to get the electric power back.
How else could people be affected?
You get big disturbances in the Earth's upper atmosphere — what we call the ionosphere — and that could be very disruptive to things like GPS [the network of global positioning system satellites]. Given the extent we use GPS in everyday life [including for cellphone networks, shipping safety and financial transaction records], that's a big issue.
The storms can also disrupt communications on transoceanic flights. Sometimes when that happens, they will either divert or cancel flights. So that would be the like the disruption we had in Europe from the volcano two years ago, where they had to close down airspace for safety reasons.
What went wrong in the 1989 storm?
In the U.K., there were two damaged transformers that had to be repaired. But no power cuts. The worst thing is what happened in Quebec. In Quebec, the power system went from normal operation to failure in 90 seconds. It affected around 6 million people. The impact was reckoned to be $2 billion Canadian in 1989 prices.
We had lots of disruption to communications to spacecraft operations. The North American Aerospace Defense Command has big radars tracking everything in space, and as they describe it, they lost 1,600 space objects. They found them again, but for a few days they didn't know where they were.
Is that the biggest geomagnetic storm on record?
We always describe the storm in 1859 as the biggest space weather event. We know there were huge impacts on the telegraph, which suggests there would be similarly severe impacts on modern power grids. It's hard to compare it to the 1989 event because of the changes in our technology.
Many systems have been built to withstand a storm as big as the 1989 event. Is that good enough?
A serious concern would be whole regions losing electrical power for some significant time. Here in the U.K., the official assessment is that we could lose one or two regions where the power might be out for several months.
What would the consequences be?
In the modern world, we use electricity for so many things. We require electrical power to pump water into people's houses and to pump the sewage away. [You can imagine] what could happen if the sewage systems aren't pumping stuff away.
If you don't have power, you can't pump fuel into vehicles. If you don't have any fuel, traffic could come to a standstill.
Could the economy function?
Most of the time you're using credit cards, debit cards or you'll be getting money out of an ATM. If you've lost the power, the computers in the bank that keep track of our money will have back-up power, but not the ATMs or the machines in the shops. So if you had a big power outage, it wouldn't be long before we'd be trying to find cash.
What are the chances that something like this will happen soon?
A recent paper [published in February in the journal Space Weather] tried to estimate the chance of having a repeat of 1859 and came up with a value of a 12% chance of it happening in the next 10 years. That's quite a high risk.
What can be done?
The biggest step is to make more and more people aware of the issue, so they're thinking about it in the way they design things. That's the most critical part.
I think it's also getting a better picture of these very violent past events. We'd like to find out more about the scope of those events. We have a lot of old data from past events that's on paper — in newspapers and so on — and we're busy trying to find ways to turn it into digital.
We had a recent flare-up of publicity in March thanks to a solar storm that didn't really amount to much. Is this sort of coverage a good thing or a bad thing?
It makes such a good scare story, and it's entertaining. It was a mildly interesting event, certainly, but not at all big-league stuff. It makes people think, "Oh it's nothing really," so experts like myself are in danger of being in the crying-wolf situation. That's something that is a concern to me, personally.
amina.khan@latimes.com
This interview was edited for space and clarity.
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
_________________________
Liberty anywhere is a threat to Collectivism everywhere.
Remember.... Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
#1342952 - 05/06/12 05:43 PM
Re: Space weather expert has ominous forecast
[Re: Chicago Jesus]
|
Cuzi Sedso
Senior Member
Registered: 11/06/11
Posts: 1428
Loc: NY
|
What are you worried about? I thought you didn't believe in science.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
#1342987 - 05/06/12 08:46 PM
Re: Space weather expert has ominous forecast
[Re: Ayuveda]
|
Chicago Jesus
Senior Member
Registered: 01/16/12
Posts: 6188
Loc: Cocktails with Regie and Tiger
|
What are you worried about? I thought you didn't believe in science. Fear Mongering. Solid homie. Proof your tinfoil hat deflects just about anything.
(Daily Mail) — Dinosaurs may be partly to blame for a change in climate because they created so much flatulence, according to leading scientists.
Professor Graeme Ruxton of St Andrews University, Scotland, said the giant animals spent 150 years emitting the potent global warming gas, methane.
Large plant-eating sauropods would have been the main culprits because of the huge amounts of greenery they consumed.
The team calculated the animals would have collectively produced more than 520m tons of methane a year — more than all today’s modern sources put together.
It is thought these huge amounts could easily have been enough to warm the planet.
It is even possible that the climate change was so catastrophic that it caused the dinosaurs eventual demise.
One of the animals, a 90-ton argentinosaurus, which measured 140ft in length, would have consumed at least half a ton of food in one day.
After breaking down in the animal’s stomach it would have produced thousands of litres of the greenhouse gas compared with a modern cow which only produces 200 litres of methane daily.
Methane is up to 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2).
It is created from a variety of natural and human-influenced sources which include landfills, natural gas, petroleum sources and agricultural activities.
Scientists claim humans have pushed levels of the gas up 2.5 times higher than they should be and estimate this is responsible for 20 per cent of modern global warming.
Cows and other livestock currently only emit about 100m tons of methane a year.
According to Professor Ruxton and his co-researcher David Wilkinson, of Liverpool John Moores University, this is only a fifth of what was produced when Dinosaurs walked the Earth.
‘In fact, our calculations suggest these dinosaurs may have produced more methane than all the modern sources, natural and human, put together,’ said Mr Wilkinson to the Sunday Times.
The research is due to be published in an academic journal this week.
_________________________
Liberty anywhere is a threat to Collectivism everywhere.
Remember.... Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
#1343324 - 05/08/12 03:44 PM
Re: Space weather expert has ominous forecast
[Re: Chicago Jesus]
|
Chicago Jesus
Senior Member
Registered: 01/16/12
Posts: 6188
Loc: Cocktails with Regie and Tiger
|
Dinosaur Gas Caused Global Warming?
May 08, 2012
Listen to it Button
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I see this story, and then I realize: We have a lot of new listeners here, a tremendous number of new listeners. We officially know this now. It's beyond common sense supposition. We now know. Because of accurate records, we know. That's as much as I can legally say. But we know. We know it's huge, the new-listen number. Well, I have a story here that if everybody in the audience was up to speed and in total context with how things happen in this program, I would approach it a certain way.
But we have people here who may be listening for their first day, their first week, first month. So I want to approach this a little differently. I want to read to you a headline in a story today in the New York Daily News. Are you ready? Do I have your attention? I want you to pay very, very close attention to this. "[R]esearch published yesterday in a magazine called Current Biology suggests that large dinosaurs belched and expelled gas to such an extent that it may have contributed to global warming and their extinction."
Now, what I want to do is ask you to stop for a moment and really think about that. You know that there's all kinds of arguments going on about global warming, and you've heard probably (I'm speaking to you people that are new in the audience) all the claims that it's the cars that we drive. It's the greenhouse gases! It seems like every day there's a new claim, something humanity is doing to destroy the planet. Yet we've also learned that it's a total hoax. If you're new to the program, I don't have time to go back and repeat years of programming.
But e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia in the UK conclusively show how data was altered and faked to produce results that showed man was responsible for global warming when he wasn't. The stuff was made up. We know that they have tried every scare tactic in the world to convince people that they are responsible for the climate being destroyed, or the world warming up. Now, we know that the reason for this is they're trying to capitalize on people's emptiness in their lives. Most people don't think their lives mean anything and they want to have meaning in their lives.
So the left very cleverly comes along and says, "You know what? You can save the planet!"
"Whoa! Wow! Now my life is gonna have meaning. Ho! Sign me up."
"Yeah, well, you have to admit that you have been the problem. With all the gasoline that you've used and all the coal that you've burned and the electricity you've used, you've contributed. But there's atonement for you. If you buy little cars that we tell you to buy, if you go along with raising taxes, if you have more government control -- forget about all the traditional forms of energy and let's go windmills and solar panels -- you're fine."
And people say, "Oh, good! Okay, I'll buy a Prius, or I'll buy an electric car."
They think they're saving the planet, and that's how it happens. Now, I just want to ask you. Just use as much common sense as you can muster. I want to ask you to seriously consider -- don't just accept it knee-jerk because "science," quote, unquote says it. Please understand that science has been corrupted by politics like most everything politics touches has been corrupted. And science is politics. And another thing if you're new to the program: If you ever hear the word "consensus" in a discussion about science being fact, understand that it's not possible.
Consensus equals majority thought. Science is not subject to opinion. Scientific fact is fact. The earth is round not because a consensus of scientists think it is but because it's round! I want you to actually stop and consider this report, serious as it can be in the New York Daily News, that dinosaur farts and burps have contributed to global warming and their own extinction. And I want to ask you if you really believe that. I want you to stop and I want you to very seriously consider the proposition that there aren't any dinosaurs because their own flatulence wiped 'em out.
They farted themselves to death and, in the process, they destroyed the planet, their own habitat. They caused global warming by burping and expelling gas so much, they destroyed their own habitat. I want to ask you: Does this pass the smell test? I just want you to use your common sense. I could do an Environmentalist Wacko Update here. I could do the usual: Make fun of it. But then I might distract from the actual point being made for those of you not up to speed and context with how we do things on this program.
Because, see, the point is, this is ridiculous. This is literally insane. It's ridiculous. It's absurd. It is one of the most stupid assertions I have encountered in 25-plus years of deep study of the environmental wacko movement. Does it pass the smell test? The dinosaurs farted themselves to death, and at the same time burped themselves to death -- and then after all that, caused global warming, which is really what did them in. Then, I want you to ask yourself this: Why is it that it has not yet been asserted that we humans are farting ourselves to death?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT 
RUSH: This story in the New York Daily News about dinosaur flatulence, in addition to being absurd, it's very weird. It's a real story, folks. A genuine study claims that dinosaur methane emissions 200 million years ago are at the same level as methane emissions from livestock and industry today. And, of course, methane from livestock and industry is causing global warming today. And if the dinosaurs, that many of 'em, were expelling that much gas back then, why, the same thing would be happening back then. But then at the end of the article we're told that the very idea that dinosaur emissions could cause global warming, and even their own extinction, is absurd. The story actually says this. The writer of the story assesses the study himself, after reporting the study seriously. This is about as sensible as that group, Center for Science in the Public Interest, succeeding in getting coconut oil banned in movie theaters simply because they didn't like it.
The author of that study is claiming that it's now being taken out of context and he never claimed that dinosaur emissions caused global warming or their own extinction. He says their emissions were a minor factor, but he is still claiming their methane emissions equal those that are produced today. So apparently the reaction to the study has been one of, "Are you kidding me?" So the guy said, "Hey, I didn't say what is being reported as being said." The point is, the environmentalist wacko movement, there are people that believe in this kind of stuff, they make bets on it, and it's as ridiculous as most other claims they're making about manmade global warming.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Our official climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama, Huntsville, has weighed in on dinosaur flatulence and global warming, extinction. He said, "Look, if this guy is right in his research about all that flatulence, and if the dinosaurs were smoking cigarettes, there could have combustion all over the place and they might have something to talk about then."
END TRANSCRIPT
_________________________
Liberty anywhere is a threat to Collectivism everywhere.
Remember.... Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
#1343328 - 05/08/12 03:55 PM
Re: Space weather expert has ominous forecast
[Re: Chicago Jesus]
|
Cuzi Sedso
Senior Member
Registered: 11/06/11
Posts: 1428
Loc: NY
|
How appropriate... a picture of Limbaugh above a piece on dinosaur flatulence!
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
#1343329 - 05/08/12 03:55 PM
Re: Space weather expert has ominous forecast
[Re: Chicago Jesus]
|
MeRightYouWrong
Senior Member
Registered: 06/29/11
Posts: 1478
Loc: Mountain of Truth
|
Rush mocks New york Daily News for reporting this, but Fox News also reported it, as well as many other news sources.
Why didn't Rush make a mockery of all news sources that reported this instead of singling out one publication?
I think we know the answer to that.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Moderator: FL1 Staff, FL1 Mod, FL1 Tek Deluxe, FL1 Mod 2, FL1 Office, FL1 Mod 3
|
|
