A POWERFUL solar eruption that has already disturbed radio communications in China could disrupt electrical power grids and satellites used on Earth in the next days, NASA said.
The massive sunspot, which astronomers say is the size of Jupiter, is the strongest solar flare in four years, NASA said yesterday.
The Class X flash – the largest such category – erupted on Tuesday, according to the US space agency.
“X-class flares are the most powerful of all solar events that can trigger radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms,” disturbing telecommunications and electric grids, NASA said.
Astronomers have been predicting a solar cycle known as Solar maximum, predicted to hit with full force in 2012, could be one of the most damaging on record.
Similar storms back in 1859 and 1921 caused worldwide chaos, wiping out telegraph wires on a massive scale, but the potential for damage in the digital era could be much greater.
A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences found that if a similar storm occurred today, it could cause “$1 to 2 trillion in damages to society’s high-tech infrastructure and require four to 10 years for complete recovery”.
On Tuesday, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory saw a large coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with the flash that is blasting toward Earth at about 900km per second, it said.
The charged plasma particles were expected to reach the planet’s orbit tonight.
The flare spread from Active Region 1158 in the sun’s southern hemisphere, which had so far lagged behind the northern hemisphere in flash activity. It followed several smaller flares in recent days.
“The calm before the storm,” read a statement on the US National Weather Service Space Weather Prediction Service.
“Three CMEs are enroute, all a part of the Radio Blackout events on February 13, 14, and 15 (UTC). The last of the three seems to be the fastest and may catch both of the forerunners about mid to late … February 17.”
Geomagnetic storms usually last 24 to 48 hours, “but some may last for many days”, read a separate NWS statement.
“Ground to air, ship to shore, shortwave broadcast and amateur radio are vulnerable to disruption during geomagnetic storms. Navigation systems like GPS can also be adversely affected.”
The China Meteorological Administration reported that the solar flare had jammed shortwave radio communications in southern China.
It said the flare caused “sudden ionospheric disturbances” in the atmosphere above China, and warned there was a high probability that large solar flares would appear over the next three days, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Another previous major disturbance of the Earth’s electric grid from a solar incident, in 1973, a magnetic storm caused by a solar eruption plunged six million people into darkness in Canada’s eastern-central Quebec province.
The British Geological Survey said meanwhile that the solar storm would result in spectacular Northern Lights displays.
One coronal mass ejection (CME) arrived on February 14, “sparking Valentine’s Day displays of the Northern Lights (aurora borealis) further south than usual”.
“Two CMEs are expected to arrive in the next 24-48 hours and further… displays are possible some time over the next two nights if skies are clear,” it said.
The office published geomagnetic records dating back to the Victorian era which it hopes will help in planning for future storms.
“Life increasingly depends on technologies that didn’t exist when the magnetic recordings began,” said Alan Thomson, BGS head of geomagnetism.
“Studying the records will tell us what we have to plan and prepare for to make sure systems can resist solar storms,” he said.
NASA, National Academy of Sciences, and even Secret Societies are silently warning the population of an interstellar catastrophe that is likely to come in 2012-2013.
In the new History Channel episode of Brian Meltzer’s Decoded delves into the meaning of the Georgia Guidestones. The secret society of the Rosicrucians had knowledge of a ‘solar catastrophe’ and erected the Georgia Guidestones as a guide for survivors to repopulate the Earth.
In 2006 and 2010 NASA warned the general population to get ready for a a once-in-a-lifetime solar storm in 2012. There was very little coverage of this in the news media, and I highly doubt the U.S. government would make go public about this anytime soon.
Lawrence E. Joseph author of “Apocalypse 2012” writes in the Huffington Post that our Solar System, Sun and all its planets are moving into an ‘energy cloud’ that excites the atmosphere of our planets and especially our sun, and it could be the ingredient of an interstellar catastrophe in 2012-2013.
On Christmas Eve, 2009, the startling hypothesis that our Solar System, the Sun and all its planets, are moving into a potentially dangerous and destabilizing interstellar energy cloud, was resoundingly sustained. In their research paper, “A strong, highly-tilted interstellar magnetic field near the Solar System,” published the December 24, 2009 issue of Nature, a highly respected scientific journal, M. Opher et al report on data transmitted from Voyager, the twin spacecraft that have been exploring the outer reaches of the Solar System since 1977.
“We have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system. This magnetic field holds the interstellar energy cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all,” says Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. He explains that this energy cloud is at least twice as strong as had previously been predicted and that the Solar System has begun to pass into it, adding that this field “is turbulent or has a distortion in the solar vicinity.”
Astrophysicist Alexei Dmitriev says our solar system is entering an interstellar energy cloud
In fact, most scientists had either minimized the possible significance of the interstellar energy cloud or dismissed the whole notion of its existence altogether. But not Dr. Alexei Dmitriev, the esteemed Russian space physicist whom I visited in Akademgorodok, a clandestine scientific research city outside of Novosibirsk, Siberia. In my recent book, Apocalypse 2012: An Investigation into Civilization’s End, I detailed Dmitriev’s conclusions, based on his team’s analysis of Voyager data, that the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are inexplicably excited — immense storms, mammoth eruptions, plasma arcs jetting from the planets’ surface to their moons. He reasoned that this turbulence is caused by an external injection of energy into the planets’ atmospheres: to wit, an interstellar energy cloud which the leading edge of the Solar System has now entered.
The Nature article does not examine the earthly ramifications of moving into the energy cloud beyond suggesting that we could face an increase in cosmic rays, which could affect everything from space travel to rainfall. But the prescient Dmitriev, who has been publishing on the subject for the past fifteen years, observes that passage into this interstellar cloud has already begun to perturb the Sun, causing solar outbursts that are leading to hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes of unprecedented ferocity here on Earth. He is on record as predicting that we will face global catastrophe in “not tens but ones of years.” When pressed, Dmitriev guesstimates that the Solar System will remain within this turbulent energy cloud for something on the order of three millennia.
The confirmation of Dmitriev’s interstellar energy cloud hypothesis marks the third time that major predictions made in Apocalypse 2012 have been validated since it was published in 2007. Much of the book concerned the potential impacts of solar turbulence on climatic and seismic events, on the global satellite network and also the electrical power grid. Lo and behold, in December, 2008, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued a 100+ page report detailing the grave vulnerability of the electrical power grid to solar blasts, which, by scientific consensus, are next expected to climax in late 2012 or early 2013. The NAS concludes that up to 130 million people could find themselves without electricity for months or years due to solar mega-storms shorting out the grid. Without telecommunications, water or gasoline (the pumps are electric), refrigeration, and basic law enforcement or military security, civilization as we know it would be brought to its knees.
Apocalypse 2012 also reported extensively on evidence that the Earth’s protective magnetic shield is showing signs of realignment and deterioration, a hypothesis emphatically validated in December, 2008, THEMIS, a squadron of five NASA research satellites unexpectedly flew through a giant, pole-to-equator breach in our planet’s magnetic field. The astrophysicists attached to the THEMIS project were utterly astonished by the e data, with David Sibeck, the project leader, going so far as to declare that “it was as though the Sun rose in the west.” The shields are down, Scotty, and the Sun is going to begin pummeling us big time in late 2012 or early 2013.
Prepare and stock up on food that would last for at least 2 years. On top of these warnings we have the global food crisis, food inflation, increasing energy costs, we need to prepare for the future and our families. You can bet the elite are prepared for this, and it could be the reason why a “doomsday” seed vault was made.
Extra Stuff; Lawrence E. Joseph appears on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory:
In an interview with Bloomberg’s Jim Efstathiou Jr., Barack Obama’s energy adviser, Jason Grumet, said if elected Obama will classify carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant. Obama will tell the Environmental Protection Agency that it may use the 1990 Clean Air Act to set emissions limits, according to Grumet, and he will likely do this immediately upon taking office, David Bookbinder, chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club told Bloomberg.
“The U.S. has to move quickly domestically so we can get back in the game internationally,” Grumet said. In other words, an Obama administration would impose draconian carbon emission regulations on the American people and “help clear the deadlock in talks on an international agreement to slow global warming,” according to Rajendra Pachauri, head of a United Nation panel of climate-change scientists. Negotiators from almost 200 countries will meet in December in Poznan, Poland, to discuss ways to limit CO2, that is to say they will work on a global carbon taxation structure.
A global carbon tax is not so much about limiting CO2 as it is a scheme designed to pay for world government and corporate globalization. “The Climate Change Control Bill strongly supported by Obama calls for an international governing regime to monitor and regulate carbon dioxide and ‘carbon footprints’ from discovery, to production, to consumption at a cost of $50 trillion globally and at a cost of $8 trillion for US taxpayers, all to be paid for by a global tax, whose monies will be used to establish a world government body,” writes Patrick Briley.
Obama has worked closely on this global taxation and world government scam under the cover of environmentalism with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Al Gore, and former communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev, an advocate of the so-called Earth Charter and the author of Manifesto for Earth. Brzezinski co-founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller in 1973. Rockefeller and fellow globalist Maurice Strong of Canada were instrumental in the creation of the Earth Charter. As noted above, the Sierra Club will play a decisive role in Obama’s administration. The organization takes money from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and is closely aligned with the United Nations Environmental Program. Strong was UNEP’s first executive director.
It is a well documented fact the environmental movement receives huge disbursements from chartered institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, W. Alton Jones Foundation, Turner Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, the Alfred W. Mellon Foundation, and others, including Bill and Melinda Gates, the Heinz family and the Carnegie Corporation. It is no mistake foundation funded environmental groups are now calling for a global carbon tax structure and an international governing regime to monitor and regulate carbon dioxide, as this serves the plan of their masters well.
An Obama administration will kick this scheme into warp drive and hasten the implementation of a world government of the sort members of the global elite have worked toward for many years. A phony environmental crisis, with carbon emissions playing the role as chief villain, is a perfect storm for the global elite. “We are on the verge of a global transformation,” David Rockefeller once quipped. “All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”
France: Turmoil Must Not Affect Climate Change Bill
France and Germany urged smaller European Union economies not to use the world financial meltdown as an excuse to gut legislation that aims to combat global warming with deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said at an EU environment ministers’ meeting that “the European Union must keep its leadership role” in climate change to nudge the United States and others into a global deal on slashing emissions.
The bill, which aims to cut EU greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020, is to be adopted in December. The EU hopes it will lead to a deal that month at UN climate negotiations in Poznan, Poland.
“We cannot afford to delay,” German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said.
In last-minute objections, Italy said the bill would hurt its industries because Chinese and US competitors face no equivalent emission burdens. Italian officials pushed for a clause that would force the European Commission to do a new cost analysis of the climate change bill in 2009.
Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia say they have already made great cuts in carbon emissions since emerging from communism.
Borloo said “there was a very strong willingness” to work toward a deal by December.” But, he added, “the financial markets crisis must not delay this. The EU must keep its leadership role or there will be no point in going to Poznan.”
The financial turmoil has triggered fears of a global recession that would make governments less eager to get major polluters such as energy generators, steel makers and cement producers to pay billions into a cap-and-trade emissions scheme.
The EU cap-and-trade program could impose up to 50 billion euros ($68.8 billion) a year in polluter fees.
EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said critics exaggerated the costs.
“Approving the EU bill in December will be consistent with tackling the financial crisis,” because it will promote investments in clean energy, creating jobs and easing the EU’s dependence on oil imports, he said.
The European Commission estimates the cost of the climate change bill at 0.5 percent of the bloc’s gross national product by 2020.
Essential surveillance kit for the new green police: the Energy Saving Partnership has taken out a patent on Heatseekers, thermo-imaging vehicles which, at full potential, have the capacity to identify 1,000 properties an hour, or 5,000 properties a night, that are leaking carbon.
“Once the property has been scanned, a dedicated team of energy advisers will visit householders to show them the thermal image scan of their homes,” says Inspector Knock-on-the-Door.
The intensity of the sun’s million-mile-per-hour solar wind has dropped to its lowest levels since accurate records began half a century ago, scientists say.
Measurements of the cosmic blasts of radiation, ejected from the sun’s upper atmosphere, were made with the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
The solar wind “inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system,” which protects the inner planets against the radiation from other stars, said Dave McComas, Ulysses’ solar wind principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
“With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere will diminish in size and strength,” said Ed Smith, NASA’s Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system,” added Smith.
Scientists say the weakening of solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun’s magnetic field, but the causes of these changes are unknown.
The weakened solar activity can be beneficial because it slows satellites around the Earth, allowing them to remain in orbit longer.
The sun normally experiences 11-year-cycles between periods of great activity and lesser activity.
But, Smith said, the Ulysses mission’s recent results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, show that “we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated.”
The Ulysses mission was the first project to survey the space environment over the sun’s poles. The data the spacecraft has collected has profoundly changed the way scientists view our nearest star and its effects on the Earth.
In the peer reviewed book “Global Warming—Global Cooling, Natural Cause Found”, meteorologist and climate researcher David Dilley utilizes nearly a half million years of data linking long term gravitational cycles of the moon explain the recent global warming, rises in carbon dioxide levels, and for 2200 global warming cycles during the past half million years.
The gravitational cycles are called the Primary Forcing Mechanism for Climate (PFM), and act like a magnet by pulling the atmosphere’s high pressure systems northward or southward by as much as 3 or 4 degrees of latitude from their normal seasonal positions, and thus causing long-term shifts in the location of atmospheric high pressure systems.
Research by Mr. Dilley shows a near 100 percent correlation between the PFM gravitational cycles to the beginning and ending of global warming cycles. Global warming cycles began right on time with each PFM cycle during the past half million years, as did the current warming which began 100 years ago, and it will end right on time as the current gravitational cycle begins its cyclical decline.
Global temperatures have cooled during the past 12 months. During 2008 and 2009 the first stage of global cooling will cool the world’s temperatures to those observed during the years from the 1940s through the 1970s. By the year 2023 global climate will become similar to the colder temperatures experienced during the 1800s.
Plastic Polypropylene sheets to blanket Earth from Global Warming
An eccentric team of glaciologists headed by Dr. Jason Box (Ohio State University) have put forward a new solution to fight global warming by literally blanketing the Earth using polypropylene blankets on the rapidly melting Arctic ice shelf in Greenland. These blankets will cover a total surface area of 10,000 square meters, and are designed to reflect sunlight and block out Greenland’s immense winds.
The bulk of their cargo is 31 giant rolls of uniquely designed white polypropylene blankets which are treated with UV stabilizers. The team will blanket over glacial well that carries meltwater from the surface to the base of the ice and try conserving ice up to 2 m deep.
The team will be head to a remote glacier, 90 km east of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland and the major part of their cargo comprise of 31 giant rolls of uniquely designed white polypropylene blankets. Showing immense strength, PP blankets which weighs 340 gms/sq.m. will stretch to more than 55% of their original length prior to failing. Apart from being tear resistant, the PP blankets fail at a force of 3,800N (equivalent to placing a 380-kg weight), according to one puncture test carried.
As evidence builds of the earth entering a dramatic cooling trend, another scientist has gone public with his conviction that we are about to enter a new ice age, rendering warnings about global warming fraudulent and irrelevant.
Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera of the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Mexico states that “In about ten years the Earth will enter a “little ice age” which will last from 60 to 80 years and may be caused by the decrease in solar activity,” according to a report in the major Mexican newspaper Milenio Diario.
Herrera slammed the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) stance on global warming as “erroneous” because of their failure to factor in the impact of solar activity.
The models and forecasts of the IPCC “is incorrect because only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity,” said Herrera.
Herrera states that the earth is entering a natural phase of climate transition during which solar activity will diminish considerably, “so that in two years or so, there will be a small ice age that lasts from 60 to 80 years.”
Herrera cited the growth in glaciers observed at the Andes, Perito Moreno, Logan, the highest mountain in Canada, and Franz-Josef Glacier, New Zealand.
A dramatic cooling trend is being observed across the planet even as people like Al Gore continue to claim that the threat of global warming mandates the poor and middle class be hit with CO2 taxes in order to prevent climate change.
Both anecdotal evidence and hard data indicates that the planet is in the beginning stages of a significant downturn in global temperatures.
China recently experienced its coldest winter in 100 years while northeast America was hit by record snow levels and Britain suffered its coldest April in decades as late-blooming daffodils were pounded with hail and snow on an almost daily basis. The British summer has also left many yearning for global warming, with temperatures in June and July rarely struggling to get over 16 degrees and on one occasion even dropping as low as 9 degrees in the middle of the afternoon.
“Summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century’s opening decade,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That’s by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.”
The reason? Sunspot activity has dwindled. There have only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar cycle.
“The sun’s surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun’s 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century,” reports one science blog.
Since the sun, and not carbon dioxide, is the principle driver of climate change, a dearth of sunspot activity would herald a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare and contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age during which Europe and North America were hit by bitterly cold winters and the Thames river in London completely froze.
Long-time man-made global warming advocates NASA assure us that significant sunspot activity will return in 2012, but a recent a paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, predicts that sunspots will all but vanish after 2015.
As we reported last week, the Armagh observatory, which has been measuring sun cycles for over 200 years. predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees over the next 20 years as solar activity grinds to a halt and the planet drastically cools down, potentially heralding the onset of a new ice age.
“Based on the past Armagh measurements, this suggests that over the next two decades, global temperatures may fall by about 2 degrees C — that is, to a level lower than any we have seen in the last 100 years….”Temperatures have already fallen by about 0.5 degrees C over the past 12 months and, if this is only the start of it, it would be a serious concern,” concludes David Watt.
Arctic Ice Grows 30 Per Cent In a Year Predictions of “ice free” summer for first time in history completely debunked
Alarmist scientists who predicted that the North Pole could be “ice free” this summer as a result of global warming have been embarrassed after it was revealed that Arctic ice has actually grown by around 30 per cent in the year since August 2007.
Back in June, numerous prominent voices in the scientific community expressed fears of a mass melting of the polar ice caps, including David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, who told National Geographic Magazine, “We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history].”
“This summer’s forecast—and unusual early melting events all around the Arctic—serve as a dire warning of how quickly the polar regions are being affected by climate change,” adds the article.
In February, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, told Xinhua, “If Norway’s average temperature this year equals that in 2007, the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away, which is highly possible judging from current conditions.”
As per usual, the reality has failed to match the hype of the climate doomsayers.
According to collated data from the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the University of Illinois, Arctic ice extent was 30 per cent greater on August 11, 2008 than it was on the August 12, 2007. This is a conservative estimate based on the map projection.
Blue pixels represent increased ice coverage over the North Pole in the year since August 2007.
The video below highlights the differences between those two dates,” reports The Register. “As you can see, ice has grown in nearly every direction since last summer – with a large increase in the area north of Siberia. Also note that the area around the Northwest Passage (west of Greenland) has seen a significant increase in ice. Some of the islands in the Canadian Archipelago are surrounded by more ice than they were during the summer of 1980.”
But what of the Antarctic down south? Figures tell us that ice coverage in the year since August 2007 has grown by nearly one million square kilometers.
As The Register article notes, “The Arctic did not experience the meltdowns forecast by NSIDC and the Norwegian Polar Year Secretariat. It didn’t even come close. Additionally, some current graphs and press releases from NSIDC seem less than conservative. There appears to be a consistent pattern of overstatement related to Arctic ice loss.”
The widow of a tabloid photo editor who died in the 2001 anthrax attacks insisted in a $50 million federal lawsuit filed years ago that the U.S. government was ultimately responsible for his death.
The widow of a tabloid photo editor who died in the 2001 anthrax attacks insisted in a $50 million federal lawsuit filed years ago that the U.S. government was ultimately responsible for his death.
Now that the FBI is pinning the blame on government scientist Bruce Ivins, the lawsuit brought by Maureen Stevens looks positively clairvoyant. And results of the FBI investigation could have a major effect on the outcome of her case.
“We were right all along,” Patrick Hogan, the son-in-law of Maureen and the late Robert Stevens, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “It seems to me it’s pretty much a slam dunk.”
Stevens was a photo editor at American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, Sun and Globe gossip tabloids, when he was exposed to anthrax that was mailed to AMI offices in Boca Raton. Stevens died Oct. 5, 2001, the first of five people to be killed and 17 others to be sickened in the anthrax attacks.
Two years later, Maureen Stevens filed her lawsuit. In it, she claims the U.S. government was negligent because it failed to safeguard strains of the deadly anthrax bacteria at the U.S. Army disease research center at Fort Detrick, Md.
The government, her lawsuit says, “owed a duty of care, the highest degree of care” in handling of anthrax and supervising employees who had access to it. Although she didn’t know it when the lawsuit was filed, Ivins was one of those employees, a microbiologist who was working on an anthrax antidote. Ivins committed suicide last week as he was being investigated.
“One of the real areas of satisfaction, if you can call it that, is that we’ve maintained all along this was an inside job,” said Richard Schuler, Maureen Stevens’ attorney.
The case is unique among the legal actions brought after the anthrax attacks, according to the lawyers involved. Employees of a postal facility in Washington, D.C., where two workers died, sued the Postal Service for allegedly failing to protect them, but a federal judge in 2004 ruled the service is immune.
If the federal government ultimately names Ivins as the anthrax attack perpetrator, Schuler said the government’s lawyers should drop their long battle and settle the lawsuit. He noted that another scientist wrongly implicated by the FBI in the plot, Steven Hatfill, recently was paid $5.8 million to settle his lawsuit against the Justice Department.
“It’s been a long road for this family,” Schuler said. “I hope somebody who has some authority will call us and make it right with this family.”
Maureen Stevens declined an interview request, deferring to her attorney. The lawsuit, also filed on behalf of the couple’s three grown children, seeks a maximum of $50 million in compensatory damages for the government’s alleged negligence in Stevens’ death. Schuler said that figure represents the upper reaches of a possible damage award or settlement.
Two of the Stevens children did not return phone messages or e-mails seeking comment Tuesday. Hogan, husband of daughter Heidi, said he’s hopeful that the FBI has its man in Ivins.
“It seems to me they botched this thing from the beginning. It was one of their own people,” Hogan said. “I’m just very happy that they actually found somebody.”
A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia is warning of upcoming global cooling due to lessened solar activity. The study, written by three Australian researchers, has identified what is known as a “spin-orbit coupling” affecting the rotation rate of the sun. That rotation, in turn, is linked to the intensity of the solar cycle and climate changes here on Earth.
The study’s lead author, Ian Wilson, explains further, “[The paper] supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 – 30 years.”
According to Wilson, the result is a strong, rapid pulse of global cooling, “On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 – 2 C.”
A 2 C drop would be twice as large as all the warming the earth has experienced since the start of the industrial era, and would be significant enough to impact global agriculture output.
Earlier this year, astronomers from around the world noted solar activity was suspiciously low; some began predicting global cooling at that time. Since then, activity has remained far below average, with it now being over two months since a single sunspot has appeared on the surface of the sun.
In May, a team of German climatologists published research stating that, due to “natural effects”, global warming would halt for up to 15 years.
The headlines last week brought us terrifying news: The North Pole will be ice-free this summer “for the first time in human history,” wrote Steve Connor in The Independent. Or so the experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado predict. This sounds very frightening, so let’s look at the facts about polar sea ice.
As usual, there are a couple of huge problems with the reports.
Firstly, the story is neither alarming nor unique.
In the August 29, 2000 edition of the New York Times, the same NSIDC expert, Mark Serreze, said:
“There’s nothing to be necessarily alarmed about. There’s been open water at the pole before. We have no clear evidence at this point that this is related to global climate change.”
During the summer of 2000 there was “a large body of ice-free water about 10 miles long and 3 miles wide near the pole”. Also in 2000, Dr Claire Parkinson at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center was quoted as saying: “The fact of having no ice at the pole is not so stunning.”
Secondly, the likelihood of the North Pole being ice free this summer is actually quite slim. There are only a few weeks left where the sun is high enough to melt ice at the North Pole. The sun is less than 23 degrees above the horizon, and by mid-August will be less than 15 degrees above it. Temperatures in Greenland have been cold this summer, and winds are not favorable for a repeat. Currently, there is about one million km2 more ice than there was on this date last summer.
So what is really going on at the poles?
The Tipping Point that wouldn’t tip
Satellite records have been kept for polar sea ice over the last thirty years by the University Of Illinois. In 2007 2008, two very different records were set. The Arctic broke the previous record for the least sea ice area ever recorded, while the Antarctic broke the record for the most sea ice area ever recorded. Summed up over the entire earth, polar ice has remained constant. As seen below, there has been no net gain or loss of polar sea ice since records began.
Last week, Dr James Hansen from NASA spoke about how CO2 is affecting the polar ice caps.
“We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes… The Arctic is the first tipping point and it’s occurring exactly the way we said it would,” he said.
Well, not exactly.
Hansen is only telling half the story. In the 1980s the same Dr Hansen wrote a paper titled Climate Sensitivity to Increasing Greenhouse Gases, in which he explained how CO2 causes “polar amplification.” He predicted nearly symmetrical warming at both poles. As shown in Figure 2-2 from the article, Hansen calculated that both the Arctic and Antarctic would warm by 5-6 degrees Centigrade. His predictions were largely incorrect, as most of Antarctica has cooled and sea ice has rapidly expanded. The evidence does not support the theory.
In an interview with Bloomberg’s Jim Efstathiou Jr., Barack Obama’s energy adviser, Jason Grumet, said if elected Obama will classify carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant. Obama will tell the Environmental Protection Agency that it may use the 1990 Clean Air Act to set emissions limits, according to Grumet, and he will likely do this immediately upon taking office, David Bookbinder, chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club told Bloomberg.
A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia is warning of upcoming global cooling due to lessened solar activity. The study, written by three Australian researchers, has identified what is known as a “spin-orbit coupling” affecting the rotation rate of the sun. That rotation, in turn, is linked to the intensity of the solar cycle and climate changes here on Earth.
noworldsystem.com 