I’ve been avoiding this story (Magnetic polar shifts cause massive global super storms) for awhile, hoping it would simply die, but people keep asking me about it, and I see it appearing on other blogs, so I suppose I’ll have to address it. Mainly what I want to do is present facts about it and let readers make up their own minds.
There has been a lot of worry and hype on this subject. Part of it is fueled by the silly “2012” thing. Some it has been fueled by people who had been primed for “space storms” in solar cycle 24, such as in this Fox News video:
Many people still haven’t got the memo that solar cycle 24 is now forecast by NASA (after a number of forecast reductions) to be about as quiet as the Dalton Minimum, with a peak sunspot count of 59 in their latest forecast. They hear that the protective Earth’s magnetic field may flip/deplete from one source, remember the hype over the upcoming solar cycle, and worry that we are going to get toasted. I assure you, we will, when the sun turns into a red giant a couple billion years from now, but let’s not worry about that.
In the meantime, yes, at some point the Earth’s magnetic field will flip. Compasses will point south instead of North. According to the best science we have this happens frequently on Earth (in the scale of geologic time). And, as we know, the sun’s magnetic field appears to reverse its polarity on the advent of each new solar cycle, about every 11 years. The sun doesn’t wink out or get stormy when this happens, nor can we as humans detect any earthly change when this occurs. It’s essentially imperceptible to us.
As for earth, it’s magnetic field also flips, but not nearly as often. About every 200,000-250,000 years. The last one occurred 780,000 years ago, so the period is not constant. This is to be expected in a chaotic system. Below, see the magnetic record timeline as derived from rocks:
More on the magnetic timeline here. Looking at the long term record, magnetic field reversals are rather common. So, as far as Earth goes, it is “business as usual”. It probably would say: “Nothing to see here, move along.” if asked. I’ll point out that life continued through all of this. And, as far as I know, no scientist has linked extinctions to reversals. The Wikipedia article has this to say:
Because the magnetic field has never been observed to reverse by humans with instrumentation, and the mechanism of field generation is not well understood, it is difficult to say what the characteristics of the magnetic field might be leading up to such a reversal.
Some speculate that a greatly diminished magnetic field during a reversal period will expose the surface of the Earth to a substantial and potentially damaging increase in cosmic radiation. However, Homo erectus and their ancestors certainly survived many previous reversals, though they did not depend on computer systems that could be damaged by large coronal mass ejections.
There is no uncontested evidence that a magnetic field reversal has ever caused any biological extinctions. A possible explanation is that the solar wind may induce a sufficient magnetic field in the Earth’s ionosphere to shield the surface from energetic particles even in the absence of the Earth’s normal magnetic field. Another possible explanation is that magnetic field actually does not vanish completely, with many poles forming chaotically in different places during reversal, until it stabilizes again.
There’s a NASA story on the wandering magnetic North pole from 2003 that is instructive, I’m repeating part of it below:
===============================================================
Scientists have long known that the magnetic pole moves. James Ross located the pole for the first time in 1831 after an exhausting arctic journey during which his ship got stuck in the ice for four years. No one returned until the next century. In 1904, Roald Amundsen found the pole again and discovered that it had moved–at least 50 km since the days of Ross.
The pole kept going during the 20th century, north at an average speed of 10 km per year, lately accelerating “to 40 km per year,” says Newitt. At this rate it will exit North America and reach Siberia in a few decades.
Keeping track of the north magnetic pole is Newitt’s job. “We usually go out and check its location once every few years,” he says. “We’ll have to make more trips now that it is moving so quickly.”
Earth’s magnetic field is changing in other ways, too: Compass needles in Africa, for instance, are drifting about 1 degree per decade. And globally the magnetic field has weakened 10% since the 19th century. When this was mentioned by researchers at a recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, many newspapers carried the story. A typical headline: “Is Earth’s magnetic field collapsing?”
Probably not. As remarkable as these changes sound, “they’re mild compared to what Earth’s magnetic field has done in the past,” says University of California professor Gary Glatzmaier.
Sometimes the field completely flips. The north and the south poles swap places. Such reversals, recorded in the magnetism of ancient rocks, are unpredictable. They come at irregular intervals averaging about 300,000 years; the last one was 780,000 years ago. Are we overdue for another? No one knows.
Left: Magnetic stripes around mid-ocean ridges reveal the history of Earth’s magnetic field for millions of years. The study of Earth’s past magnetism is called paleomagnetism. Image credit: USGS. [more]
According to Glatzmaier, the ongoing 10% decline doesn’t mean that a reversal is imminent. “The field is increasing or decreasing all the time,” he says. “We know this from studies of the paleomagnetic record.” Earth’s present-day magnetic field is, in fact, much stronger than normal. The dipole moment, a measure of the intensity of the magnetic field, is now 8 × 1022 amps × m2. That’s twice the million-year average of 4× 1022 amps × m2.
To understand what’s happening, says Glatzmaier, we have to take a trip … to the center of the Earth where the magnetic field is produced.
At the heart of our planet lies a solid iron ball, about as hot as the surface of the sun. Researchers call it “the inner core.” It’s really a world within a world. The inner core is 70% as wide as the moon. It spins at its own rate, as much as 0.2° of longitude per year faster than the Earth above it, and it has its own ocean: a very deep layer of liquid iron known as “the outer core.”
Right: a schematic diagram of Earth’s interior. The outer core is the source of the geomagnetic field.
Earth’s magnetic field comes from this ocean of iron, which is an electrically conducting fluid in constant motion. Sitting atop the hot inner core, the liquid outer core seethes and roils like water in a pan on a hot stove. The outer core also has “hurricanes”–whirlpools powered by the Coriolis forces of Earth’s rotation. These complex motions generate our planet’s magnetism through a process called the dynamo effect.
Using the equations of magnetohydrodynamics, a branch of physics dealing with conducting fluids and magnetic fields, Glatzmaier and colleague Paul Roberts have created a supercomputer model of Earth’s interior. Their software heats the inner core, stirs the metallic ocean above it, then calculates the resulting magnetic field. They run their code for hundreds of thousands of simulated years and watch what happens.
What they see mimics the real Earth: The magnetic field waxes and wanes, poles drift and, occasionally, flip. Change is normal, they’ve learned. And no wonder. The source of the field, the outer core, is itself seething, swirling, turbulent. “It’s chaotic down there,” notes Glatzmaier. The changes we detect on our planet’s surface are a sign of that inner chaos.
They’ve also learned what happens during a magnetic flip. Reversals take a few thousand years to complete, and during that time–contrary to popular belief–the magnetic field does not vanish. “It just gets more complicated,” says Glatzmaier. Magnetic lines of force near Earth’s surface become twisted and tangled, and magnetic poles pop up in unaccustomed places. A south magnetic pole might emerge over Africa, for instance, or a north pole over Tahiti. Weird. But it’s still a planetary magnetic field, and it still protects us from space radiation and solar storms.
Above: Supercomputer models of Earth’s magnetic field. On the left is a normal dipolar magnetic field, typical of the long years between polarity reversals. On the right is the sort of complicated magnetic field Earth has during the upheaval of a reversal. [more]
===========================================================
They didn’t seem very worried about it at NASA then. They were more worried about solar cycle 24 producing a lot of solar flares at the time, which would disrupt a lot of our new technology.
When a big CME heads toward earth, it can cause havoc, whether our magnetic field is strong or not. For example, in 1859, long before our worries about Earth’s magnetic field started, there was the Carrington event:
At 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, 33-year-old Richard Carrington—widely acknowledged to be one of England’s foremost solar astronomers—was in his well-appointed private observatory. Just as usual on every sunny day, his telescope was projecting an 11-inch-wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw.
Right: Sunspots sketched by Richard Carrington on Sept. 1, 1859. Copyright: Royal Astronomical Society: more.
On that morning, he was capturing the likeness of an enormous group of sunspots. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of blinding white light appeared over the sunspots, intensified rapidly, and became kidney-shaped. Realizing that he was witnessing something unprecedented and “being somewhat flurried by the surprise,” Carrington later wrote, “I hastily ran to call someone to witness the exhibition with me. On returning within 60 seconds, I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled.” He and his witness watched the white spots contract to mere pinpoints and disappear.
It was 11:23 AM. Only five minutes had passed.
Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Indeed, stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii.
Even more disconcerting, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted.
“What Carrington saw was a white-light solar flare—a magnetic explosion on the sun,” explains David Hathaway, solar physics team lead at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Notice, no mention in any of the historical reports of superstorm style bad weather, just unusual low latitude auroras and wacky telegraphs. Such an event will happen again in Earth’s history, we can be sure of it. From Wiki: “Ice cores contain thin nitrate-rich layers that can be used to reconstruct a history of past events before reliable observations. These show evidence that events of this magnitude — as measured by high-energy proton radiation, not geomagnetic effect — occur approximately once per 500 years, with events at least one-fifth as large occurring several times per century. Less severe storms have occurred in 1921 and 1960, when widespread radio disruption was reported”
Sure, it would be worse today if Earth’s magnetic field was weaker, but comparatively, the terrestrial magnetic field is a wimp and get’s pushed around by the sun anyway:
Now compare that story to what our buddy Caca Kaku has been saying:
But for now, the reality of solar cycle 24 is far less worrisome:
Adding to some of the media hype worry, the north magnetic pole is on the move. In fact, as Luboš Motl has recently pointed out, it has been accelerating in its movement. According to this 2009 NatGeo story, it is now on the move by about 40 miles per year towards Siberia:
There was the recent story about runways at Tampa International Airport having to be renumbered because the compass heading has changed. It also added to the worry and hype about the Earth’s magnetic field. Well, it is a story that is likely to be repeated in the years to come, as the pole drifts even more. At some point the FAA may just decide it isn’t worth trying to keep up with, and make runway numbers reflect GPS headings (based on true north) instead.
And that’s not the only effect. Soon, many USHCN and GHCN ASOS station in the USA will be out of alignment with magnetic north. Yes that’s right, they are aligned perpendicular to magnetic north, like this US Historical Climate Network climate monitoring station in Minneapolis, MN:
As far as I can tell, that’s about the only significant “climate disruption” we are going to see.
There’s of course the possibility that a weaker magnetic field might provide for some increased thunderstorm development, such as this linkage between Forbush decreases and thunderstorm electricity, but there doesn’t appear to be any strong linkage to synoptic scale storm formation that we know of. The issue of the sun modulating cosmic ray passage to Earth which is a different issue altogether.
Now compare what has been presented above to the article in Helium that everyone is concerned about:
(Magnetic polar shifts cause massive global super storms)
On the heels of the lashing the British Isles sustained, monster storms began to pummel North America. The latest superstorm—as of this writing—is a monster over the U.S. that stretched across 2,000 miles affecting more than 150 million people.
Yet even as that storm wreaked havoc across the Western, Southern, Midwestern and Northeastern states, another superstorm broke out in the Pacific and closed in on Australia.
The southern continent had already dealt with the disaster of historic superstorm flooding from rains that dropped as much as several feet in a matter of hours. Tens of thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed. After the deluge bull sharks were spotted swimming between houses in what was once the quiet town of Goodna.
Shocked authorities now numbly concede that some of the water may never dissipate and have wearily resigned themselves to the possibility that region will now contain a small inland sea.
But then only a handful of weeks later another superstorm—the mega-monster cyclone Yasi—struck northeastern Australia. The damage it left in its wake is being called by rescue workers a war zone.
Do you recognize the writing style? Let’s look at a similar example.
We have recently been told that these storms were caused by “man-made global warming”, let’s listen to Al Gore:
As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming:
“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.”
“A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.”
There’s a catastrophe prediction on every street corner it seems:
Me, I’m not worried about the magnetic field flipping any more than I am about the sun turning into a red giant. It’s out of my hands. The best you can do is to adopt the old Boy Scout motto: Be prepared.
For what, I’m not sure, so I don’t worry too much. Nature so far has allowed life to go along on this planet, mostly unabated for millions of years. Sure, we could get squished like a bug tomorrow by an asteroid, but can we do anything about that if we know today?
Bobby McFerrin had it right:
I ain’t sayin nothing cept Maxwell was right.
KooKoo Kaku needs to go back to graduate school. And if I were being more snarky than that, I would have mentioned a less lofty endeavor, like maybe high school.
[snip – religion, link bombing – off topic ~mod]
The original article is interesting stuff but as many say somewhat OTT; and I suggest the spin from bodies such as NASA, while not undervaluing their data, is more connected with spin for funding rather than connected with the spin of the Earth.
It was stated: “The Earth’s northern magnetic pole was moving towards Russia at a rate of about five miles annually. That progression to the East had been happening for decades. Suddenly, in the past decade the rate sped up. Now the magnetic pole is shifting East at a rate of 40 miles annually, an increase of 800 percent. And it continues to accelerate.”
One could equally observe that 5 miles a year is not much in terms of your diagram of the magnetosphere and neither is 8 times that. Anyway IF this is crucial we should have seen a wave of superstorms over the last ten years rather than last week. However as we all know – re CO2 warmists’ inane claims – the numbers of large storms or any sort of storms has NOT increased in the last decade compared with previous decades.
While the Earth’s magnetic field and more importantly sun-earth linkages are very important for weather extremes the approach of this article confuses snow storms /Tropical Cyclones on time scales of days with slow changes over millennia. A snow storm isn’t an ice age – even if they are both coming!
The article says: “One of the most stunning signs of the approaching Ice Age is what’s happened to the world’s precessional wobble”
Are you sure? Did the Chandler wobble stop in the last ice-age? Could one equally state “One of the most stunning signs of the approaching Ice Age is what happened last week in Egypt”!! And by the way maybe Egypt did ‘stop’ in the last ice age?!
As a matter of interest I with others from WeatherAction did point out at a meeting in the Institute Of Physics, London, in 2004 that during ice ages the warming and cooling spikes appear to coincide with the magnetic pole moving towards / away from the geographic pole, however this is on time scales of thousands of years not weeks.
It seems to me that by far the biggest drivers of storms and cold blasts, rather than these small changes you talk about are matters of sun-earth magnetic connectivity and solar activity which change in sign / by factors of THOUSANDS (AND which in turn CHANGE the Earth’s magnetic field – so the article is confusing cause with common effect as indeed do 90% of the sacred cows of ‘climate science’).
A quick look at data suggest that the most favorable periods for such extreme events (irrespective of Chandler’s or any wobble) is during the ODD-EVEN solar cycle minima or more especially the rising part of Even solar cycles – ie ‘NOW’ (meaning years around present), subject to lunar modulations which are also ‘NOW’ helping – see Queensland floods and the eclipse cycle article which includes a fab pic
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews11No1.pdf
The advent of those two superstorms WAS predicted by WeatherAction and was driven by events on the sun and extra open-ness of the magnetosphere to solar plasma.
These events do indeed herald more to come – in line with our prediction of June 2010 that there would be a whole lot of super-extremes in the coming year or so.
Please see the other article – Solar Climate Change – here for WHAT THE SUN DID and upcoming DATES of more ETs (Extra Top red Weather Warnings) this month and consequent thundersnow-blizzards in the USA:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=7169 and also What the Sun did…
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews11No3.pdf
Piers Corbyn, WeatherAction long range weather & Climate forecasters.
The north magnetic pole moves on an annual (secular motion), and also on a daily variation of up to 80 km (diurnal motion)
It is important to realize that the position of the North Magnetic Pole given for a particular year is an average position. The Magnetic Pole wanders daily around this average position and, on days when the magnetic field is disturbed, may be displaced by 80 km or more. Although the North Magnetic Pole’s motion on any given day is irregular, the average path forms a well-defined oval. The diagram shows the average path on disturbed days.
The Sun constantly emits charged particles that, on encountering the Earth’s magnetic field, cause electric currents to flow in the ionosphere and magnetosphere. These electric currents disturb the magnetic field, resulting in a temporary shift in the North Magnetic Pole’s position. The size and direction of this shift varies with time, in step with the magnetic field fluctuations. Since such fluctuations occur constantly, the Magnetic Pole is seldom to be found at its “official” position, which is the position in the absence of magnetic field fluctuations.
http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/geomag/nmp/daily_mvt_nmp_e.php
[snip – religion – off topic ~mod]
” So, the start of a new Ice Age is marked by a magnetic pole reversal, increased volcanic activity, larger and more frequent earthquakes, tsunamis, colder winters, superstorms and the halting of the Chandler wobble. Unfortunately, all of those conditions are being met.”
Wrong in so many ways…
” the start of a new Ice Age is marked by a magnetic pole reversal”
The last magnetic pole reversal occurred approximately 780,000 years ago;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_reversal
Since then there have been 5 major ice ages;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
none of which were “marked by a magnetic pole reversal”.
” increased volcanic activity”
Not according to the Global Volcanism Program at the Smithsonian:
http://www.volcano.si.edu/faq/index.cfm?faq=06
http://news.discovery.com/earth/are-volcanic-eruptions-increasing.html
” larger and more frequent earthquakes”
Not according to the US Geologic Survey;
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/increase_in_earthquakes.php
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/year/graphs.php
or the British Geological Survey:
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/highlights/earthquakeActivity.html
” larger and more frequent ” ” tsunamis”
There does appear to be an increase in measured Tsunami activity , ” The long-term rate of global tsunami occurrence is approximately 7.4 events/year over this period of the catalog. This rate fluctuates, however, with a prominent rate increase in the mid-1990s for a period of about 3 years, when as many as 18 tsunamis occurred in a one-year period. Another rate increase began in 2005 and is continuing to the present day at approximately 11 events/year averaged over the 6-year time period.”
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AGUFM.S33B2091G
However, this increase in tsunami activity measured could be associated with improvements in tracking and measurement capabilities since record keeping began in 1946, as well as natural fluctuations unrelated to geomagnetic activity.
“colder winters”
Since when? Certainly not as compared to the Little Ice Age:
http://www.eh-resources.org/timeline/timeline_lia.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
More recently looking the UHA temperature record;
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_Jan_2011.gif
the only colder winters seem to be since 2008, in comparison to the slight warm period from 2001 – 2007. This slight cooling hardly seems to portend a coming Ice Age.
” superstorms”
“Global Tropical Cyclone activity is at 33-year lows”:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/08/global-tropical-cyclone-activity-is-at-33-year-lows/
What “superstorms”?
“halting of the Chandler wobble.”
The Chandler Wobble continues unabated:
http://nasadaacs.eos.nasa.gov/articles/images/2010_gps_colordata.gif
http://nasadaacs.eos.nasa.gov/articles/2010/2010_gps.html
There does appear to be some interesting behavior by the Chandler Wobble in 2005; “It has been known for some time that the phase of the Chandler Wobble jumped by 180 degrees in the 1920s, but a new study by scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences has found that the same thing also happened in 1850 and 2005.”
http://www.physorg.com/news171094752.html
however since this also apparently occurred in 1850 and the 1920’s, it is nothing new and obviously the previous occurances did not portend the beginning of an Ice Age.
In summary, the conclusion of the author that, “the start of a new Ice Age is marked by a magnetic pole reversal, increased volcanic activity, larger and more frequent earthquakes, tsunamis, colder winters, superstorms and the halting of the Chandler wobble. Unfortunately, all of those conditions are being met.” appears almost completely erroneous.
Also, in terms of the wandering poles, this page includes current maps and data:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/GeomagneticPoles.shtml
Dave Springer says:
February 7, 2011 at 9:58 am
Be prepared… how exactly?
I would recommend a good pocket knife.
Gibbs Rule #9.
When I saw this as the lead article being linked to on Climate Depot and I read the article, my first though was that Marc Marano would have been much better off to have passed this sort of conspiracy theory “ooga booga” over.
Whilst I know it is entirely feasible and indeed the Earth does periodically reverse it’s polarity, the article that I saw read like a loony was predicting the end of the world and Marano was giving it place of prominence. To me it cheapened what is otherwise a good blog and reference for numerous articles. You were right to resist this as long as you did Anthony and I believe you have approached it in a much more sensible way.
The first YouTube video link is to a NASA video hacked up by the Planet X/Nibiru lunatic crew. The first minute or so is untouched, but the rest is the kind of fringe conspiracy theory fantasy that is way out of place for this blog!
Hi folks,
Would someone help me out here? I’m having a hard time figuring out how we can have a solid core surrounded by liquid metal considering the temperatures involved and so on. What is the theory explaining this please? (hoping for a concise/brief answer, not looking for hard core details, if you’ll forgive the pun!). Thanks in advance for replies!
re post by: JJ says:
February 7, 2011 at 12:11 pm
JJ, thanks for the chuckle!! Good one!
Aaaaahaaaaa, me hearties!
Box that compass,
Swing that ship,
If we don’t get it right,
O’er world’s edge we’ll slip.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass#Compass_balancing
I’m with Long John Silver. GPS, but not Galileo, which is being built for the French military and is financed by the Boiling Frog funding method . People should make themselves aware of gradual change, lest they suffer eventual undesirable consequences.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/01/built-on-lie.html
It is because of SUPERB posts like this one that I SYSTEMATICALLY read WUWT and that I do not read SYSTEMATICALLY other skeptical blogs. It seems some people on the skeptic side, in good faith, were wrong in giving credit to the magnetic pole reversal story. Well, WUWT did not fell into that error. Instead Mr Anthony Watts wrote an extremely clear, well documented and very interesting -that’s important too!- post on why we should question the magnetic reversal disaster story.
I think this shows why WUWT should be voted BEST SCIENCE BLOG IN THE PLANET.
Leif Svalgaard says:
February 7, 2011 at 5:29 pm
………..
‘Magnetic north pole’ is suppose to be in the Arctic Ocean. It is not. It is in Siberia, until mid 1990’s was in the Hudson Bay.
Current magnetic bifurcation in the NH is temporary (soon to disappear) , with the HB vortex loosing its strength and a strong rise in the Siberian one.
For anyone doubting above, consult ETH (Zurich), or NOAA, the latest 2010 map you can see here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TIF.gif
All fluids are subjects to the same physical laws. Circulation in the Earth’s interior is due to rotation, thermal convection and tectonic plates movement, in the same way as the Earth’s rotation and thermal convection causes a hurricane vortex in the atmosphere.
How do you explain reversals with the latest cylinder hypothesis?
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/JC.gif
they are suppose to be catastrophic.
According to my hypothesis that is not the case, just drifting of the vortices around the globe, no catastrophe!
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MF.htm
Andy Jackson’s lecture to AGU shows that the ‘science is not settled’. He thinks LOD is due to magnetic break, exactly as I suggested.
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm10/lectures/lecture_videos/GP43C.shtml
And what about 6 year period oscillation in the Earth’s magnetic field?
Have you an answer to that one?
I do, it will be soon on my website.
Bubbagyro,
Thank you for pointing out that the North pole is actually the South pole.
We who live in Australia have always known that we live at the top of the world, and that our cyclones rotate in the correct direction. We also drive on the correct side of the road. Reversing the magnetic field of the world would show all those in the miss-named Northern Hemisphere which is the true way up. Thanks to WUWT for a very enlightening and entertaining blog.
wayne Job says:
February 8, 2011 at 2:15 am
Bubbagyro,
Thank you for pointing out that the North pole is actually the South pole.
We who live in Australia have always known that we live at the top of the world, and that our cyclones rotate in the correct direction.
OK, OK. And next you’re gonna claim that your AC power is negative half of the time because you use a cosine wave instead of a sine wave to calculate Maxwell’s Law.
Good thing that Newton pushes up the beer down there towards the bottom of the can or we’d all be in trouble. 8<)
Check out the amazing correlation between the shift of earth’s magnetic poles and global temperatures. I had this published in Energy and Environment and you can download it from my website http://www.akk.me.uk/Climate_Change.htm. And if anyone wants it they can have my spreadsheet to check out the data. Interestingly the poles shift may not be the cause if another paper is correct that links the drifts of the magnetic poles to ocean currents.
Your, or USGS in reality, diagram showing how global magnetic reversals show in the rocks was the one of the solid pieces of evidence proving Plate Tectonics.
Most of my teevee viewing is selected programmes recorded from Nat Geo, Discovery, Science, History. I have grown increasingly impatient and put off by the constant drumbeat of catastrophism on all of these channels. All the “Nostradamus says…”, “the Mayans say…”, “an earthquake or island collapse or supervolcano or comet strike or asteroid strike or global warming or tsunami or field reversal or CME or gamma ray burst is going to kill us all” chatter on these shows has completely turned me off to watching them. I can’t wait for December 22, 2012 to dawn to shut them up for a while! Maybe those dreadful “When We’re Gone” shows will finally be taken out of rotation.
Here are scientists, researchers, the supposedly learned heads of our modern world stooping to participate in reportage which is as lurid and sensationalised as anything you’d find in The Enquirer or on TMZ. These are the people our societies in the West have learned to depend on for the guidance to solve problems and now a sizable portion of them are doing the “Chicken Little” dance for fame and fortune on teevee. It’s not a comforting situation at all.
The fact is that most of the supporters of the current man-made climate change paradigm are cut from the same bolt of cloth – for short I call them all catastrophists. They’re all fixated on the worst possible outcome from any situation. Talk about any possible problem and they immediately move toward “The End Is Near” in responce.
I’d like it if we could cut through the histrionics and sensationalism, but I guess that’s not ‘good teevee’ and doesn’t sell adverts at a fast enough clip.
There was a lady sun scientist on UK TV a couple of days ago saying the same stuff as Kaku, that this solar cycle will be way stronger than expected.
Where are they getting this from? Neither gave details.
PS. Has anyone tried reading the “TIMELINE OF REVERSALS” with a bar-code reader? Perhaps the answer lies within ….
vukcevic says:
February 8, 2011 at 1:16 am
Have you an answer to that one?
I do, it will be soon on my website.
Every complicated question has a simple answer which is wrong.
Rational Debate,
We now have a Google for basic research, you don’t need to interrupt a thread for that.
seeing as bees birds and fish DO navigate by natural magnetic influences I do think there may be some bearing on wildlife, we humans also are affected by polarity surely.
the MRI units work on it, to look into us, so anyone out there considering that small increments may have an effect in truth.
I do NOT go with the mass fear fluff the kacked it chaps pushing, but it is a real issue regardless.
maybe check out
http://www.iceagenow.com for a look also.