I wonder how long it will be before Al Gore tries to blame ball lightning on “dirty weather”? A neat video follows. From CSIRO:
Goodness, gracious, great balls of lightning
Sightings of balls of lightning have been made for centuries around the world – usually the size of a grapefruit and lasting up to twenty seconds – but no explanation of how it occurs has been universally accepted by science. Even more mysterious are sightings of balls of lightning forming on glass and appearing in homes and in aeroplanes.
CSIRO scientist John Lowke has been studying ball lightning since the sixties. He’s never seen it, but has spoken to eye witnesses and in a new scientific paper(paywalled at AGU, don’t bother) he gives the first mathematical solution explaining the birth of ball lightning – and how it can pass through glass.
Previous theories have cited microwave radiation from thunderclouds, oxidising aerosols, nuclear energy, dark matter, antimatter, and even black holes as possible causes. John disputes these theories.
He proposes ball lightning is caused when leftover ions (electric energy), which are very dense, are swept to the ground following a lightning strike. As for how they pass through glass, he says this is a result of a stream of ions accumulating on the outside of a glass window and the resulting electric field on the other side excites air molecules to form a ball discharge.
According to John ball lightning is rare, but it has been witnessed in Australia many times. People just don’t realise what it is when they see it.
NOTE: This video was provided by CSIRO in their press release. I don’t agree that all of the scenes in the video are relevant to the issue. Take it with a grain of salt. Anthony
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For the record, here is what I sent to CSIRO:
Dear Simon,
I’m writing to complain about what I consider a sloppy job related to this press release as it appears on Eurekalert:
Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres
Expalination for ball lightning
Australian scientists have unveiled a new theory which explains the mysterious phenomenon known as ball lightning.
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
Contact: Simon Hunter
61-395-458-412
1. The word Explanation is misspelled.
2. The title of the paper is not given, forcing anyone who wants to read it to have to figure out what it is by searching JGR.
3. The link to the paper immediately goes to a login page. Paywalls and press releases don’t work well together. At least provide the abstract if the paper is paywalled.
4. As I understand it, CSIRO is a publicly funded agency, so it would make more sense and be in the public interest to make a full copy of the paper available on the CSIRO website.
There has been a trend elsewhere for this sort of incompleteness in conveying science to the public, so I feel I must point it out.
Thank you for your consideration.
Anthony Watts
WUWT
Just go to a transmitter site during a thunder storm, we have a place here you have to sit on the wooden table if you are caught in the storm. From my experience it has never been the result of a strike but rather a charge in the air while the clouds are passing closely.
Ir. Geert C. Dijkhuis, my former physics teacher, was interested in the phenomena and its application in a cold-fusion energy reactor. Convectron N.V. was the company he founded (1983) based on that: http://www.convectron.eu/ .
I saw ball lightning while doing creel survey in a metal kicker on the Deshka river in 1993. It was preceded by regular lightning. It rolled around on the botton of a cloud like it was grid. Not quite a bolt. It had a tether to the cloud. Prob 20 seconds total. Maybe 30 ft across. About 800 ft up. Needless to say we got out of there.
The Real Reason:
In the far-flung future, it will be concluded that time travel is impossible, affirming the hypothesis that it must be impossible as the transmitting of information to the past will alter the future arising from the point of reception thus effectively destroying the future the information was sent from.
After decades of experiments, all that the historical records have shown as happening at the intended entry points with favorable electrical conditions was glowing orbs of varying intensity, transmitting no information but dissipating the remaining energy pulse.
Despite recommendations to cease immediately, government funding will continue for decades, as the consensus among chronal researchers is that to avoid Catastrophic Anthropogenic Chronal Change they must continue until the experiments have generated as many orb effects in the past as there should be to match the past that became the present future.
Skeptics point to the scarcity of observations and argue they cannot be used to determine a global mean for any particular time. Chronal researchers point to the literature they themselves have peer-reviewed that shows an observation at a single geographical location is representative of expected observations up to 1200 km away.
Skeptics argue that the researchers are creating effects where there were none before, altering the historical records. Researchers point to their computational models, which reveal more experiments will create more effects, thus even more experiments are required to account for the rising rate of effects.
Finally skeptics note the models have predicted far more effects which should have been observed than actually were. In an accidentally released message, noted chronal scientist K Trenberth 6 reveals they can’t account for the difference and it’s a travesty they can’t. In response to criticism and in defense of his research, Trenberth declares the models must be correct, the effects must have manifested somewhere, and Trenberth commences searching the deep ocean for evidence of his missing orbs.
Kadaka, beautiful analysis! I think you may have gotten one minor point wrong though: I believe it’s not Catastrophic Anthropogenic Chronal Change, but Catastrophic Anthropogenic Chronal Anomalies.
I.E., CaCa — nasty stuff!
– MJM
Well, my BS meter is flickering. Must be the ball lightning.
I don’t trust the video. Really bad PR. For starters, ball lightning generally appears during high-lightning-strike storms, yet there was no sign of such. And more suspicious signs. To me, that video is so bad, and the press release so bad, that I wonder if CSIRO have other motives than the obvious. The reports on the thread of people’s experiences are so much more real, and fit so much better to both commonsense and what I also remember reading about ball lightning in the past. Yes, I would expect Tesla to be on the case.
During the recend Lewandowsky fracas, I re-read Richard Hoagland’s story of the origin of the “Hoaxed Moon Landing” superstition – which he was lucky enough to have witnessed first hand, years before it had matured in the “collective unconscious” and gained traction. Hoagland describes, in “Dark Mission” how he saw the story being seeded – with the inexplicable (at the time) cooperation of the publicity manager at JPL. Later on he worked out plausible reasons.
I smell the possibility of another such an event here – as if someone wants ball lightning theories / research / whatever discredited. Too close to UFO’s perhaps.
Or perhaps, maybe I’m wrong.
I would not recommend wearing flipflops (probably called something else in the US) when welding.
John Marshall said October 20, 2012 at 3:25 am:
“Sandals” tends to refer to a better class of footwear, the cheap $1 things are still called flip-flops.
Some tried calling them something else, but “Kerrys” never caught on…
when I was a kid they were called “Thongs”. No more, alas.
No ball lightning in the Pacific NW, electrical storms are rare here, but I loved the fortean stories about it when I was a kid.
I think they are multidemionshional leaks caused by lightning. Seriously it suprises me it has taken so long to explain ball lightning. The explinations are about the same as 50 years ago
Please, a LOT of people preceded Tesla and MANY more have followed; The GREATEST asset he had was having a presence on two continents with access to technical events/progress on both and importantly in eastern and western Europe. In many, many ways he worked the ‘arbitrage’ angle on developing technologies (much like Steve Jobs did when he borrowed ‘concepts’ from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center when he first saw a GUI and ‘mouse’ demo’d) in his day. It took a smart cookie for him to recognize what he was seeing when he saw it, so, no slight on his abilities in that department.
I’m going to be honest with you now, because some of this ‘hero worship’ irks me to no end; Tesla was a man, a mortal, just like us, and put his pants on one leg at a time too, contrary to what one reads nowadays about the man on some websites. I would strongly urge you, plead with you, implore you to find out the honest truth about that technological time period in which he lived and get an honest mental picture of his contributions as well as what others were up to during that time period instead of continually foraging on the grist churned out by some writers and some websites (the ‘energetic forum’/free energy folks, bless their hearts, come to mind for one).
.
Only very few shots of what could be ball lightning in here. The clips with the clear skies and dancing lights are just airplanes coming in to land at a distant airfield. Here in Cambridge you can see such lights in the evening on a clear day from planes coming in to land and circling in parking orbits for Stansted and Luton airports (both about 50km away) and sometimes from the airbase at Mildenhall. The motion of such lights is exactly as seen in the clips.
My wife’s folks have a house on Boot Lake, near Eagle River, Wisconsin. The geology is glacial till atop crystalline bedrock, and its probably difficult to get an adequate ground on utilities in the area. My wife say they get ball lightning often during thunderstorms. It follows the old copper telephone wires in the area, Even if there is no obvious ball lightning during a thunderstorm, lightning will make the telephone ring. My wife says her mother, during lightning storms when the phone would ring, would instruct the kids “Don’t answer that!”
While in the Marines in the early 80’s I was stationed at MCAGCC Twentynine Palms, CA… a base in the Mojave with not much to recommend it at the time, but being set on the side of a substantial ‘mountain’ it had a sweeping view across many dozens of miles of sparsely- inhabited desert. Thunderstorms were not exactly common but during the three years I was there we saw a fair number of desert downpours with substantial lightning. I was there at the time as a at the Marine Corps Comm-Elect School; later I’d return there as an instructor.
Once during morning formation on the A Company parade deck, while a high storm was working its way along the opposing side of the valley, our entire unit formation was treated to what appeared to be a ball lightning strike on the valley floor, several miles away.
A large branched-lighting strike hit the ground, and immediately after, a brightly-glowing point of blue-white light, clearly visible in the overcast daylight, could be seen slowly moving along the valley floor for nearly a minute in more or less a random way. it could not be an afterimage as it stayed in place even when looking away, and several dozen people saw it clearly. It vanished abruptly, and several seconds later we heard a distant ‘bang!’
Watching that phenomenon was amazing; something I’ll never forget. If it hadn’t been seen by a large number of people, who just happened to all be lined up looking in the same direction as the same time (one of the joys of Marine life, standing in formation!) I would have doubted if it was real. Being witnessed by a few dozen budding electronics technicians, you can bet it was the hot topic of the day.