Lots of people talking about this article in the UK daily Mail:
A near miss for Earth: Solar flare that could have knocked out power, cars and phones came so close two weeks ago
- Earth has narrowly missed electromagnetic pulses caused by solar flares
- If they had hit, the pulses could have knocked out electrical equipment over continent-scale regions
An electromagnetic pulse that could have knocked electrical equipment over continent-scale regions barely missed Earth two weeks ago, it has been revealed.
Source: (h/t Jack Simmons)
But, not so fast…NASA’s Dr. Tony Phillips of Spaceweather.com writes:
Many readers are asking about a report in the Washington Examiner, which states that a Carrington-class solar storm narrowly missed Earth two weeks ago. There was no Carrington-class solar storm two weeks ago. On the contrary, solar activity was low throughout the month of July.
The report is erroneous.
The possibility of such a storm is, however, worth thinking about: A modern Carrington event would cause significant damage to our high-tech society.
There is even a recent SciFi movie revolving around the idea which seems to have gone straight to video:
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Joel Renfrew says: @ur momisugly August 5, 2013 at 4:25 am
I don’t advocate murdering people, but forced sterilization is a good idea and probably the only way to keep people from being murdered.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” ~ H.L. Mencken
As I said elsewhere the Eugenics Movement is still alive and well, it has just been rebranded. Of course it is “always for our own good.”
The eugenics movement Britain wants to forget
Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left’s closet: Socialism’s one-time interest in eugenics is dismissed as an accident of history. But the truth is far more unpalatable
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood – In Her Own Words
Examples:
We are to be bred like cattle to have the ‘Desired Characteristics’ and the evidence is out there if you bother to look.
Hospitals ‘paid millions to put patients on death pathway’ “Hospitals are being paid millions of pounds to reach targets for the number of patients put on a controversial pathway for the withdrawal of life-saving treatment, according to data based on Freedom of Information requests.”
UK: DNA from millions of newborn babies is secretly stored on NHS database… without proper parental consent.
USA: The government has your baby’s DNA
… mandated by the government, it’s often done without the parents’ consent, according to Brad Therrell, director of the National Newborn Screening & Genetics Resource Center. In many states, such as Florida, where Isabel was born, babies’ DNA is stored indefinitely, according to the resource center….”
UK takes step toward ‘three-parent babies’
8/05/13 RFID Chip Now Being Issued In Hanna, Wyoming As Part Of New “Obamacare” Plan: The “Obamacare” RFID chips are currently being given a test run…
Joel:
Forced sterilization is not a good idea. Research China, and their one-child laws. See how well that worked out. Now extrapolate that to zero. Personally, I don’t WANT to see rioting in the streets.
So what, people voluntarily off themselves and the remainder fight over their housing? Is this how you see it going down? Honestly, you really have no idea how humans work, so I have to assume you’re very young. Relatively painless, hey? Who is doing the work? Presumably the remainder are remaining because they’re wealthy, so who cleans their houses, builds and repairs their cars, houses, office buildings? They’re not going to do it themselves, they’re wealthy and unused to manual labor.
So, during this massive upheaval of humanity that’s going on, and the complete collapse of the economy that you say won’t happen but everyone else knows will, who is growing food? Who is distributing it? Who has time to eat when they’re out rioting in the streets and fighting over the good real estate left vacant by the dearly departed?
So I presume that those “old people” (from your perspective that’s what, anyone over 30?) who fail to maintain their healthy status are euthanized, right? I remember this movie, it was called Logan’s Run.
And why on earth are all these young people taking in their elderly relatives? Aren’t there plenty of vacated urban spaces and houses lying around for the taking?
I agree with Patrick.
CodeTech says:
>
> So what, people voluntarily off themselves and the remainder fight
> over their housing? Is this how you see it going down?
You seem to be substituting your own fantasies for what I wrote. I
did not suggest that people voluntarily kill themselves; I said
that forced sterilization, which would result in a lower
population, would also result in more housing being available.
Nobody would be fighting over it – they would buy it.
> Honestly,
> you really have no idea how humans work, so I have to assume
> you’re very young. Relatively painless, hey? Who is doing the
> work? Presumably the remainder are remaining because they’re
> wealthy,
Why would they be wealthy? The forced sterilization would be done
randomly.
> so who cleans their houses, builds and repairs their
> cars, houses, office buildings? They’re not going to do it
> themselves, they’re wealthy and unused to manual labor.
You really think that disaster is just around the corner and that
any change means society grinds to a halt. Astonishing.
>
> The idea that the reduction will somehow make people starve is
> absurd; the amount of food produced in Europe and the European
> Diaspora is far more than is needed to feed us. Even if our
> population were one-tenth of what it is, we could easily produce
> enough food to keep us well-fed.
>
> So, during this massive upheaval of humanity that’s going on,
says who?
> and
> the complete collapse of the economy that you say won’t happen but
> everyone else knows will,
Who is this ‘everybody else’?
> who is growing food? Who is distributing
> it? Who has time to eat when they’re out rioting in the streets
> and fighting over the good real estate left vacant by the dearly
> departed?
What a diseased imagination you have. Truly fantastic.
>
> A higher ratio of old people to younger ones will be offset by
> the fact the a large part of the ‘old’ people are healthier than
> their peers of 100 years ago and can continue working, and will
> want to. In any case, younger people, unless they are psychopaths,
> take in their elderly parents and grandparents, do they not?
>
> So I presume that those “old people” (from your perspective that’s
> what, anyone over 30?) who fail to maintain their healthy status
> are euthanized, right? I remember this movie, it was called
> Logan’s Run.
Another example of you spouting your fantasies while thinking you
are replying to something I said.
>
> And why on earth are all these young people taking in their
> elderly relatives? Aren’t there plenty of vacated urban spaces and
> houses lying around for the taking?
>
> I agree with Patrick.
I don’t think you know what you agree with or what you are talking
about. If you are not just taking the piss, you really should stick
to coding; and whatever you do, never try to get into politics.
Joel, before any society accepts forced random sterilization, a BUNCH of other rights need to be taken away. Which, based on history, would lead to civil and revolutionary wars with much suffering world wide. Your premise is not thought out well and jumps through hoops that just would not be available in real world settings.
Joel:
If you – yourself – are not already sterilized, you need to be quiet on the subject of forcing others to kill their children, grandchildren, and great-children.
Then again, according to Darwin, forced sterilization of liberals and democrats and the poor would “improve the species” …. Right?
Carla says:
August 4, 2013 at 7:00 pm
u.k.(us) says:
August 4, 2013 at 6:20 pm
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
—
To hard to tell if that (Vuk failing 15) was Dr. S., best shot or not.
——————
==========
At risk of being dense, I would just like to clarify that my “comment” was directed at the sun 🙂
u.k.(us) says:
August 5, 2013 at 9:46 am
At risk of being dense, I would just like to clarify that my “comment” was directed at the sun 🙂
Does the Sun care?
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 5, 2013 at 9:48 am
u.k.(us) says:
August 5, 2013 at 9:46 am
At risk of being dense, I would just like to clarify that my “comment” was directed at the sun 🙂
Does the Sun care?
==============
What did you just say, I missed the meaning.
u.k.(us) says:
August 5, 2013 at 9:54 am
At risk of being dense, I would just like to clarify that my “comment” was directed at the sun 🙂
“Does the Sun care?”
What did you just say, I missed the meaning.
People care, sun does not, but perhaps I’m just being dense 🙂
CodeTech says: @ur momisugly August 5, 2013 at 6:31 am
Joel says:
You can tell Joel is young. If you are over 45 good luck finding a decent job. The old are now slated to become the ‘chiggers’ of the 21st century forced to take low pay part time jobs to supplement their retirement which is rapidly depreciating thanks to the FEDs inflation policy. The jobs they used to have are now taken by immigrants at lower wages. Many older folks are even forced to train their replacements.
In the Forbes article Economically, Could Obama Be America’s Best President?
I brought up John Williams of Shadowstat’s 22% unemployment rate. The author did not address what I said but when another person brought up the broken government unemployment statisitics another Forbes Contributor answered.
there was a reply from anoter Forbes contributor:
So because the baby boomers are being forced out of the market and can not find decent jobs “WE DON”T COUNT” Ain’t government logic great?
Notice how it is being “Blamed on Capitalism” yet John Williams explained how the Clinton Admin. changed how the statistics were calculated to hide the massive unemployment that would hit the USA from his ‘Free Trade’ Agreements (NAFTA and WTO) and from his policies of shipping US technology to China, Chasing the Dragon
Yup Yup it is all the fault of those nasty capitalists and if the Democrats are in bed with them… ERRRrrr move along nothing to see here.
….
Government also downplays inflation GRAPH The real problem is the USA is exporting our inflation and we got away with it because the US dollar is the World Reserve Currency. Now other countries are getting P.O.
Wall Street Journal: The Latest American Export: Inflation
June 14, 2013 Investors Avoid Bonds in the East and West: In a Reversal, Foreigners Sell Off U.S. Treasurys (That is US government Debt)
BRICS Nations Plan New Bank to Bypass World Bank, IMF
What will China’s decision to bypass the American dollar when trading oil mean?
Australia Enters Direct Currency Trading Agreement With China
The Real Numbers: Half of America in Poverty — and It’s Creeping Upward: The Census Bureau has reported that one out of six Americans lives in poverty. A shocking figure. But it’s actually much, much worse.
Why this matters:
In a 2011 article On Hyperinflation, Edward Harrison explains why the US is not looking at hyperinflation.
There have been rumblings from Russia and China about the US Dollar as World Reserve Currency. China Maneuvers To Take Away U.S.’ Dominant Reserve Currency Status and our trade deficit is high link
Currency revulsion is setting among other countries as I showed above.
Tax compliance was high in the U.S. by the The $2 trillion shadow economy is the recession’s big winner
An accountant just told me the US government is now making Accountants libel if their customers do not pay the correct tax….
………………………………
Why does all this gabbering on economic matter?
Because governments KNOW if the regulations are taxes become onus citizens retaliate by developing an underground economy. A Carbon Tax taxes that economy no matter what because economic activity depends on ENERGY.
[Check this phrasing please: ” Because governments KNOW if the regulations are taxes become onus citizens retaliate by developing an underground economy. ” Mod]
That’s an excellent post. I first thought there was a typo in the Forbes title: they put “best” when they clearly meant “worst”. It’s almost understandable, given that Forbes is a financial magazine. If you’re a stockholder with a reasonably big portfolio, you’ve done fairly well.
But in every other aspect of life – every other – we are considerably worse off now than we were 8 years ago. Almost every trip through an airport is a humiliating, degrading ordeal. (And now we learn that “Complaints against U.S. airport security workers up 26 percent in three years” (Reuters headline)). Businesses have cut back their workers’ hours to escape the burden of Obama’s health insurance regulations (I say “insurance” because there’s no actual health care involved). (This includes franchises like McDonalds.)
Because Washington likes to feel itself “more equal” than the rest of us, they’ve exempted themselves – and their staff – from the burden of Obama’s insurance law.
Across the country, cities are going bankrupt (partly due to years of local mismanagement).
Everyone suffers – either directly or indirectly – under hundreds of onerous regulations – Federal and local. Our foreign policy is in a shambles – an ambassador killed in Benghazi, along with some of his bodyguards; the administration has tried to cover that up ever since it happened. And now it seems likely that the CIA was doing a bit of gun-running in Benghazi. All the survivors, and most everyone involved, has been sworn to secrecy – even forbidden to talk to Congress, and given monthly lie-detector tests to insure compliance.
Those – and the points made in Gail’s post, are just the tip of the iceberg.
America is the Titanic.
Government is the iceberg.
@joel Renfrew
I’m gobsmacked, and nearly speechless. You think forced sterilization would be a good thing, and then you tell someone who clearly knows far more about the subject at hand then you that he/she shouldn’t go into politics?? It’s people like YOU going into politics that’s horrifying. There are reams of studies related to aging populations and the effect on economies – you clearly haven’t read any of them to speak of. You are living in a la-la land where you can make these massive changes and all will just be wonderful. It’s utter bunk and fantasy.
Just one example, how are all the elderly people who need care going to manage to move in with their kids, when you force sterilized them and they don’t HAVE any kids? Right now most of the first world nations already have less than replacement rate birth rates – and a heck of a lot of people don’t have kids. In the USA, for example, about 1 in 5 women who get a college degree never have kids, and 1 in 4 with advanced degrees.
And as others have said, who is going to do all the work, including continuing to produce all the food needed? There are already farm labor shortages, especially for things like working orchards.
And just how are you possibly going to implement forced sterilization without having mass rioting, civil wars, mass migrations? People will be fleeing countries who have implemented or are about to implement such a program for ones that haven’t yet – and I bet you’d get a massively increased birth rate too as people try to have babies NOW rather than waiting, for fear that they won’t be able to have them later. The economic and social upheaval would be horrendous.
As someone else already said: Unless you are already sterilized – by choice and not by accidental infertility – and I’ll go father and add your entire family too, then you have no business talking about this.
You desperately need to educate yourself better on this subject. Oh, and you asked who “everybody else” was that knew these would be massive problems… try almost everyone who’s at all educated, including economists.
But then, hey, we don’t have to worry about Joel’s forced sterilization – one big Carrington type event and it might just cause the great population decrease he wants in one fell swoop. Of course, we’ll all be living in the stone age again for awhile, those who survive.
Hi Leif,
Correct me please but wouldn’t we get some warning of a Carrington like event. We should see a large amount of plaque or sun spots in the area of which the event will take place. This should give us at least hours if not days to prepare, at least personally. Flares and CME just don’t happen without warning they have to come from a magnetically complex plaque or spot group.
Jim Arndt says:
August 5, 2013 at 11:50 am
Correct me please but wouldn’t we get some warning of a Carrington like event.
As you correctly point out, we would have days of warning. The problem is that most large and complicated spot groups do not result in a Carrington event, so we have way too many false positives. We are not [yet] in the position of being able to predict if a large group will actually produce a very large event. If one results, we have about 15+ hours of warning from solar observations and 15+ minutes from spacecraft. This is for the magnetic effect. The radiation and solar energetic particles [SEP] arrive so fast that we have almost no warning. The radiation arrives at the speed of light so we have no warning there, and the SEPs can move at up to more than 80% of the speed of light which could give us about 100 seconds of warning [the Sun being only 500 light-seconds distant], which does not help much.
I’ld be the first one to raise my cell phone up in hopes it would get fried.
If there’s a microwave oven handy, you could do a test run.
Pamela Gray says:
August 5, 2013 at 12:12 pm
I’ld be the first one to raise my cell phone up in hopes it would get fried.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I just leave the darn thing turned off most of the time. Drives hubby nuts. (I hate phones.)
Read a few comments, the one about Zimbabwe and inflation got my attention I always thought it was the bread basket of Africa “in the good old days”. For the rest for a while I thought I was checking out “The Blaze”.
If you think that millions would die from a two-week blackout then you should change your handle to “Irrational Db8”. Millions and millions would be terribly inconvenienced, and that is exactly the point.
But please do feel free to “wish for a re-alignment that’s a little less gruesome” since dreams, no matter how fantastic are still okay in a free society. So knock yourself out. I just prefer tough love to wishful thinking. It works better for alcoholics and druggies for example stopping them before they overdose or wrap the car around a tree or oncoming another car. Note that in this analogy the bloody conclusion is NOT the temporary blackout ( that’s the moment of clarity ), instead it is allowing them to succeed in boxing us in with a narrow range of inferior sources of energy, for example windmills, solar, geothermal, hydro and other magic while killing nuke, oil, coal and eventually gas which they will certainly get around to.
There’s a pretty good chance we’ll see a dry-run rehearsal pretty soon because up here in New York they are shutting down and converting coal plants to natural gas. Simultaneously they are attacking the one remaining Nuke plant that supplies over 1/3 of the juice to NYC. This follows the decades ago successful closing of the Shoreham Nuke plant 5 minutes after it was constructed by the previous Cuomo. They are setting us up for massive trouble later when Gas prices inevitably rise again or when the eco-terrorists tire of going after Nuke and Coal and decide to attack this other fossil fuel instead.
So as we follow the exact same path of most Euroweenies I look forward to a demonstrative reminder of our pre-industrial unspoiled garden of eden that the greenies so desire. It will be especially fun to watch our big cities, those islands of ivory towers like Manhattan fend for themselves in such a circumstance. Cities that stockpile spoiled arrogant elitists, produce nothing, and import everything, suddenly find themselves with a short supply of edible food and no power for their cellphones, and no signal even if they have a bunch of batteries lying around. Those that are still in the cities today will have no one to blame but themselves. Myself, I got out of Dodge long ago.
For the record, I for one do not believe the Armageddon tales of solar overload or man-made EMP anyway. Sure there will be lots of blown transformers and perhaps many dead small cheap DC circuit boards, and there is a lesson in this as well. We studied Tempest long ago and somehow managed to shove all that knowledge down a memory hole. After a global blackout that information will have to be dusted off and revisited.
@ur momisugly Blade says: August 6, 2013 at 6:45 pm
How do you figure it would be limited to a two week blackout? The estimates are far worse than that for a Carrington type event. And just how many do you think are likely to die if that two week blackout is in the middle of summer, especially with temperatures in the SW over 110 degrees and even nights often still above 100 by midnight or later…. or if it hit in the middle of the winter during a serious cold snap? How are people in these large cities supposed to get water during a complete blackout? How about all the residents in hospitals and nursing homes, you think they’d be fine during an extended blackout, especially those that have to have electric powered equipment to live? For argument’s sake, let’s say it is limited to two weeks. Are you ok then with thousands of extra deaths to provide your “teachable moment?” Tens of thousands?
@Rational Db8
Me? I’m not calculating anything! Two-weeks was what I said at most in that original comment you quoted and ran with.
Naturally the longer blackout is the worse are the effects, that’s simple. You ask how to estimate the deaths? Well why would you believe me or anyone else? I wouldn’t believe me or anyone else in this climate ( pardon the pun ). Estimates would be expected to match the amount of funding the estimator would be stealing from the taxpayer. They would most likely attribute anything and everything to a blackout including the “normal” daily death toll background noise.
Sure, in 110° heat people that are spoiled by fossil fuel generated air conditioning will suddenly relive the daily life of their great-grandparents. Likewise in winter it would really be a throwback since they will remember that their ancestors would be chopping down trees and throwing it into fireplaces now non-existent in their high-rise apartments. Perhaps it will then cross their tiny minds how we managed to do away with that old way of clear-cutting forests and slaughtering every animal in sight for food, coats and fuel by recycling long-dead lifeforms instead. That was the real “green” thing to do, and we did it quite by accident.
Education is the key. If they remain uneducated don’t be surprised by what comes next as they manually disassemble the industrial revolution piece by piece, accomplishing over a long period of time what a blackout will help simulate in an instant.
@ur momisugly Blade says: August 6, 2013 at 9:26 pm
Ok, then let’s compromise – we’ll go for a “teachable moment” that happens to come during relatively mild weather, and not longer that hospitals etc., have available fuel (or are able to get it) to run their generators. And the general population is able to get sufficient fluids so they don’t die of dehydration. That probably would help people get some decent sense of perspective in life that’s currently sadly missing – but without mass deaths.
It’s all a cover story for the real threat: overhead cometary explosions.