An international team of scientists have discovered a huge spike in radiocarbon levels 14,300 years ago by analysing ancient tree-rings found in the French Alps.
The radiocarbon spike was caused by a massive solar storm, the biggest ever identified.
A similar solar storm today would be catastrophic for modern technological society – potentially wiping out telecommunications and satellite systems, causing massive electricity grid blackouts, and costing us billions of pounds.
The academics are warning of the importance of understanding such storms to protect our global communications and energy infrastructure for the future.
The collaborative research, which was carried out by an international team of scientists, is published today (Oct 9) in The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences and reveals new insights into the Sun’s extreme behaviour and the risks it poses to Earth.
Such massive solar storms, are known as Myake Events and were unknown to science before 2012. As many as eight additional such solar storms have been identified over the past 15,000 years. The 14.3 kya event would be the most powerful yet identified.
The discovery of the 774 CE spike fostered new 14C measurement programmes on tree ring series from the Holocene at annual resolution. This is an enormous task since, before this discovery, tree-ring calibration had mainly been based on 14C ages measured on decadal wood sections. So far, four SEP spikes have been evidenced with multiple cosmogenic isotopes, 774 CE (1176 Cal BP), 993 CE (957 Cal BP), 2610 Cal BP, 9125 Cal BP) and a few others have been proposed based solely on 14C, 1052 CE (898 Cal BP), 1279 CE (672 Cal BP), 7210 Cal BP, 7360 Cal BP [17].
The largest, directly-observed, solar storm occurred in 1859 and is known as the Carrington Event. It caused massive disruption on Earth – destroying telegraph machines and creating a night-time aurora so bright that birds began to sing, believing the Sun had begun to rise. However, the Miyake Events (including the newly discovered 14,300-yr-old storm) would have been a staggering entire order-of-magnitude greater in size.
As disruptive as the Carrington Event was, Myake Events are an order of magnitude larger than the 1859 Carrington Event.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions vs Solar Storms
A repeat of the Carrington Event would be truly catastrophic to our modern, technology-dependent, society. A Myake Event might actually be an existential threat to life as we know it…. Yet…
Bard, a climate scientist at Collège de France and CEREGE, said learning about the sun’s past behavior is important for forecasting future solar storms, but also for understanding the sun’s impact on Earth’s climate. The sun’s effect on Earth’s climate is not as large as warming from greenhouse gas emissions, but it is a factor to consider in climate models.
As many as nine have been identified over the past decade.
The timing appears to be random, with an average interval of ~1,200 years.
Scientists have no idea if or how they affected the Late Pleistocene to Holocene climates.
The cause is unknown.
The frequency is unknown.
The Carrington Event, an order of magnitude weaker, would wreak havoc on modern society.
Yet… The “scientists” know that greenhouse gas emissions are more important to Earth’s climate than the Sun. The greenhouse effect depends on the Sun. Greenhouse gasses can’t “trap” heat that never reaches the surface of the Earth.
Myake Events and Neoglaciation?
Five Myake Events occurred during the Mid-Holocene Neoglaciation, with four clustered around the maximum glacial advance.
McKay et al., 2020 CPS with historical climate periods and Neoglaciation (Grosjean et al., 2007), with Myake Events.
Bard did note the 14.3 kya appears to have been followed by a 14 kya grand solar minimum that was coincident with the Older Dryas cooling between the Bølling and Allerød interstadials. Maybe, the Myake Event cluster was related to Neoglaciation?
Green New Deal = Anthropogenic Myake Event?
Let’s assume arguendo that “business as usual” will lead to an additional 1 °C of warming and 11 inches of sea level rise over the next 80 years. Most people won’t notice, because they didn’t notice the previous 1 °C of warming and 11 inches of sea level rise. Time is a serious low-pass filter.
This would leave a mark:
A Carrington class storm (see below) could inflict damage and disruption estimated at between $0.6-$2.6 trillion in the United States alone — 20 times the cost of Hurricane Katrina! Major transformer damage/failure and permanent loss of generator step ups nationwide would take 4-10 years to recover from. The loss of electricity would ripple across the social infrastructure with water distribution affected within several hours, perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours, loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, fuel re-supply and so on. At this point, that sounds apocalyptic, but one would be mistaken to assume that this is a rare occurrence.
Costs trillions and destroys our energy infrastructure? Sounds a lot like the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal might even be an anthropogenic version of a Myake Event. The main differences are that a Carrington/Myake Event would happen over a matter of days, and that the Green New Deal can be prevented.
The Flip Side
Hat tip to Yooper for this Daily Caller article:
Stunning New Discovery Is Going To Make Progressives Hate Science, And Should Terrify Conservatives
BLOG
KAY SMYTHE NEWS AND COMMENTARY WRITER October 12, 2023
A study published Monday detailed how a horrifying solar storm bombarded the Earth right around the end of our last major ice age.
[…]
So, why will progressives hate this research? Well, it’s complicated. But the simplest way to explain it is the data contributes to a much larger body of research that is starting to dispel the origin narrative on climate change, and may mean we’ve spent the last thirty years trying to fight the wrong battle. (RELATED: Dear Kay: I Watched ‘Ancient Apocalypse’ And Now I’m Scared We’re Going To Die Before 2025)
Some of you may have been forced to watch former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” back in the early part of this millennium. The premise of the film was this idea that roughly 12,900 to 11,600 years ago, a mini ice age occurred. And it’ll happen again because of man-made climate change.
What Gore failed to explain was the planet was in the thick of an ice age some 2.6 million years prior. For some unknown reason, around 14,000 years ago, ice sheets started to disappear in some parts of the world, as discussed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
If The Largest Asteroid Near Earth Hit Us, Here’s What It Would Look Like | @DailyCaller
Then, around 12,900 to 11,600 years ago, things got really cold again. This time period is called the Younger Dryas. And just as suddenly as it showed up, the Younger Dryas disappeared, likely because of an asteroid impact.
[…]
And conservatives: be scared. These same people have convinced you that climate change is not a threat. But it is. Just not in the way you’ve been told. We are now threatened by our ignorance toward the power of our cosmos, and the only thing that can change that is you.
That unsaid, the “Dear Kay” link was worse, citing Graham Hancock as a scientific source. Although, I do agree with her advice for weathering a Carrington-style event:
Under this type of cataclysm, all of the technology on Earth will fail within about an hour. We won’t be thrown back to the dark ages, but all of our electrical infrastructure might be. We’d be back to subsistence living, dependent on Mother Nature while societal chaos erupts… until it eases. You can easily prepare for such a calamity by working hard, buying land, working that land, storing water, growing essential medicines and foods.
In a recent conversation with researcher Jimmy Corsetti, he and I both agreed that the most important things you can do to survive any type of event like this is to ensure you live amongst a good, supportive community of neighbors, and to own a gun.
Bard Edouard, Miramont Cécile, Capano Manuela, Guibal Frédéric, Marschal Christian, Rostek Frauke, Tuna Thibaut, Fagault Yoann and Heaton Timothy J. 2023. A radiocarbon spike at 14 300 cal yr BP in subfossil trees provides the impulse response function of the global carbon cycle during the Late Glacial. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.3812022020620220206. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2022.0206
Grosjean, Martin, Suter, Peter, Trachsel, Mathias & Wanner, Heinz. (2007). “Ice‐borne prehistoric finds in the Swiss Alps reflect Holocene glacier fluctuations”. Journal of Quaternary Science. 22. 203 – 207. 10.1002/jqs.1111.
Kaufman, D., McKay, N., Routson, C. et al. Holocene global mean surface temperature, a multi-method reconstruction approach. Sci Data7, 201 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0530-7
The sun’s effect on Earth’s climate is not as large as warming from greenhouse gas emissions, but it is a factor to consider in climate models.
It’s a religion. You don’t argue with religions. You either believe in them or don’t.
Random events taking place with a low probability cannot be included in models. It would make them less reliable no more.
There is no indication that solar proton events have any significant event on climate. They have to be found in tree rings for the simple reason that they cannot be found in any climate proxy, not even ice cores.
It’s hard to spend a huge amount of wealth in proofing society against something that may not happen in a thousand years. The sensible thing would be to introduce changes in technology that make them more resistant to such an event. Over the next 200 years, all our technology will have been replaced.
The year without a summer was about 200 years ago and similar events have happened in the past millennia. It would be similarly wise to store materials, e.g., transformers and food. To help survive these events.
Electro-magnetic pulses from the sun and elsewhere have been studied by a Congresssional commission, and they say we could enhance our electric grid’s security and reliablitiy by spending about three billion dollars on upgrades and spare parts.
The commission made their findings public years ago and not much has been done since on securing out grid. The problem seems to be who will pay for it. The government wants the electric utilities to pay for it and the electric utilities want the government to pay for it.
As the article says, it would take years to rebuild the grid without replacement parts on hand. We should spend this three billion dollars improving the grid, whoever has to pay for it.
To me it makes more sense for the ratepayers to pay for it. They are the ones who directly benefit, and the amount they end up paying will be proportional to the amount of electricity they use. In other words, those who are most dependent on the grid pay the most.
If the taxpayers pay for it. Then the amount each person pays, will depend solely on how much they pay in taxes. Which may or may not have any relationship to how much they depend on the grid.
Of course the majority of people will support having the taxpayers pay for this, because that way they can push the majority of costs onto a small percentage of the population.
A significant list of to-do items have been identified that can make major improvements to human life on Earth for a tiny percentage of the wealth being squandered on wind and solar electricity projects. If this isn’t already on that list, it probably should be, although not neat the top in priority.
On the other hand, one of — if not the most — important responsibilities is national defense and survival of the nation. How do you run a country when only the military and government have diesel generators and the people are starving because the supply lines aren’t functioning? That’s assuming the diesel generators survive the EMP.
You just wonder why people live in caves or go underground during some periods in history. Also paint/carve strange abstract figures and see fire spewing dragons in the sky.
And what about the mega fauna ? Just human hunters ?
Sorry but your assertion that you either believe religions or you don’t is false. While people are free to believe what they want for whatever reason, that by no means requires blind faith either. Faith and reason work together in a belief system that is true.
strativarius
October 17, 2023 3:03 am
“understanding the sun’s impact on Earth’s climate.”
Surely, the role of the Sun in Earth climate is not in any doubt; it only occasionally messes up our microelectronics etc with an heaven sent EMP.
What happens if scientists attribute [some of the] warming to Sol? The gatekeepers go after it with a vengeance.
“How did the Romans manage to grow grapes in northern England when most climate studies suggest the weather was much cooler then? We may now have an answer: it wasn’t that cold at all. … Mann argues that Esper’s tree-ring measurements come from high latitudes and reflect only summer temperatures. “The implications of this study are vastly overstated by the authors,” he says.” https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22040-tree-rings-suggest-roman-world-was-warmer-than-thought/
And he is the leading expert on divine interpretation of the rings…
Have any of the ‘dendros’ ever published a definitive paper with a compelling theory of, and evidence for, temperature being the determining factor in tree ring width? Just looking at some of Eversource’s recent handiwork here in CT, I don’t see a lot of correlation between the ring widths on any given axis, e.g., north, and those along other axes of the same tree, let alone those of other trees. Has anyone ever done an independent study?
I have seen some data on tree ring growth vs temperature. I think it was for higher latitude pine-type trees at physiologically and climatologically relevant temperatures. They displayed a quadratic n-shaped curve.
Some temperature slightly offset from the optimum growth rate could represent two different temperatures.
Dendrochronology (or tree-ring dating) – note the “dating” part – has been and is a very helpful means of determining the precise age of wood samples.
As wood-thermometers, “not even wrong”.
I think they discovered a sunken vessel in the Scandinavian region a few years ago. They could tell when the trees grew and where from the rings. Apparently the trees were from Ireland. That meant there was some connection between Scandinavia and Ireland in the past that was unknown.
Ron Long
October 17, 2023 3:28 am
Yikes! David, rolling the dice on humanity? Carrington/Myake Events, a variety of Coronal Mass Ejection, appear to mostly affect the ionosphere and most strongly on the side toward the Sun, as the Ejection arrives. Sure, the Carrington Event caused Auroras all over the earth, at least as far as humanity was able to report at that time, but did not cause actual damage everywhere. I like my chances. I am a lot more worried about the Jim Jordan vote for House Speaker this afternoon. Go JIm! What a hoot if he is elected, the Dumbocrats voted to throw Mcarthy out and end up with Jordan, trading a negotiator for a bulldog.
The House Repubicans need to get their act together fast.
They are about to turn themselves into a Laughingstock, which will only help the radical Democrats in their efforts to hijack the United States government and destroy the U.S. Constitution.
Put aside your petty differences and look at the Big Picture, which is don’t help the radical Democrats because they are poison to our free society.
👍Absotively, the Rupubs better have a “ nice little talk” with those RINOs and make them a offa they can’t refuse.
rbabcock
October 17, 2023 3:28 am
When you are just 93 million miles away from a thermonuclear entity that weighs 4,385,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds give or take you are just asking for trouble.
“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
All the yak about a Miyake event plunging the world into a dark subsistance existence is bullshite.
First of all, we have monitoring that tells us when one of these events is presenting on the sun’s surface, so we have hours advance notice that a major solar storm is coming. Giving humanity warning to shut down sensitive equipment and power grids temporarily.
A solar storm cannot destroy electrical devices that are not operating, or that are shielded against EM. Given that we have plenty of warning to shut everything down, little that is important needs to be damaged at all.
Will there be disruptions due to a solar storm of EM? Sure, there will be idiot power grid operators who ignore the warnings, and have not hardened their grid systems to EM. But it won’t induce another stone age as the fear mongers claim. The disruption will be much smaller in impact, perhaps in worst case there would be the equivalent of another COVID disruption to supply chains making it difficult to get replacement TVs and wifi devices and such. As disruptive as COVID was, we got over it in a matter of months once the infection rate was brought under control with mass immunizations.
You never know they might actually notice the weather around them instead of every bad weather event from around the world. We can only hope once they get over the withdrawal symptoms.
I did not write that we are fully prepared – indeed I said the opposite that there are idiot grid operators who won’t be ready. But most will be, at least in the advanced nations like the US and EU.
Nobody ever ever claimed that duck and cover was full preparation for a nuclear war. It was simply one way of trying to survive a blast. Which most non-idiots, apparently unlike you, would prefer to simply not ducking and covering and immediately dying.
By the way, most of the residents of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings survived, and most did not have significant radiation damage to their bodies. For those who died or were severely injured, of course it sucked. But then conventional bombs killed far more people in Japan than were killed in the two nuclear bomb attacks.
Imminent CME arrival is first observed by the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, located at the L1 orbital area. Sudden increases in density, total interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) strength, and solar wind speed at the DSCOVR spacecraft indicate arrival of the CME-associated interplanetary shock ahead of the magnetic cloud. This can often provide 15 to 60 minutes advanced warning of shock arrival at Earth – and any possible sudden impulse or sudden storm commencement; as registered by Earth-based magnetometers.
15 to 60 minutes to process the nature of the threat, get the word out to grid operators and shut down in an orderly manner… Not getting a warm and fuzzy feeling.
A severe electromagnetic pulse (EMP) or geomagnetic disturbance (GMD) event could take the power grid down for months, and possibly even for years. An EMP is a very intense pulse of electromagnetic energy, typically caused by the detonation of a nuclear bomb or other high-energy explosive device. A GMD, meanwhile, can be caused when a solar eruption produces a coronal mass ejection (CME) that travels from the sun to the Earth. A direct hit by an extreme CME would cause widespread power blackouts disabling everything that uses electricity. Some experts have suggested that a major EMP or GMD hit could result in the death of up to 90% of the U.S. population.
What makes the event so devastating is that the U.S. power grid is not well-protected from such a strike, and the country is not prepared to recover quickly.
The question is: Should we, as a nation, spend the money to harden our infrastructure against CME’s and/or man-made EMP’s? I think it would be money better spent than on trying to prevent bad weather.
Every grid operator has been warned and trained. This is an extremely low probability event, of course, happening over timescales of multiple thousands of years. But shutting down a grid happens a lot faster than starting one up.
The induced currents in telegraph wires destroyed that system in the Carrington event. How would you shield transmission lines that suddenly become generators in a rapidly changing very strong electromagnetic field? Would circuit breakers be good enough to isolate transformers?
The Carrington event did not destroy the telegraph system.
How do you shield long transmission lines? You don’t, you put in fuses, surge protectors and circuit breakers. Which has for the most part already been done. It was needed to protect against lightning strikes, each of which, locally, can have much more energy than an EMP event.
If the voltage induced in a conductor rises high enough, the voltage can jump across gaps. 10,000 volts can jump 12 inches. The higher the voltage, the greater the required safe distance becomes.
High voltage systems have to be designed to prevent that sort of thing. Not the sort of thing you find outside of power companies or large industrial sites.
But voltage on the other hand is not constrained. Even a fuse, a breaker, or an air gap can be jumped by a spark of sufficient voltage.
On a cable, I would expect that an open circuit would lead to no damage, the sparks jumping the insulators at the towers or at the sub-stations. However, at a transformer, an open circuit, due to a breaker being open, may not be wide enough to stop a large spark jumping across the gap and frying the control and measuring equipment on the other side.
If you want to protect the equipment, then the solution is to open the power circuit AND earth the conductors to ground at multiple points. That way, the induced voltage is dissipated before it can do any damage.
I wonder if the preparation time, (30-90 minutes), would be enough to get the earthing in place. I think not.
It is my impression, from observing repair crews, that their is a large switch at at least some step-down transformers, to shut off the power to allow work on the lines or transformers. However, they appear to be manual, and there is no way to isolate each and every one in the country in the available time, especially if it happens on a holiday. The problem is one of not having enough spare transformers to swap out the one’s damaged.
Shut them all off, and nothing gets induced. A current can only be induced in a closed circuit – i.e., the devices and lines are connected. Pop breakers, and the closed circuit no longer exists.
For example, the major militaries across the world have all hardened their extremely vital and sensitive electronics from nuclear induced EMP – which is far stronger than any solar event – for many decades now.
Grid operators have been hardening their grids also for decades, against both EMP and a solar event. Space craft launched from earth routinely are subjected to strong solar fields, and they do just fine nearly all the time.
Again, as I wrote, not every operator will be well prepared or have hardened electronics, but the notion that we are all going to plunged into the stone age by such an event is simply preposterous.
Just like all the doomsday predictions of the change in the millenium … which turned out to be a total, near 100% dud.
But predicting disasters is great for media mouse clicks and ad sales, which is why they promote such doomsday BS., and way too many people believe it because they do not have the knowledge to understand that it’s BS.
And if you have say a power transformer in the circuit, opening the primary circuit doesn’t fully restrict induced current from flowing in the secondary.
A solar storm cannot destroy electrical devices that are not operating
Wishful nonsense.
As disruptive as COVID was, we got over it in a matter of months once the infection rate was brought under control with mass immunizations.
Yet more nonsense, any decent virologist that isn’t shilling for the drug cartels will tell you that mass vaccinations in the face of a pandemic forces viral mutations, which is exactly what happened with the gene modification injections.
Dude – I understand that you are a vaccine denier. But just look at the bottom line – before the vaccines were introduced and distributed, world wide COVID infections exploded by the tens of millions of confirmed cases. After most of the population (more than about 70%), COVID ceased to be a pandemic.
Cause, and effect. Proven beyond any shadow of any doubt except by the fact deniers of the world.
“After most of the population (more than about 70%), COVID ceased to be a pandemic.”
Poor Duane, refusing to avail himself to knowledge that is readily available over the Web with a good search engine:
“On May 5 [2023], WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced the end to the international public health emergency as worldwide cases of infection, hospitalizations and deaths continue downward. However, the organization has yet to reclassify COVID-19 from pandemic status.“
— https://www.osfhealthcare.org/blog/is-the-pandemic-over/
(my bold emphasis added)
“On 5 May 2023, more than three years into the pandemic, the WHO Emergency Committee on COVID-19 recommended to the Director-General, who accepted the recommendation, that given the disease was by now well-established and ongoing, it no longer fit the definition of a PHEIC. This does not mean the pandemic itself is over, but the global emergency it has caused is, for now. A Review Committee to be established will develop long-term, standing recommendations for countries on how to manage COVID-19 on an ongoing basis.
— https://www.who.int/europe/emergencies/situations/covid-19
(my bold emphasis added)
So COVID-19 is still classified by the World Health Organization to be an ongoing pandemic, even though it is no longer classified as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), which is the designation WHO assigned to it on 30 January 2020, prior to them officially declaring COVID-19’s outbreak to be a pandemic on 11March 2020.
By the way, your “any decent virologist” argument is utter nonsense and totally preposterous. Viruses always mutate, as long as they continue reproducing in hosts they continue to mutate. The rate of mutation is not the same for all viruses. The dangerous viruses are those that mutate fast.
The best cause of massively increasing the number of mutations is to let the virus infect everybody. Keeping the number of hosts limited is what reduces mutations, and that is what vaccinations do – train the body to kill the virus rather than let it take over the body.
“Keeping the number of hosts limited is what reduces mutations, and that is what vaccinations do.”
Well, earlier (October 17, 2023 12:15 pm) you posted: “Do you deny that once the vaccines became widely distributed (generally more than 70% of the population being innoculated) that COVID infection rates plummeted to a tiny fraction of what it was prior to vaccination?”
So why is that now humanity is facing these newest COVID-19 variants:
— Omicron XBB.1.5
— Omicron BA.2.75
— Omicron XBB.1.5
— Omicron DV.7.1
— Omicron BA.2.86
— Omicron XBB.1.16
(ref: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/variants-concern )
given that “more that 70% if the population” in the US has been inoculated against COVID-19 (your words)?
“karlomonte” appears to have semiconductor experience.
“Duane” appears to have power distribution experience.
The two areas are not the same. Distribution uses kilovolts AC, microprocessors like volts DC.Fuses are great until you have to replace them, sometimes with a soldering iron. Sometimes they are a little pit of charcoal on crumbled FR4.
Your ‘just in time’ management style won’t stop orbit locked satellites & always connected renewable infested electronic controlled grids frying with hours of a warning
Virtually all satellites and spacecraft are already hardened against solar EM radiation. How do you think satellites, especially those in either stationary orbit, and relatively unprotected by the atmosphere, and all spacecraft that enter deep space survive? They’re all exposed to solar EM all the time. The sun regularly emits radiation that can damage unprotected circuits in temporary pulses.
Solid state devices are especially vulnerable to x-rays. X-rays don’t induce electrical effects, they simply heat the semiconductor–sometimes to destructive temperatures. And there’s no protection from cosmic rays. Imagine having to program a computer where a random memory cell can go bad at any moment. When they send new programs to our robot spacecraft, they have to program around the bad memory cells.
“As disruptive as COVID was, we got over it in a matter of months once the infection rate was brought under control with mass immunizations.”
What utter, ignorant BS.
“Covid was the fourth leading cause of death in the United States last year, dropping from its place as the third leading cause in 2020 and 2021, when virus fatalities were superseded only by heart disease and cancer, the National Center for Health Statistics reported on Thursday.”
— https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/health/covid-deaths-2022.html
(note that that cited reference is a May 4, 2023 NYT article)
We have yet to see where COVID-19 ranks as a leading cause of death for CY2023, but all of the current PSAs related to COVID-19 indicate it will still be in the top-five.
Duane, once again, demonstrating his is a master of misinformation.
Do you deny that many tens of millions of people became infected prior to the distribution of the vaccines?
Do you deny that once the vaccines became widely distributed (generally more than 70% of the population being innoculated) that COVID infection rates plummeted to a tiny fraction of what it was prior to vaccination?
If you deny both of those, then you are probably one of those idiots who still believes Donald Trump won the 2020 election … and that he had the largest inauguration crowds ever, way bigger than Obamas … etc,. etc.
Duane,
Nice try, but now look at the data from Oz. The infections were very low BEFORE the vaccine roll out because of the limited travel, massive lock downs and mandated isolation requirements.
And then the vaccine was rolled out.
And then natural spread of the virus occurred. The peak infection was after the vaccine.
From my point of view, the vaccines did not prevent infection. It’s all a matter of timing and thankfully, natural immunity and defence. If you’d had the disease already, then like the common cold, you are then probably immune to that specific variant. Thedrop in infection that you mention is probably due to natural protection systems in the human body, preventing reinfection and less to do with the vaccine which, (as noted in Oz and also NZ), did not prevent infection.
Solar storms induce changes in the Earth’s magnetic field that in turn induce voltage differences within electronic devices. It doesn’t matter whether the device is on or not, if those voltage differences get too strong, the device will be destroyed.
That said, all electronic devices are shielded in order to prevent them from radiating EM energy. Devices that exist in EM noisy environments, such as cars, are shielded to prevent the car’s EM from disrupting their calculations.
Power lines are already protected against lightning strikes. Locally, the power and rise time of a voltage strike is many times greater than that can be generated by a Carrington event.
Yes, a Carrington event will affect the entire grid, not just one little spot like a lightning strike would, however the entire grid has been protected against lightning. Each of those surge protectors and fuses, would protect their own little piece of the grid, as they were designed to do, and the over all effect would be the entire grid being protected.
Current cannot flow except in a closed circuit. Open the circuit, and no current can flow, and no voltage spike can be induced in a non-energized circuit. That is why lightning hits where it hits – it requires a path to ground, provided by high ionization of things or people who provide that path to ground.
“That is why lightning hits where it hits – it requires a path to ground, provided by high ionization of things or people who provide that path to ground.”
Absurd. When lightning hits a lighting rod, any other metal structure, or any other substance having good electrical conductivity (e.g., sea water) that is “grounded” all of the tens of thousands of amps in the strike can be conducted along the path to ground without requiring any ionization of any ground path substance. In almost every lightning strike, it is only the air above the strike point that is ionized.
In fact it is even wrong to say that lightning “requires a path to ground”, witness cloud-to-cloud lightning bolts and the numerous time that aircraft in flight are struck by lightning . . . they certainly weren’t grounded at those times.
Sparks can fly with sufficient voltage differentials, and the lowest voltage need not be at 0 vdc or 0 vac.
Yes, almost all correct from MW. “It doesn’t matter whether the device is on or not, if those voltage differences get too strong, the device will be destroyed.”
I wanted to write something similar but the conversation is being thrown in a lot of charged directions at once. Thanks MW, at least one person “gets it”.
Hospitals are barely solvent now. They have not hardened their instrumentation or their power distribution. People will die if the power is dropped for hours/days. A lot of people…
The sun’s effect on Earth’s climate is not as large as warming from greenhouse gas emissions, but it is a factor to consider in climate models.
Almost all the energy that drives the climate comes from the sun. Whoever wrote the above quote, is stunningly illiterate.
About these solar events … do they cause mass extinctions or otherwise perturb the ecosystem? Why do they think such events might be dangerous to satellites?
Correct – the Sun is the main driver of climate and anyone trying to minimise that to blame CO2 should be wearing a white coat with buckles on the sleeves
Energy coming in, mostly comes from the sun. However it’s how the energy gets back out that drives climate.
Solar flares damage satellites by two means. Energetic particles can directly damage micro-scale circuitry. Rapid changes in EM fields can induce voltages in electrical components. Remember that the traces between electrical components are also metal and can act as antennas to pick up energy.
Another issue is a solar flare which heats the upper atmosphere, causing it to expand and increase drag on objects in low earth orbit.
The Carrington event affected the telegraph system because the wires between the telegraph stations were long. Shorter objects, like ships for instance, didn’t report effects.
The voltage developed along a wire depends on the rate of flux change and the length of the wire. As far as I can tell, the Carrington event didn’t produce rates of flux change sufficient to produce damaging voltage for a satellite’s electronics.
“The radiocarbon spike was caused by a massive solar storm, the biggest ever identified. ”
Is that the only possible cause? If so, is there enough data to be sure? Tree rings are small- and there can’t be many from that age.
And, what exactly does an EM do to electrical equipment to damage it? If we have our computers, TVs, etc. turned off, can they still be damaged? If it’s an electrical surge, and our UPS protect our computers?
The charged particles in a CME induce heavy currents and voltage spikes in electrical infrastructure – your 300 quid UPS or surge diverters won’t protect against this kind of induced inrush
Most of the charged particles are blocked by the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere.
Coronal Mass Ejections get you by causing a rapid distortion in the Earth’s magnetic field.
This rapid change in the magnetic field will induce a current in any piece of metal that is in that field.
Any equipment not adequately protected in a Faraday cage would be liable to damage. Leave your laptop on the table, even switched off, and it would fry. More extreme EMPs will cause substantial atmospheric heating: part of the principle of nuclear weapons designed to generate an EMP. Just your household wiring would generate enough to destroy anything plugged in. Fuses would probably be too slow. The effects would be like a direct hit by lightning into the circuits.
Surge protectors will protect against surges coming in from the grid, but that isn’t the only way that an EMP can damage electronics.
Any change in an EM field will cause a voltage spike in any length of metal.
If the length of metal is long enough, or the EM change is large enough/fast enough, the level of voltage being generated can be enough to damage the electronics.
That being said, all electronics are already shielded to prevent EM radiation from escaping. Any shielding that works to prevent EM from escaping, will also work to keep EM from penetrating.
The amount of shielding any electronic device is provided with will depend on how much power the device consumes. The more power it uses, the more EM it will generate, and the more shielding it will need.
Any shielding that works to prevent EM from escaping, will also work to keep EM from penetrating.
Not necessarily. To save weight and cost of materials, the minimum RF shielding for the expected working environment will be employed. There will probably be no magnetic shielding. EMP rejection is not a normal design requirement for civilian electronics.
May I pull out the old “Younger Dryas never happened” hypothesis again.
It says that the rapid drop in temperatures observed in the record around the Younger Dryas never actually took place at all. It is observed because a large radiation spike throws the dating out by a few thousand years and we see a bit of the last ice age in the wrong place.
It is an outrageous hypothesis but it keeps getting just enough peripheral support to not go away.
“May I pull out the old ‘Younger Dryas never happened’ hypothesis again.”
Well, here is what the “prestigious” (hah, hah!) IPCC has to say about the clearly-identified-via-paleoclimatology Younger Dryas transient: “The central Greenland ice core record (GRIP and GISP2) has a near annual resolution across the entire glacial to Holocene transition, and reveals episodes of very rapid change. The return to the cold conditions of the Younger Dryas from the incipient inter-glacial warming 13,000 years ago took place within a few decades or less (Alley et al., 1993). The warming phase, that took place about 11,500 years ago, at the end of the Younger Dryas was also very abrupt and central Greenland temperatures increased by 7°C or more in a few decades (Johnsen et al., 1992; Grootes et al., 1993; Severinghaus et al., 1998)”
— http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/074.htm
The scientific “jury” is still out as to what was the root cause of the Younger Dryas transient period in Earth’s climate history.
It’s so rapid, in and out, that’ it’s unique.
Of course, other such events may not have the resolution in to see how fast their transitions were.
Or maybe, we are looking at something else…
Someone
October 17, 2023 8:25 am
“A Myake Event might actually be an existential threat to life as we know it”
It happened 14.3 kyr ago, and the life “as we know it” appears to be just fine…
My point was that the claim about “an existential threat to life as we know it” implies some global mass extinction of epic proportions, similar to dinosaur end. Not to say that the Sun could not do something like this once in a while, but the event 14.3 kyr ago certainly did not.
No. It implies that a Myake Event could irrevocably change life as we currently know it.
as we know it
As something is currently understood or viewed. This phrase usually implies that current conditions will change, as, for example, “Nuclear warfare will mark the end of civilization as we know it.” First recorded in the late 1800s, the phrase began to be widely used from the 1940s on and has reached cliché status.
Life, as we currently view it, includes electricity and all the other wonders of modern technology. Going without electricity for a week temporarily alters one’s lifestyle.
A severe electromagnetic pulse (EMP) or geomagnetic disturbance (GMD) event could take the power grid down for months, and possibly even for years. An EMP is a very intense pulse of electromagnetic energy, typically caused by the detonation of a nuclear bomb or other high-energy explosive device. A GMD, meanwhile, can be caused when a solar eruption produces a coronal mass ejection (CME) that travels from the sun to the Earth. A direct hit by an extreme CME would cause widespread power blackouts disabling everything that uses electricity. Some experts have suggested that a major EMP or GMD hit could result in the death of up to 90% of the U.S. population.
What makes the event so devastating is that the U.S. power grid is not well-protected from such a strike, and the country is not prepared to recover quickly.
Going without electricity for months or years would end a lot of lives and life, as we know it, might not ever recover to where it was before the Myake Event.
An extinction level event, ends life. It wipes out entire species. A mass extinction event takes out entire genera, groups, families and even phyla.
Well, if we continue down The Green New Deal path, we might not notice the change in “life as we know it”. 😎
Kenwd0elq
October 17, 2023 8:57 am
An “existential” threat? No, these massive flares are not a threat to human life. We know, because humans were all over the Earth when the last several hit, and we’re still here.
Humans have only been dependent on electricity for about 100 years. Here’s what I wrote in context:
A repeat of the Carrington Event would be truly catastrophic to our modern, technology-dependent, society. A Myake Event might actually be an existential threat to life as we know it….
Life, as I know it, is heavily dependent on electricity.
A Carrington class storm (see below) could inflict damage and disruption estimated at between $0.6-$2.6 trillion in the United States alone — 20 times the cost of Hurricane Katrina! Major transformer damage/failure and permanent loss of generator step ups nationwide would take 4-10 years to recover from. The loss of electricity would ripple across the social infrastructure with water distribution affected within several hours, perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours, loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, fuel re-supply and so on. At this point, that sounds apocalyptic, but one would be mistaken to assume that this is a rare occurrence.
Life as we know it is very much dependent on agriculture as we know it.
Agriculture as we know it is very much dependent on energy as we know it.
Without electricity, fuel for farm equipment quickly runs out.
Without fuel, farmers are suddenly dependent on draft animals.
At present, most farmers have few if any draft animals, nor does their current equipment easily adapt to being pulled by draft animals.
It will take hundreds of generations to breed up enough draft animals for all of the current farmers.
michael hart
October 17, 2023 10:01 am
“So, why will progressives hate this research? Well, it’s complicated.”
Out of the mouths of babes….
MarkW
October 17, 2023 10:29 am
We’d be back to subsistence living,
If that were to happen, I bet that nobody would stop to ask if a critter was on the endangered species list, before popping it into the cooking pot.
“An international team of scientists have discovered a huge spike in radiocarbon levels 14,300 years ago by analysing ancient tree-rings found in the French Alps.”
The question that comes to my mind is what effect these events might have on the fertility of wildlife? Could this event have triggered the disappearance of many large animals?
Nah. Just a bunch of squirrels upset that they can’t get to Amazon.com to get in queue for a new batch of cell phones. “What do yo mean there’s no f$$@*! base station linear power amplifier! Well crap I guess I’ll just go hide more acorns from the 8 billion hungry bipeds.”
KevinM
October 17, 2023 12:20 pm
I thought tree rings were for measuring temperature anomalies.
Tree rings are primarily used to estimate the age of trees. The number of rings is correlative to the number of years a tree has lived. Climate parameters are inferred from changes in the widths of the rings.
In this case, 14C anomalies were identified in fossil trees. Estimating the age of the tree when the solar storm occurred was relatively straight-forward, Estimating when the tree died was more complicated. Put the two together and you get an estimate of the calendar year in which the solar storm occurred.
Jim Masterson
October 17, 2023 12:30 pm
“The sun’s effect on Earth’s climate is not as large as warming from greenhouse gas emissions, but it is a factor to consider in climate models.”
Remember when they used to say weather (and climate) were caused by the Sun?
I’m not a geologist like our author, but I think the heating of decaying radioactive elements in the Earth’s interior would probably keep its temperature more than a few degrees above absolute zero. But that internal energy would go away eventually.
macromite
October 17, 2023 1:03 pm
Just woolgathering David, but would a Myake Event have any explosive effect on lithium ion batteries? Would Teslas and their ilk be exploding left and right? Mobile phones? Or would they just fry like the rest of the electronics?
“The sun’s effect on Earth’s climate is not as large as warming from greenhouse gas emissions, but it is a factor to consider in climate models”
How can people get away with saying things like this?
John Hultquist
October 17, 2023 1:37 pm
I check the site: spaceweather dot com
. . . every morning to see if I should put on my aluminum foil hat.
Sleeping in the hat is a problem so if this solar storm threatens
before breakfast, I’m toast. 🙂
Seriously, have a look. Near the top center there is a daily update on solar activity.
My goodness there are so many stupifyingly stupid statements made stupidly in that. Not by you Mr. Middleton, but in the excerpts you wisely chose to show the ignorance and demagoguing the climateteers are capable of.
It is troubling that the lead author of this excellent paper made the comment about the Sun being a climatic non-factor.
Bob Weber
October 18, 2023 3:16 pm
I’m at this year’s Sun-Climate Symposium in Flagstaff, now one hour away from my poster session…
During the past two days we had the pleasure of hearing about the Bard et al paper from several speakers, including the imminent geophysicist Timothy Jull, Irina Panyushkina, and Fusa Miyake, for whom these events are named, who all presented many tree ring derived cosmogenic records from solar energetic particle events (flares, CMEs, ie electric weather events) discovered in tree ring data.
Modern SEP events are less able to be seen in the carbon-14 data such as the Feb 1956 event, which produced a measly 0.2% increase in carbon-14 because of the masking effect of atmospheric atomic bomb tests which spiked carbon-14 significantly above background level, still above pre-test levels.
There is a shift after solar cycles of about 3 years in tree carbon-14 due to the global carbon cycle.
Jull mentioned the oldest wood samples so far come from European bogs in the Rhine Valley, and the oldest in the US are from California at 8ky old.
If anyone has wood older than 15ky in their backyard bog, you may have important cosmogenic data.
As far as technology readiness for SEP events, this was covered by NOAA at the 2018 AGU meeting.
It’s a religion. You don’t argue with religions. You either believe in them or don’t.
Random events taking place with a low probability cannot be included in models. It would make them less reliable no more.
There is no indication that solar proton events have any significant event on climate. They have to be found in tree rings for the simple reason that they cannot be found in any climate proxy, not even ice cores.
It’s hard to spend a huge amount of wealth in proofing society against something that may not happen in a thousand years. The sensible thing would be to introduce changes in technology that make them more resistant to such an event. Over the next 200 years, all our technology will have been replaced.
The year without a summer was about 200 years ago and similar events have happened in the past millennia. It would be similarly wise to store materials, e.g., transformers and food. To help survive these events.
Electro-magnetic pulses from the sun and elsewhere have been studied by a Congresssional commission, and they say we could enhance our electric grid’s security and reliablitiy by spending about three billion dollars on upgrades and spare parts.
The commission made their findings public years ago and not much has been done since on securing out grid. The problem seems to be who will pay for it. The government wants the electric utilities to pay for it and the electric utilities want the government to pay for it.
As the article says, it would take years to rebuild the grid without replacement parts on hand. We should spend this three billion dollars improving the grid, whoever has to pay for it.
I forgot to put the link in there:
http://www.empcommission.org/
In other words the ratepayers pay for it or the taxpayers do.
To me it makes more sense for the ratepayers to pay for it. They are the ones who directly benefit, and the amount they end up paying will be proportional to the amount of electricity they use. In other words, those who are most dependent on the grid pay the most.
If the taxpayers pay for it. Then the amount each person pays, will depend solely on how much they pay in taxes. Which may or may not have any relationship to how much they depend on the grid.
Of course the majority of people will support having the taxpayers pay for this, because that way they can push the majority of costs onto a small percentage of the population.
That’s the same divide and conquer strategy that allows road tolls.
A significant list of to-do items have been identified that can make major improvements to human life on Earth for a tiny percentage of the wealth being squandered on wind and solar electricity projects. If this isn’t already on that list, it probably should be, although not neat the top in priority.
Who picks?
On the other hand, one of — if not the most — important responsibilities is national defense and survival of the nation. How do you run a country when only the military and government have diesel generators and the people are starving because the supply lines aren’t functioning? That’s assuming the diesel generators survive the EMP.
You just wonder why people live in caves or go underground during some periods in history. Also paint/carve strange abstract figures and see fire spewing dragons in the sky.
And what about the mega fauna ? Just human hunters ?
Sorry but your assertion that you either believe religions or you don’t is false. While people are free to believe what they want for whatever reason, that by no means requires blind faith either. Faith and reason work together in a belief system that is true.
“understanding the sun’s impact on Earth’s climate.”
Surely, the role of the Sun in Earth climate is not in any doubt; it only occasionally messes up our microelectronics etc with an heaven sent EMP.
What happens if scientists attribute [some of the] warming to Sol? The gatekeepers go after it with a vengeance.
“A high profile scientific journal is investigating how it came to publish a study suggesting that global warming is down to natural solar cycles. “
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2209895-journal-criticised-for-study-claiming-sun-is-causing-global-warming/
Which begs the question…
“How did the Romans manage to grow grapes in northern England when most climate studies suggest the weather was much cooler then? We may now have an answer: it wasn’t that cold at all.
…
Mann argues that Esper’s tree-ring measurements come from high latitudes and reflect only summer temperatures. “The implications of this study are vastly overstated by the authors,” he says.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22040-tree-rings-suggest-roman-world-was-warmer-than-thought/
And he is the leading expert on divine interpretation of the rings…
“Study reveals that Mann’s Bristlecone pine trees may not be good “treemometers” after all”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/14/study-reveals-that-manns-bristlecone-pine-trees-may-not-be-good-treemometers-after-all/
The general rule appears to be tree rings can only be trusted when they agree with the narrative.
Bingo!
Have any of the ‘dendros’ ever published a definitive paper with a compelling theory of, and evidence for, temperature being the determining factor in tree ring width? Just looking at some of Eversource’s recent handiwork here in CT, I don’t see a lot of correlation between the ring widths on any given axis, e.g., north, and those along other axes of the same tree, let alone those of other trees. Has anyone ever done an independent study?
Answer to your question is “I doubt it”.
I have seen some data on tree ring growth vs temperature. I think it was for higher latitude pine-type trees at physiologically and climatologically relevant temperatures. They displayed a quadratic n-shaped curve.
Some temperature slightly offset from the optimum growth rate could represent two different temperatures.
Dendrochronology (or tree-ring dating) – note the “dating” part – has been and is a very helpful means of determining the precise age of wood samples.
As wood-thermometers, “not even wrong”.
I think they discovered a sunken vessel in the Scandinavian region a few years ago. They could tell when the trees grew and where from the rings. Apparently the trees were from Ireland. That meant there was some connection between Scandinavia and Ireland in the past that was unknown.
Yikes! David, rolling the dice on humanity? Carrington/Myake Events, a variety of Coronal Mass Ejection, appear to mostly affect the ionosphere and most strongly on the side toward the Sun, as the Ejection arrives. Sure, the Carrington Event caused Auroras all over the earth, at least as far as humanity was able to report at that time, but did not cause actual damage everywhere. I like my chances. I am a lot more worried about the Jim Jordan vote for House Speaker this afternoon. Go JIm! What a hoot if he is elected, the Dumbocrats voted to throw Mcarthy out and end up with Jordan, trading a negotiator for a bulldog.
That will be awesome, assuming he wins.
My main worry is that 8-10 RINO’s join with all the Commies to install someone like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger.
The House Repubicans need to get their act together fast.
They are about to turn themselves into a Laughingstock, which will only help the radical Democrats in their efforts to hijack the United States government and destroy the U.S. Constitution.
Put aside your petty differences and look at the Big Picture, which is don’t help the radical Democrats because they are poison to our free society.
👍Absotively, the Rupubs better have a “ nice little talk” with those RINOs and make them a offa they can’t refuse.
When you are just 93 million miles away from a thermonuclear entity that weighs 4,385,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds give or take you are just asking for trouble.
Or a bit of warmth!
You do realise that poundage was reducing as you were typing?!
There you go, trying to be all scientificky.
Indeed.
“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
+42×1042
An answer worthy of “Deep Thought”
You left out the -1 at the end.
I’ll take it on advizement but I’m all doomed out just at present. Besides it’s time to hit the beach before it’s doomed again-
WATCH: This hidden Aussie beach only ‘appears’ every seven to 10 years – 9Travel (nine.com.au)
Who gets our blame for that?
Not who, what
And we all know the answer to that question – the magic molecule
Trump?
All the yak about a Miyake event plunging the world into a dark subsistance existence is bullshite.
First of all, we have monitoring that tells us when one of these events is presenting on the sun’s surface, so we have hours advance notice that a major solar storm is coming. Giving humanity warning to shut down sensitive equipment and power grids temporarily.
A solar storm cannot destroy electrical devices that are not operating, or that are shielded against EM. Given that we have plenty of warning to shut everything down, little that is important needs to be damaged at all.
Will there be disruptions due to a solar storm of EM? Sure, there will be idiot power grid operators who ignore the warnings, and have not hardened their grid systems to EM. But it won’t induce another stone age as the fear mongers claim. The disruption will be much smaller in impact, perhaps in worst case there would be the equivalent of another COVID disruption to supply chains making it difficult to get replacement TVs and wifi devices and such. As disruptive as COVID was, we got over it in a matter of months once the infection rate was brought under control with mass immunizations.
We’re fully prepared just like the bomb practice when you see the flash and curl up under the desk in the foetal position and kiss yer ass goodbye-
Mobile phones banned from today in all NSW public high schools | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site
“This means teachers and students are focusing on teaching and learning with no interruptions.”
Ah, so they can spend even more time on the fake climate crisis in lessons….
You never know they might actually notice the weather around them instead of every bad weather event from around the world. We can only hope once they get over the withdrawal symptoms.
I did not write that we are fully prepared – indeed I said the opposite that there are idiot grid operators who won’t be ready. But most will be, at least in the advanced nations like the US and EU.
Nobody ever ever claimed that duck and cover was full preparation for a nuclear war. It was simply one way of trying to survive a blast. Which most non-idiots, apparently unlike you, would prefer to simply not ducking and covering and immediately dying.
By the way, most of the residents of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings survived, and most did not have significant radiation damage to their bodies. For those who died or were severely injured, of course it sucked. But then conventional bombs killed far more people in Japan than were killed in the two nuclear bomb attacks.
Yeah, but Japan didn’t know how many nuclear bombs the US had.
But it did take two.
That is a non sequitur.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/coronal-mass-ejections
15 to 60 minutes to process the nature of the threat, get the word out to grid operators and shut down in an orderly manner… Not getting a warm and fuzzy feeling.
https://www.powermag.com/how-an-emp-or-gmd-could-destroy-the-power-grid-and-create-chaos/
The question is: Should we, as a nation, spend the money to harden our infrastructure against CME’s and/or man-made EMP’s? I think it would be money better spent than on trying to prevent bad weather.
Every grid operator has been warned and trained. This is an extremely low probability event, of course, happening over timescales of multiple thousands of years. But shutting down a grid happens a lot faster than starting one up.
The induced currents in telegraph wires destroyed that system in the Carrington event. How would you shield transmission lines that suddenly become generators in a rapidly changing very strong electromagnetic field? Would circuit breakers be good enough to isolate transformers?
Ask him if he knows what a CMOS gate oxide is.
The Carrington event did not destroy the telegraph system.
How do you shield long transmission lines? You don’t, you put in fuses, surge protectors and circuit breakers. Which has for the most part already been done. It was needed to protect against lightning strikes, each of which, locally, can have much more energy than an EMP event.
Exactly, Mark. The point being electrical current can only be induced in closed circuits. Open the circuits and voila, no current.
Which is why most electrical equipment today is protected by breakers or fuses, and has been for more than a century.
If the voltage induced in a conductor rises high enough, the voltage can jump across gaps. 10,000 volts can jump 12 inches. The higher the voltage, the greater the required safe distance becomes.
High voltage systems have to be designed to prevent that sort of thing. Not the sort of thing you find outside of power companies or large industrial sites.
Lightening can jump quit a large “gap”.
How many volts would a Cardington event induce in the grid?
No current. Correct.
But voltage on the other hand is not constrained. Even a fuse, a breaker, or an air gap can be jumped by a spark of sufficient voltage.
On a cable, I would expect that an open circuit would lead to no damage, the sparks jumping the insulators at the towers or at the sub-stations. However, at a transformer, an open circuit, due to a breaker being open, may not be wide enough to stop a large spark jumping across the gap and frying the control and measuring equipment on the other side.
If you want to protect the equipment, then the solution is to open the power circuit AND earth the conductors to ground at multiple points. That way, the induced voltage is dissipated before it can do any damage.
I wonder if the preparation time, (30-90 minutes), would be enough to get the earthing in place. I think not.
It is my impression, from observing repair crews, that their is a large switch at at least some step-down transformers, to shut off the power to allow work on the lines or transformers. However, they appear to be manual, and there is no way to isolate each and every one in the country in the available time, especially if it happens on a holiday. The problem is one of not having enough spare transformers to swap out the one’s damaged.
Shut them all off, and nothing gets induced. A current can only be induced in a closed circuit – i.e., the devices and lines are connected. Pop breakers, and the closed circuit no longer exists.
For example, the major militaries across the world have all hardened their extremely vital and sensitive electronics from nuclear induced EMP – which is far stronger than any solar event – for many decades now.
Grid operators have been hardening their grids also for decades, against both EMP and a solar event. Space craft launched from earth routinely are subjected to strong solar fields, and they do just fine nearly all the time.
Again, as I wrote, not every operator will be well prepared or have hardened electronics, but the notion that we are all going to plunged into the stone age by such an event is simply preposterous.
Just like all the doomsday predictions of the change in the millenium … which turned out to be a total, near 100% dud.
But predicting disasters is great for media mouse clicks and ad sales, which is why they promote such doomsday BS., and way too many people believe it because they do not have the knowledge to understand that it’s BS.
You need more EE study.
Voltage can be induced in any conductor, not just closed systems. Yes, I am an electrical engineer.
And if you have say a power transformer in the circuit, opening the primary circuit doesn’t fully restrict induced current from flowing in the secondary.
Wishful nonsense.
Yet more nonsense, any decent virologist that isn’t shilling for the drug cartels will tell you that mass vaccinations in the face of a pandemic forces viral mutations, which is exactly what happened with the gene modification injections.
Reminds me of how the climistas dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as working for the oil companies.
Dude – I understand that you are a vaccine denier. But just look at the bottom line – before the vaccines were introduced and distributed, world wide COVID infections exploded by the tens of millions of confirmed cases. After most of the population (more than about 70%), COVID ceased to be a pandemic.
Cause, and effect. Proven beyond any shadow of any doubt except by the fact deniers of the world.
And dude, I understand that you are just another clown.
Proven beyond any shadow of any doubt.
“After most of the population (more than about 70%), COVID ceased to be a pandemic.”
Poor Duane, refusing to avail himself to knowledge that is readily available over the Web with a good search engine:
“On May 5 [2023], WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced the end to the international public health emergency as worldwide cases of infection, hospitalizations and deaths continue downward. However, the organization has yet to reclassify COVID-19 from pandemic status.“
— https://www.osfhealthcare.org/blog/is-the-pandemic-over/
(my bold emphasis added)
“On 5 May 2023, more than three years into the pandemic, the WHO Emergency Committee on COVID-19 recommended to the Director-General, who accepted the recommendation, that given the disease was by now well-established and ongoing, it no longer fit the definition of a PHEIC. This does not mean the pandemic itself is over, but the global emergency it has caused is, for now. A Review Committee to be established will develop long-term, standing recommendations for countries on how to manage COVID-19 on an ongoing basis.
— https://www.who.int/europe/emergencies/situations/covid-19
(my bold emphasis added)
So COVID-19 is still classified by the World Health Organization to be an ongoing pandemic, even though it is no longer classified as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), which is the designation WHO assigned to it on 30 January 2020, prior to them officially declaring COVID-19’s outbreak to be a pandemic on 11March 2020.
By the way, your “any decent virologist” argument is utter nonsense and totally preposterous. Viruses always mutate, as long as they continue reproducing in hosts they continue to mutate. The rate of mutation is not the same for all viruses. The dangerous viruses are those that mutate fast.
The best cause of massively increasing the number of mutations is to let the virus infect everybody. Keeping the number of hosts limited is what reduces mutations, and that is what vaccinations do – train the body to kill the virus rather than let it take over the body.
How many mRNA injections have you had?
Did they keep you from getting sick?
No.
Well, earlier (October 17, 2023 12:15 pm) you posted:
“Do you deny that once the vaccines became widely distributed (generally more than 70% of the population being innoculated) that COVID infection rates plummeted to a tiny fraction of what it was prior to vaccination?”
So why is that now humanity is facing these newest COVID-19 variants:
— Omicron XBB.1.5
— Omicron BA.2.75
— Omicron XBB.1.5
— Omicron DV.7.1
— Omicron BA.2.86
— Omicron XBB.1.16
(ref: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/variants-concern )
given that “more that 70% if the population” in the US has been inoculated against COVID-19 (your words)?
Do you see any possible inconsistency here???
“karlomonte” appears to have semiconductor experience.
“Duane” appears to have power distribution experience.
The two areas are not the same. Distribution uses kilovolts AC, microprocessors like volts DC.Fuses are great until you have to replace them, sometimes with a soldering iron. Sometimes they are a little pit of charcoal on crumbled FR4.
Your ‘just in time’ management style won’t stop orbit locked satellites & always connected renewable infested electronic controlled grids frying with hours of a warning
Fuses, surge protectors and shielding will provide that protection. Shielding that is already needed to protect against lightning strikes.
Virtually all satellites and spacecraft are already hardened against solar EM radiation. How do you think satellites, especially those in either stationary orbit, and relatively unprotected by the atmosphere, and all spacecraft that enter deep space survive? They’re all exposed to solar EM all the time. The sun regularly emits radiation that can damage unprotected circuits in temporary pulses.
Solid state devices are especially vulnerable to x-rays. X-rays don’t induce electrical effects, they simply heat the semiconductor–sometimes to destructive temperatures. And there’s no protection from cosmic rays. Imagine having to program a computer where a random memory cell can go bad at any moment. When they send new programs to our robot spacecraft, they have to program around the bad memory cells.
“As disruptive as COVID was, we got over it in a matter of months once the infection rate was brought under control with mass immunizations.”
What utter, ignorant BS.
“Covid was the fourth leading cause of death in the United States last year, dropping from its place as the third leading cause in 2020 and 2021, when virus fatalities were superseded only by heart disease and cancer, the National Center for Health Statistics reported on Thursday.”
— https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/health/covid-deaths-2022.html
(note that that cited reference is a May 4, 2023 NYT article)
We have yet to see where COVID-19 ranks as a leading cause of death for CY2023, but all of the current PSAs related to COVID-19 indicate it will still be in the top-five.
Duane, once again, demonstrating his is a master of misinformation.
You are the master of self deception, apparently.
Do you deny that many tens of millions of people became infected prior to the distribution of the vaccines?
Do you deny that once the vaccines became widely distributed (generally more than 70% of the population being innoculated) that COVID infection rates plummeted to a tiny fraction of what it was prior to vaccination?
If you deny both of those, then you are probably one of those idiots who still believes Donald Trump won the 2020 election … and that he had the largest inauguration crowds ever, way bigger than Obamas … etc,. etc.
Duane,
Nice try, but now look at the data from Oz. The infections were very low BEFORE the vaccine roll out because of the limited travel, massive lock downs and mandated isolation requirements.
And then the vaccine was rolled out.
And then natural spread of the virus occurred. The peak infection was after the vaccine.
From my point of view, the vaccines did not prevent infection. It’s all a matter of timing and thankfully, natural immunity and defence. If you’d had the disease already, then like the common cold, you are then probably immune to that specific variant. Thedrop in infection that you mention is probably due to natural protection systems in the human body, preventing reinfection and less to do with the vaccine which, (as noted in Oz and also NZ), did not prevent infection.
Solar storms induce changes in the Earth’s magnetic field that in turn induce voltage differences within electronic devices. It doesn’t matter whether the device is on or not, if those voltage differences get too strong, the device will be destroyed.
That said, all electronic devices are shielded in order to prevent them from radiating EM energy. Devices that exist in EM noisy environments, such as cars, are shielded to prevent the car’s EM from disrupting their calculations.
Power lines are already protected against lightning strikes. Locally, the power and rise time of a voltage strike is many times greater than that can be generated by a Carrington event.
Yes, a Carrington event will affect the entire grid, not just one little spot like a lightning strike would, however the entire grid has been protected against lightning. Each of those surge protectors and fuses, would protect their own little piece of the grid, as they were designed to do, and the over all effect would be the entire grid being protected.
Current cannot flow except in a closed circuit. Open the circuit, and no current can flow, and no voltage spike can be induced in a non-energized circuit. That is why lightning hits where it hits – it requires a path to ground, provided by high ionization of things or people who provide that path to ground.
Learn.
Absurd. When lightning hits a lighting rod, any other metal structure, or any other substance having good electrical conductivity (e.g., sea water) that is “grounded” all of the tens of thousands of amps in the strike can be conducted along the path to ground without requiring any ionization of any ground path substance. In almost every lightning strike, it is only the air above the strike point that is ionized.
In fact it is even wrong to say that lightning “requires a path to ground”, witness cloud-to-cloud lightning bolts and the numerous time that aircraft in flight are struck by lightning . . . they certainly weren’t grounded at those times.
Sparks can fly with sufficient voltage differentials, and the lowest voltage need not be at 0 vdc or 0 vac.
Yes, almost all correct from MW. “It doesn’t matter whether the device is on or not, if those voltage differences get too strong, the device will be destroyed.”
I wanted to write something similar but the conversation is being thrown in a lot of charged directions at once. Thanks MW, at least one person “gets it”.
I think you should look into “a solar storm cannot destroy electrical devices that are not operating“.
30 minutes notice
https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-wed-have-30-minutes-warning-before-a-killer-solar-storm-hits Cellphone towers are vulnerable. The link below is only talking about the normal solar storms that happen every 25 years or so.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2022/02/09/why-solar-storms-could-be-the-biggest-risks-to-technology/?sh=66b32fe75395
Hospitals are barely solvent now. They have not hardened their instrumentation or their power distribution. People will die if the power is dropped for hours/days. A lot of people…
All we have to do is reel in all the conductors hanging in the air that we call transmission lines.
That is almost as damaging as Net Zero Hysteria
From the above article:
Almost all the energy that drives the climate comes from the sun. Whoever wrote the above quote, is stunningly illiterate.
About these solar events … do they cause mass extinctions or otherwise perturb the ecosystem? Why do they think such events might be dangerous to satellites?
“stunningly illiterate.”
deliberately lying, even.
Correct – the Sun is the main driver of climate and anyone trying to minimise that to blame CO2 should be wearing a white coat with buckles on the sleeves
Energy coming in, mostly comes from the sun. However it’s how the energy gets back out that drives climate.
Solar flares damage satellites by two means. Energetic particles can directly damage micro-scale circuitry. Rapid changes in EM fields can induce voltages in electrical components. Remember that the traces between electrical components are also metal and can act as antennas to pick up energy.
Another issue is a solar flare which heats the upper atmosphere, causing it to expand and increase drag on objects in low earth orbit.
The Carrington event affected the telegraph system because the wires between the telegraph stations were long. Shorter objects, like ships for instance, didn’t report effects.
The voltage developed along a wire depends on the rate of flux change and the length of the wire. As far as I can tell, the Carrington event didn’t produce rates of flux change sufficient to produce damaging voltage for a satellite’s electronics.
“The radiocarbon spike was caused by a massive solar storm, the biggest ever identified. ”
Is that the only possible cause? If so, is there enough data to be sure? Tree rings are small- and there can’t be many from that age.
And, what exactly does an EM do to electrical equipment to damage it? If we have our computers, TVs, etc. turned off, can they still be damaged? If it’s an electrical surge, and our UPS protect our computers?
Since it’s correlated to a 10Be spike in Greenland ice cores, a solar storm is the most likely answer.
The charged particles in a CME induce heavy currents and voltage spikes in electrical infrastructure – your 300 quid UPS or surge diverters won’t protect against this kind of induced inrush
Most of the charged particles are blocked by the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere.
Coronal Mass Ejections get you by causing a rapid distortion in the Earth’s magnetic field.
This rapid change in the magnetic field will induce a current in any piece of metal that is in that field.
Probably a useful read.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/12507/chapter/2
Any equipment not adequately protected in a Faraday cage would be liable to damage. Leave your laptop on the table, even switched off, and it would fry. More extreme EMPs will cause substantial atmospheric heating: part of the principle of nuclear weapons designed to generate an EMP. Just your household wiring would generate enough to destroy anything plugged in. Fuses would probably be too slow. The effects would be like a direct hit by lightning into the circuits.
And what will that do to us? Other organisms?
Most electronics is already protected against lightning. An EMP or Carrington event will be slower than a lightning strike.
Surge protectors will protect against surges coming in from the grid, but that isn’t the only way that an EMP can damage electronics.
Any change in an EM field will cause a voltage spike in any length of metal.
If the length of metal is long enough, or the EM change is large enough/fast enough, the level of voltage being generated can be enough to damage the electronics.
That being said, all electronics are already shielded to prevent EM radiation from escaping. Any shielding that works to prevent EM from escaping, will also work to keep EM from penetrating.
The amount of shielding any electronic device is provided with will depend on how much power the device consumes. The more power it uses, the more EM it will generate, and the more shielding it will need.
OK, I won’t lose sleep worrying about it. I’ll move it down near the bottom of my 1,000 things to worry about- right next to the oceans boiling.
Not necessarily. To save weight and cost of materials, the minimum RF shielding for the expected working environment will be employed. There will probably be no magnetic shielding. EMP rejection is not a normal design requirement for civilian electronics.
Hmmmm . . . now it’s tree rings all the way down. Bye-bye turtles.
What about the walruses?
They won’t have an opportunity to talk about cabbages and kings.
It’s the grand solar minimums you need to be fearful of
May I pull out the old “Younger Dryas never happened” hypothesis again.
It says that the rapid drop in temperatures observed in the record around the Younger Dryas never actually took place at all. It is observed because a large radiation spike throws the dating out by a few thousand years and we see a bit of the last ice age in the wrong place.
It is an outrageous hypothesis but it keeps getting just enough peripheral support to not go away.
Well, here is what the “prestigious” (hah, hah!) IPCC has to say about the clearly-identified-via-paleoclimatology Younger Dryas transient:
“The central Greenland ice core record (GRIP and GISP2) has a near annual resolution across the entire glacial to Holocene transition, and reveals episodes of very rapid change. The return to the cold conditions of the Younger Dryas from the incipient inter-glacial warming 13,000 years ago took place within a few decades or less (Alley et al., 1993). The warming phase, that took place about 11,500 years ago, at the end of the Younger Dryas was also very abrupt and central Greenland temperatures increased by 7°C or more in a few decades (Johnsen et al., 1992; Grootes et al., 1993; Severinghaus et al., 1998)”
— http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/074.htm
The scientific “jury” is still out as to what was the root cause of the Younger Dryas transient period in Earth’s climate history.
It’s so rapid, in and out, that’ it’s unique.
Of course, other such events may not have the resolution in to see how fast their transitions were.
Or maybe, we are looking at something else…
“A Myake Event might actually be an existential threat to life as we know it”
It happened 14.3 kyr ago, and the life “as we know it” appears to be just fine…
Life as I know it, is fairly dependent on electricity. Life, as it was known 14.3 kya, was more dependent on banging rocks together.
I think you are confusing life and lifestyle.
My point was that the claim about “an existential threat to life as we know it” implies some global mass extinction of epic proportions, similar to dinosaur end. Not to say that the Sun could not do something like this once in a while, but the event 14.3 kyr ago certainly did not.
No. It implies that a Myake Event could irrevocably change life as we currently know it.
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/as+we+know+it
Life, as we currently view it, includes electricity and all the other wonders of modern technology. Going without electricity for a week temporarily alters one’s lifestyle.
https://www.powermag.com/how-an-emp-or-gmd-could-destroy-the-power-grid-and-create-chaos/
Going without electricity for months or years would end a lot of lives and life, as we know it, might not ever recover to where it was before the Myake Event.
An extinction level event, ends life. It wipes out entire species. A mass extinction event takes out entire genera, groups, families and even phyla.
Its “existential threat” again. Replacement words could be selected to avoid an argument between people who probably agree.
How about “life would change” – that phrase sounds too vague but delivers no less detail.
Life would suck for months, maybe years, maybe forever.
However, an “existential threat to life” is an entirely different thing that “an existential threat to life as we know it.”
Although, “life as we know it” is dependent on perspective. Life would go on normally for the 800 million people currently living without electricity.
If there’s a problem with my phrasing, it’s that it’s America-centric… More accurately Texan-centric.
Well, if we continue down The Green New Deal path, we might not notice the change in “life as we know it”. 😎
An “existential” threat? No, these massive flares are not a threat to human life. We know, because humans were all over the Earth when the last several hit, and we’re still here.
Humans have only been dependent on electricity for about 100 years. Here’s what I wrote in context:
Life, as I know it, is heavily dependent on electricity.
ELFIN UCLA
A Myake Event is an order of magnitude larger than a Carrington class storm.
Life as we know it is very much dependent on agriculture as we know it.
Agriculture as we know it is very much dependent on energy as we know it.
Without electricity, fuel for farm equipment quickly runs out.
Without fuel, farmers are suddenly dependent on draft animals.
At present, most farmers have few if any draft animals, nor does their current equipment easily adapt to being pulled by draft animals.
It will take hundreds of generations to breed up enough draft animals for all of the current farmers.
“So, why will progressives hate this research? Well, it’s complicated.”
Out of the mouths of babes….
If that were to happen, I bet that nobody would stop to ask if a critter was on the endangered species list, before popping it into the cooking pot.
The question that comes to my mind is what effect these events might have on the fertility of wildlife?
Could this event have triggered the disappearance of many large animals?
Nah. Just a bunch of squirrels upset that they can’t get to Amazon.com to get in queue for a new batch of cell phones. “What do yo mean there’s no f$$@*! base station linear power amplifier! Well crap I guess I’ll just go hide more acorns from the 8 billion hungry bipeds.”
I thought tree rings were for measuring temperature anomalies.
Tree rings are primarily used to estimate the age of trees. The number of rings is correlative to the number of years a tree has lived. Climate parameters are inferred from changes in the widths of the rings.
In this case, 14C anomalies were identified in fossil trees. Estimating the age of the tree when the solar storm occurred was relatively straight-forward, Estimating when the tree died was more complicated. Put the two together and you get an estimate of the calendar year in which the solar storm occurred.
“The sun’s effect on Earth’s climate is not as large as warming from greenhouse gas emissions, but it is a factor to consider in climate models.”
Remember when they used to say weather (and climate) were caused by the Sun?
Without the Sun the Earth would be frozen solid, atmosphere and all, at only a few degrees above absolute zero.
I’m not a geologist like our author, but I think the heating of decaying radioactive elements in the Earth’s interior would probably keep its temperature more than a few degrees above absolute zero. But that internal energy would go away eventually.
Just woolgathering David, but would a Myake Event have any explosive effect on lithium ion batteries? Would Teslas and their ilk be exploding left and right? Mobile phones? Or would they just fry like the rest of the electronics?
I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t trigger battery fires… But all vehicles would be succeptible to damage…
https://www.verisk.com/insurance/products/emerging-issues/financial-and-insurance-implications-of-a-solar-eruption/
“The sun’s effect on Earth’s climate is not as large as warming from greenhouse gas emissions, but it is a factor to consider in climate models”
How can people get away with saying things like this?
I check the site: spaceweather dot com
. . . every morning to see if I should put on my aluminum foil hat.
Sleeping in the hat is a problem so if this solar storm threatens
before breakfast, I’m toast. 🙂
Seriously, have a look. Near the top center there is a daily update on solar activity.
My goodness there are so many stupifyingly stupid statements made stupidly in that. Not by you Mr. Middleton, but in the excerpts you wisely chose to show the ignorance and demagoguing the climateteers are capable of.
It is troubling that the lead author of this excellent paper made the comment about the Sun being a climatic non-factor.
I’m at this year’s Sun-Climate Symposium in Flagstaff, now one hour away from my poster session…
During the past two days we had the pleasure of hearing about the Bard et al paper from several speakers, including the imminent geophysicist Timothy Jull, Irina Panyushkina, and Fusa Miyake, for whom these events are named, who all presented many tree ring derived cosmogenic records from solar energetic particle events (flares, CMEs, ie electric weather events) discovered in tree ring data.
Modern SEP events are less able to be seen in the carbon-14 data such as the Feb 1956 event, which produced a measly 0.2% increase in carbon-14 because of the masking effect of atmospheric atomic bomb tests which spiked carbon-14 significantly above background level, still above pre-test levels.
There is a shift after solar cycles of about 3 years in tree carbon-14 due to the global carbon cycle.
Jull mentioned the oldest wood samples so far come from European bogs in the Rhine Valley, and the oldest in the US are from California at 8ky old.
If anyone has wood older than 15ky in their backyard bog, you may have important cosmogenic data.
As far as technology readiness for SEP events, this was covered by NOAA at the 2018 AGU meeting.
Very cool… 😎