Govert Schilling
ScienceNowThu, 26 May 2011 12:44 UTC
© Hendrick Avercamp / Wikimedia Commons
Brrr ... Cold winters in 17th century Europe, as shown in this painting by Hendrick Avercamp, may have been caused by a lack of solar activity after all.
Boston - For decades, astronomers and climatologists have debated whether a prolonged 17th century cold spell, best documented in Europe, could have been caused by erratic behavior of the sun. Now, an American solar physicist says he has new evidence to suggest that the sun was indeed the culprit.
The sun isn't as constant as it appears. Instead, its surface is regularly beset by storms of swirling magnetic fields. As a result, like a teenager plagued with acne, the face of the sun often sprouts relatively dark and short-lived "sunspots," which appear when strong magnetic fields inhibit the upwelling of hotter gas from below. The number of those spots waxes and wanes regularly in an 11-year cycle. However, even that cycle isn't immutable.
In 1893, English astronomer Edward Maunder, studying historical records, noted that the cycle essentially stopped between 1645 and 1715. Instead, the sun was almost devoid of sunspots during this period. In 1976, American solar physicist John "Jack" Eddy suggested there might have been a causal link between this "Maunder Minimum" in the number of sunspots and the contemporaneous Little Ice Age, when average temperatures in Europe were a degree centigrade lower than normal.
Brandon Keim
Wired.comMon, 09 May 2011 16:14 UTC
© Wire.com
Mid coast earthquakes.
On the last day of April and first five days of May, dozens of tiny earthquakes caused Maine's eastern coast to tremble. What could have shaken this geologically quiet region, located in the middle of a tectonic plate, far from any active faults?
The last ice age, say geologists. Like a trampoline's surface after liftoff, Earth's crust along the eastern seaboard is still springing back from the pressing weight of a massive ice sheet that has since melted. The earthquakes are a present-time reminder of processes that are prehistoric at a human scale, but from a geological perspective still ongoing.
"This action is still taking place," said Robert Marvinney, director of Maine's Bureau of Geology. "Five or ten thousand feet of ice weighs a lot."
CBSFri, 22 Apr 2011 07:15 UTC
Chicago - Not only has Chicago dealt with chilly rain, hail and even snow this week, but temperatures Tuesday were at their lowest for this late spring date since the 1940s.
CBS 2 Meteorologist Megan Glaros says the high Wednesday is expected only to reach 46 degrees with a peek or two of sunshine, but the chilly conditions will make it feel like winter never ended. As of 6:45 a.m., the temperature in Chicago was just 34 degrees.
© Columbia Broadcasting System
Cold, pouring rain had people running downtown Tuesday night.
Glaros says if there were precipitation Tuesday morning, some snow would likely be mixed in. Fortunately, the storm systems have moved east and conditions were just cold and overcast.
On Tuesday, the high topped out at 38 degrees in the city. In the early evening hours, just walking a few blocks along the streets of Chicago felt like going out to sea in an open boat during a rainstorm in northern Canada. Anyone walking against the wind was blasted continuously in the face with cold droplets of rain, and given the strength of the winds, an umbrella was as good as useless.
And that was before the severe storms even hit. Lightning bolts and thunder claps soon appeared, and hail of up to 1 inch in diameter was spotted in some areas, according to the National Weather Service.
More than an inch and a half of rain fell in less than half an hour Tuesday evening, forcing the cancellation of more than 450 flights at O'Hare and Midway international airports, and leaving people sleeping on terminal floors.
© USGS Lyn Topinka
Mount Shasta and Shastina, California.
Although the media has done a great job of covering this up, the inconvenient fact is that all seven glaciers on California's Mount Shasta are growing. This includes Whitney Glacier, the state's largest.
Yes, growing. Not melting.
Not only are
Mt. Shasta's glaciers growing, two have nearly doubled in size.
Both the
Hotlum and Wintun Glaciers have nearly doubled in size since 1950, says this article on Wikipedia. The Bolam Glacier has increased by half, while the Whitney and Konwakiton Glaciers have grown by a third.
Scientists first became aware of these
growing California glaciers in 2002, and I began writing about them in 2003. Now, eight years later, most media outlets still refuse to acknowledge that these glaciers are growing.
After this year's record snowfall, it will become harder to continue the deception.
© Unknown
Back in the summer of 1997, I wrote a nine-part investigative report on climate change:
Global Warming or Globaloney. It attracted a lot of attention at the time, but given the fact that the nation was being barraged by advocates of the socialist global warming propaganda campaign and their media allies, what I had to say fell mostly on deaf ears.
After all, a lot of the global warming enthusiasts appeared to have all sorts of impressive sounding scientific credentials and who's going to pay attention to a mere journalist with no academic background in climatology who claimed that global warming was a contrived myth and that there was every reason to believe that the current interglacial period of temperate weather has about reached its end.
In that series I wrote that one of the precursors of the onset of an ice age are violent tectonic events such as earthquakes of an ever increasing magnitude as was the quake that just devastated much of the Japanese islands. And despite the alarms issued by Al Gore and his cohorts much of the world has not been warming but instead experiencing some bitterly frigid winters because the polar ice caps have been growing.
© The Associated Press / Damian Dovarganes
In this photo taken Tuesday, March 8, 2011, Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits chief curator Dr. John Harris, left, and lead excavator Carrie Howard, look at fossil deposits at Box 14 of Project 23 at La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.
With a dental pick in hand, Karin Rice delicately scraped off a clump of asphalt from a pelvic bone belonging to a horse that roamed Los Angeles tens of thousands of years ago.
Like many unsuspecting creatures of the last Ice Age, the horse probably stopped to take a sip of spring water only to be ensnared - and later preserved - in a pool of sticky asphalt that seeped from underground crude oil deposits.
"You're opening up this ancient world and getting to look back in time," Rice said during a recent dig at the La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of Los Angeles.
For the past three years, scientists have been sifting through a significant trove of bones and a nearly intact mammoth skeleton discovered in 2006 during the construction of an underground garage next to the tar pits.
It's been slow going. To make room for the parking structure, researchers at the George C. Page Museum built wooden crates to house the cache and trucked them to the tar pits complex where excavators use power and hand tools to break up the soil.
Careful to avoid the mistakes of early diggers who only prized large mammals bones and little else, a small army of museum employees and volunteers painstakingly chisels away seven days a week, recovering not only animal bones, but also saving the dirt for later inspection for microfossils.
Last week in 'Gems,'
we reported that NASA has discovered 'cracks' in the fluctuating earth's magnetic field.
This is worrisome, because this magnetic field affects the ionosphere, and particularly the winds in the lower troposphere. These 'cracks' in the magnetic field and the shifting of our planet's magnetic poles can lead to SUPER STORMS on virtually every continent like we've seen in recent months.
This month's mega-monster cyclone 'Yasi' left much of northeastern Australia in Queensland a "war zone," according to rescue workers. This incredible storm packed winds near 190 miles per hour. Although it was labeled as a Category '5' cyclone (hurricane/typhoon), theoretically it was an 'off the scale' Category '6'!
Tens of thousands of homes were severely damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of people died. Livestock herds were decimated. There were reports of "sharks swimming through the flooded houses."
As if these worsening superstorms aren't enough, we have 'Chandler's Wobble' to worry about.
It was first discovered by an American astronomer in 1891 by the name of Seth Carlo Chandler. Chandler said that the earth "wobbles like a top" whenever our planet slows down a bit in its rotation like it has in recent years.
According to NASA, "the track of this spin began to slow down very slightly about Jan. 18, 2006." Since then, we've had a series of EXTREMELY HARSH winter seasons in both hemispheres.
If this 'wobble' of the planet continues, it's entirely possible that we will eventually see at least a new 'Little Ice Age,' maybe even a new GREAT ICE AGE like the one approximately 11,500 years ago.
Terrence Aym
HeliumFri, 18 Feb 2011 12:45 UTC
© n/a
NASA and the ESA agree, and so does the Russian space agency, Roscosmos - the sun is headed for a Grand Solar Minimum and a Grand Cooling will commence.
The aptly named Grand Cooling is exactly what it implies: the sun is going to cool. That cooling will also cool off the Earth. It will last from 30 to 50 years.
What exactly does global cooling mean? Well for one, Al Gore was sure wrong! The Earth isn't going to warm, it's going to get colder. Much colder. So cold a little or full-blown Ice Age will ensue. As a matter of fact, some scientists claim we're already in the early stages of an Ice Age.
Maybe the Nobel Committee and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should ask Mr. Gore to return his awards.
Dutch Professor Cees de Jager, a prominent astronomer and solar expert, forcefully asserts that we the world is indeed entering for a long period of very low solar activity. The professor and his colleagues are certain Earth is heading for a "long Grand Minimum" - defined as either a Solar Wolf-Gleissberg or a Maunder Minimum - "not shorter than a century." His 2010 paper, "The forthcoming Grand Minimum of solar activity," outlined the extended period of time that the diminished solar radiation would affect the Earth.
© Salem-News.com
Another mammoth Icelandic volcano, Baroarbunga, is ready to erupt. This one could dwarf the Eyjafjallajokull glacier volcano that blew in 2010 causing havoc throughout Europe.
That's the word that's streaming out of the northern island nation as geophysicists around the globe hold their breaths to see what will happen next.
The Eyjafjallajokull eruption galvanized Europe and stunned the world with its unrelenting ferocity. It caused billions of dollars in loss, paralyzed European air travel and caused food and other commodities to spike upwards.
Worried experts warn that this eruption could be much, much worse.
© Unknown
Strange illusion from Eyjafjallajokull that blew in 2010: Iceland Volcano: Radar Pictures of the Craters.
University of Iceland geophysicists have warned of a significant rise in seismic activity in the area of Vatnajökull, the largest of Iceland's glaciers. A swarm of earthquakes has erupted signaling the likely eruption of Bardarbunga, Iceland's second biggest volcano and one that sits directly above a major lava conduit.
Baroarbunga, a stratovolcano towering 6,600 feet, is part of the island nation's largest volcanic system. The huge volcano's crater covers 43 square miles and is completely encased under glacial ice.
Terrence Aym
HeliumMon, 07 Feb 2011 18:03 UTC
© Unknown
NASA has been warning about it...scientific papers have been written about it...geologists have seen its traces in rock strata and ice core samples...
Now "it" is here: an unstoppable magnetic pole shift that has sped up and is causing life-threatening havoc with the world's weather.
Forget about global warming - man-made or natural - what drives planetary weather patterns is the climate and what drives the climate is the sun's magnetosphere and its electromagnetic interaction with a planet's own magnetic field.
When the field shifts, when it fluctuates, when it goes into flux and begins to become unstable anything can happen. And what normally happens is that all hell breaks loose.
Magnetic polar shifts have occurred many times in Earth's history. It's happening again now to every planet in the solar system including Earth.
The magnetic field drives weather to a significant degree and when that field starts migrating superstorms start erupting.
Comment: All of the things described in this article are EFFECTS of changes in the solar capacitor. It is more likely that the Sun began to interact with its companion in 2005 exactly as described by the Cassiopaeans on 31 October, 2001:
Q: (L) Now according to these guys who are writing this web page about pole shift, they say it can be predicted where the poles will shift to. Is this in fact the case?
A: No.
Q: (L) Why can't pole shifts be predicted? Can't we know where the new pole will end up?
A: Chaotic function here
Q: (L) Okay, in a pole shift does the lithosphere of the planet slide on the core? (A) No. We have to be very precise. There are three possible things that would come under the name pole shift. Only one of them may come, or two, or three, okay? And these are the following - the axis of rotation with respect to stars is changing, straightening out for instance; this is one thing; while all the rest goes with the axis, the lithosphere and the magnetic field. Second, the axis stays where it is, maybe it shifts a little bit; the lithosphere stays where it is - maybe it wobbles - but the magnetic field changes: for instance reverses. Third, axis stays, magnetic field stays, but the lithosphere is moving. So that's three ways a pole shift can happen. And of course there are things that come together. The most dramatic one which is seen from outside is when the axis of rotation changes. The next dramatic one is probably when the lithosphere changes. And the third of unknown consequences is when the magnetic pole changes, okay? So, we want to have an understanding what will be the main change. (L) Well I guess we ought to ask an even more basic question: are we looking at a pole shift happening? That's starting at the beginning. (A) Alright. (L) In the next ten years. Is a pole shift possible in the next ten years?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) Is a pole shift of the axis...(A) Honey, you ask if the pole shift is possible, of course it's possible. But suppose it's almost zero probability? 'Is it possible' is not the right question. 'Is it going to happen?' That's a question. (L) Okay you ask, carry on. (A) Are we looking at a pole shift during the next ten or so years with a high degree of probability?
A: Yes.
Q: (A) In this concept of pole shift, what would be the main feature of this pole shift, of all those which we were discussing?
A: New axial orientation, and magnetic reversal.
Q: (L) That's fairly dramatic. (A) Alright, now, change of axis or orientation of axis of rotation: can we say we would straighten up, getting almost perpendicular to the ecliptic? Or the other possibility is that it will fall down being almost parallel to the ecliptic. The third is that we'll flip completely by 180 degrees. We know it's highly unpredictable, but can we have a clue from which one is, so to say, dominate?
A: Perpendicularity will be restored.
Q: (A) We know the axis will change dramatically and magnetic reversal will happen. You didn't mention a change or shift of the lithosphere alone. Can we...
A: Lithospheric shift will feature to some extent.
Q: (A) But, that means eventually that the equator will almost not change because...
A: Correct.
Q: (A) So it will just shift a little bit, but its not going to go to Hawaii? (L) Oh rats! That was my theory! Well, it was a good idea. (A) What about changes in the lithosphere: can we predict a little bit of change in geography, coming from motions in lithosphere and changes in water level?
A: Chaotic features predominate but in general it will be safer inland and in mountainous areas since less folding occurs in such locations.
Q: (A) Now, the major, the change of the orientation of the axis, what would be the main trigger, force, or activity, or what kind of event will trigger this change of the axis?
A: Cometary bodies.
Q: (L) Are the planets of the solar system going to kind of shift out of their orbits and run amok? Is that a possibility?
A: Yes.
Q: (A) Due to cometary orbits alone?
A: Yes. Twin sun also.
Q: (A) When we speak about these cometary bodies, are we speaking about impacts?
A: Some will hit.
Q: (A) What would be - if any - the role played by electric phenomena?
A: Twin sun grounds current flow through entire system setting the "motor" running.
Q: (L) Does this mean that all of the different bodies of the solar system are like parts of some kind of giant machine, and once this electric current flows through them, depending on their positions relative to one another at the time this current flows, that it has some influence on the way the machine runs?
A: Yes, more or less.
Comment: All of the things described in this article are EFFECTS of changes in the solar capacitor. It is more likely that the Sun began to interact with its companion in 2005 exactly as described by the Cassiopaeans on 31 October, 2001:
Q: (L) Now according to these guys who are writing this web page about pole shift, they say it can be predicted where the poles will shift to. Is this in fact the case?
A: No.
Q: (L) Why can't pole shifts be predicted? Can't we know where the new pole will end up?
A: Chaotic function here
Q: (L) Okay, in a pole shift does the lithosphere of the planet slide on the core? (A) No. We have to be very precise. There are three possible things that would come under the name pole shift. Only one of them may come, or two, or three, okay? And these are the following - the axis of rotation with respect to stars is changing, straightening out for instance; this is one thing; while all the rest goes with the axis, the lithosphere and the magnetic field. Second, the axis stays where it is, maybe it shifts a little bit; the lithosphere stays where it is - maybe it wobbles - but the magnetic field changes: for instance reverses. Third, axis stays, magnetic field stays, but the lithosphere is moving. So that's three ways a pole shift can happen. And of course there are things that come together. The most dramatic one which is seen from outside is when the axis of rotation changes. The next dramatic one is probably when the lithosphere changes. And the third of unknown consequences is when the magnetic pole changes, okay? So, we want to have an understanding what will be the main change. (L) Well I guess we ought to ask an even more basic question: are we looking at a pole shift happening? That's starting at the beginning. (A) Alright. (L) In the next ten years. Is a pole shift possible in the next ten years?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) Is a pole shift of the axis...(A) Honey, you ask if the pole shift is possible, of course it's possible. But suppose it's almost zero probability? 'Is it possible' is not the right question. 'Is it going to happen?' That's a question. (L) Okay you ask, carry on. (A) Are we looking at a pole shift during the next ten or so years with a high degree of probability?
A: Yes.
Q: (A) In this concept of pole shift, what would be the main feature of this pole shift, of all those which we were discussing?
A: New axial orientation, and magnetic reversal.
Q: (L) That's fairly dramatic. (A) Alright, now, change of axis or orientation of axis of rotation: can we say we would straighten up, getting almost perpendicular to the ecliptic? Or the other possibility is that it will fall down being almost parallel to the ecliptic. The third is that we'll flip completely by 180 degrees. We know it's highly unpredictable, but can we have a clue from which one is, so to say, dominate?
A: Perpendicularity will be restored.
Q: (A) We know the axis will change dramatically and magnetic reversal will happen. You didn't mention a change or shift of the lithosphere alone. Can we...
A: Lithospheric shift will feature to some extent.
Q: (A) But, that means eventually that the equator will almost not change because...
A: Correct.
Q: (A) So it will just shift a little bit, but its not going to go to Hawaii? (L) Oh rats! That was my theory! Well, it was a good idea. (A) What about changes in the lithosphere: can we predict a little bit of change in geography, coming from motions in lithosphere and changes in water level?
A: Chaotic features predominate but in general it will be safer inland and in mountainous areas since less folding occurs in such locations.
Q: (A) Now, the major, the change of the orientation of the axis, what would be the main trigger, force, or activity, or what kind of event will trigger this change of the axis?
A: Cometary bodies.
Q: (L) Are the planets of the solar system going to kind of shift out of their orbits and run amok? Is that a possibility?
A: Yes.
Q: (A) Due to cometary orbits alone?
A: Yes. Twin sun also.
Q: (A) When we speak about these cometary bodies, are we speaking about impacts?
A: Some will hit.
Q: (A) What would be - if any - the role played by electric phenomena?
A: Twin sun grounds current flow through entire system setting the "motor" running.
Q: (L) Does this mean that all of the different bodies of the solar system are like parts of some kind of giant machine, and once this electric current flows through them, depending on their positions relative to one another at the time this current flows, that it has some influence on the way the machine runs?
A: Yes, more or less.