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Massive Sun Flare This Weekend
A lot of people have been writing to us for the last couple of days, talking about the massive sunflare or cornoral mass ejection that's headed our way. The folks in Quebec probably remember the disastrous one from 11 years ago - solar flares can due massive damage. So, don't be surprised if the cell phone/satellite dish and such isn't work up to snuff - and if you live in the North, keep an eye out for some beautiful aurorae, as skajohna pointed out. BTW, the touchdown dates are expected to be the 19th (today) and 20th.
As we get further into the year, things could easily get a lot worse. Now is NOT a good time to buy shares in telecom satellite companies. Also, expect trans-continental Internet service to stagger. Yes, there -are- undersea cables, but much of the NSF equiptment used satellite feeds. If those are interfered with (likely) or destroyed (entirely possible), the Internet is likely to suffer severe lag, or even fragment until alternative links can be brought in.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
One thing that isn't reported in the press is the excellent agreement between solar forcing and global warming. To zeroth order the Earth is warmed by the Sun, but variations in solar irradiance are likely the primary contributions to decadal variations in the mean terrestrial temperature (as opposed to centurial or millenial variations like the major Ice Ages). Certainly there is a lot of data about climate over the last 2-3 thousand stars that is correlated with changes in solar activity.
A paper by Friis-Christensen and Lasser (1991, Science, 254, 698) showed that the mean length of the sunspot cycle is inversely correlated to mean terrestrial temperature. This correlation can be seen in other proxies of solar activity back millenia. Doing a quick search produced this page which has a lot of the basic underlying information. What one has to remember is that ALL of the "climate models" that are used to suggest an anthropogenic cause to global warming make the basic assumption that the rise in termperature is primarily correlated with an exponential growth in industry.
This is a nice hypothesis, but doesn't fly in the face of the data. FRom the F-C figure, one should note that temperature rises mostly before 1940. However, exponential rises in CO and CO2 production would demand that it take place *after* 1940.
Over 90 percent of the variance is explained by the Sun. But one thing is clear: in order to have 20th century global warming be explained by man-made causes, you have to violate cause and effect. There might be something buried in the noise, but that'll take more analysis to ferret it out. Nonetheless, it points out that one must be careful reading things in the press or from press releases.
One of my pet research projects is learning more about the sunspot cycle, Activity Cycles on other stars and stars with suppressed activity (like the Sun's during the Maunder, Sporer and Dalton minimums. So, a lot of what I've been looking at with stars, overlaps with some of the work done in solar forcing and its effect on Earth's climate.
Tech support> Well sir, it's likely your system isn't working due to solar flares.
... and for once, my BOFH Excuse of the Day would be accurate....