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Can Solar Storms Cause Wildfires?
astroengine writes "In the wake of recent solar activity, some space cadets were very quick to point out a causal link between geomagnetic storms and the wildfires currently ravaging the landscape surrounding Moscow. Of course, this is patently false. But is there a scenario when the onset of a solar storm could have secondary effects, sparking fires in already arid regions? Possibly. What's more, it already happened, 150 years ago."
But the likelihood is probably lower than the author of this fluff piece making significant ad revenue off traffic from slashdot.
lightning, arson and others are more likely
Here in Oz power lines are a major cause of bushfires without any help from solar flares.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
In Soviet Russia, forests burn YOU!
My SOHO Explorer widget clearly shows multiple solar flares, so it wouldn't surprise me if we see some elevated wildfire activity.
I've had just about enough of this "Sun". First, we've learned it's to blame for global warming, now it's setting fires throughout the world. Why, why does it hate our liberties? How many innocents must die of skin cancer before someone acts? How many children must we let it burn on metal playground equipment? When will it strike you with sunburn in your very own backyard?? The world must stand up to this terrorism! We must strike fast and we must strike hard! All good men must stand up and demand the world governments strike with the biggest atomic - no, hydrogen bomb and wipe this great evil from the sky above!!!
Urge your leaders to act now before it is to late! Think of the children!
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Back, vile troll!
assignment or equality?
THL phish sticks
"Of course, this is patently false. But is there a scenario when the onset of a solar storm could have secondary effects, sparking fires in already arid regions?"
Yes, it goes like this. Solar storm causes blackout, blackout causes poor uneducated people to light candles and propane heaters, candles and heaters cause fires and carbon monoxide deaths.
wildfires cause solar flares
Or maybe Nancy Pelosi caused it...
It all depends on which wing of the bird you sit on.
So their logic is that the telegraph (so phone, now?) lines can get overwhelmed and break, sparking fires?
Wow, that seems like a long way to go. (For one thing, I think that phone and power lines have more protection on them now. You might overload a transformer or even take down an entire grid, but I should think widespread sparking would be uncommon. They'd have had problems all over in Canada already, if not.)
If it causes fires on earth, it might singe Uranus too.
rewriting history since 2109
All wildfires are caused by C02 being released in teh atmosphere by your car and your breath and your farts. So be sure to sniff your own farts, because only you can prevent forest fires.
Assignment... people stopped caring about wildfires, so it's just being replaced with Global Warming...
Recent reports state that Global Warming is spreading across Russia, some people are worried this years Global Warming season in California could result in the most Global Warmings to date.
Sir, your sun has been arrested for arson.
The worst part was that he did it during a coronal mass ejection. That makes it a sex crime.
assignment or equality?
Well it's neither, it's a return value. I.e. 'wildfires' is an element in the set which is returned by the function globalWarming().
NASA SP-426, "Sun, Weather, and Climate, 1978m John R. Herman and Richard A. Goldberg, republished 1985 by Dover Publications, Inc. Section 3.2 talks about correlations with the 22 year Hale Solar Cycle (the 11 year cycles have alternate polarity). Rainfall and drought are the first two mentioned..... not exactly the solar storm, but still the sun
First they put stuff in our drinking water that creates rainbows http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c6HsiixFS8 and now they are causing so much pollution that it reaches the sun! well possibly but the facts are there.
This brings my mind an another story that was on Slashdot some time ago
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7819201/Nasa-warns-solar-flares-from-huge-space-storm-will-cause-devastation.html
It's happened many times before. Of particularly interesting note are the legends of "the gods" from various societies which have arisen shortly after periods of relatively poor advancement.
The solar storms output huge amounts of radiation - electromagnetic as well as other frequencies. Being as the earth is, essentially, a large (but significantly smaller than the sun) magnet, the interference with the Earth's magnetic/electrical field will quite certainly have observable effects: increased/more intense storm activity, more geologic disturbances (volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.) and so on.
When it comes down to it, it's all just a complex series of positively and negatively charged ions: when a positive or negative charge is applied from outside the system, weird things are going to happen.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It is a well-known fact that unlensed sunrays cannot ignite ordinary newspaper, not even in the middle of the summer. That is the reason why we can have newpapers printed on such flimsy material. Any kind of wood or plant would be more difficult to ignite due to their moisture content.
Nuclear bombs, which ignited paper, wood and fuel in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 65 years ago, were about 1000x times brighter than our Sun, making any kind of solar-flare related wildfire claim highly unlikely.
Not to mention a star bright enough and close enough to ignite material on Earth, would probably fry our brains with various particulate and non-particulate radiation, making the whole wildfire question moot. Cockroaches will likely rule the planet, since they have no brain, per se.
WTF? The parent post is "flamebait" and the GP is "insightful"???
As someone who has lived in both city and country Victoria for half a century I would say the parent is informative and the GP is a know nothing bogon.
Aside from the acurate points in the parent post, natives did not control burn mountain forests as the GP claims. They lit uncontrolled fires in grasslands, purely for hunting purposes.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I could have added that the most devastating events involved crown fires, which don't respect our puny attempts at burning off.
Now it may have been true that too little hazard reduction had been undertaken in the years leading up to the first in the series of truly horrific seasons, the summer of 2000-01. But, at least where I live, that all changed pretty quickly thereafter (along with the building codes). And there was an day this winter when the Sydney CBD was choked with smoke from burning in the Blue Mountains. So even if you never left Sydney you couldn't be unaware that lost of burning off is being conducted over winter.
At least he didn't call hazard reduction "back-burning," and I have to admit it did give me a bit of a chuckle that of all mods "Flamebait" was used.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Wait a second before we destroy the Sun! What if these CMEs and radiation caused the mutations which differentiated our species? We could be risking future evolutionary improvements by removing this source for modifying DNA. Of course, we could start a government sponsored project to randomly administer bursts of mutating radiation in the hopes of creating a better species.... Oh wait, never mind, we already have cellphones.
Actually, there is some evidence that the recent Russian wildfires, while not caused by solar storms, were in fact fostered by jet stream blocking events that seem to occur more often during lulls in solar activity.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The correct title is 'at what intensity can solar storms cause wildfires, and how often do storms of this intensity occur.'
Let's say there is another massive CME, or one even more massive than the one in 1859. How would you protect your electronics? Would you shove them into anti-static bags? Would they need to be (nearly) air tight, or would it be sufficient to just drape the bags over things? Would that would work for hard drives, cell phones, and if you had some large enough, PCs as well? What about data centers? Obviously, unplugging them would be a requirement, too.
You can have "Possibly."
OR "What's more, it already happened, 150 years ago."
Either it may have happened 150 years ago, which would be "Possibly" or did which would be "Yes."
Ummmm... In Soviet Russia the wildfires start solar flares?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Lightning definitively is one of the most important causes of wildfires. It is an interesting question to ponder about whether
solar storms have some effect on the frequency of lightings. One can think of, for example, some mechanism (ionization) which makes some weather phenomena with lots of ground reaching lightnings more likely.
Protection is very simple: you don't connect your electronics to miles-long antennas. It takes quite a distance (say, a hundred-mile-long telegraph wire) for a solar storm to build up a worthwhile voltage. A campus-wide Ethernet network might be big enough to fry a few network cards, and the cable network is certainly large enough to fry your modem, but for the most part, home electronics are not at risk.
The big risk is to things like the electricity transmission network itself. At the very least, a Carrington-class event will trip every circuit breaker the power company's got; at the worst, there'll be transformers blowing up all over the place.
Typically there are 2-3 reviewers and the editor acts as a referee.
If the author(s) can't satisfy all the reviewers' concerns, the editor can step in and mediate. The peers selected should be familiar enough with the specific subject enough to review. On occasion, there have been cases where the selected reviewer lacks sufficient knowlege to peer review the journal submission. This can drastically slow down the resubmittalm process. In these cases the editor is asked to step in.
A recent trend I have seen is the editor will request a list of experts from the submitting authors.
Wheather the reviewers are selected from a list or from the general readership of the journal, the authors names are kept from the those reviewing the submission. Only the editor knows for certain.
Once all the concerns are addressed, then the paper is usually accepted for publication.