true. They are predicting the next couple of years to be very active. Possibly an extreme event similar to what happened in 1859, which reportedly caused telegraphs to catch ablaze.
^ If we had an event like the 1859 super eruption the earth would be royally screwed. The modern age would grind to a halt because every transmission line on the planet that wasn't buried would be fried. The surge would probably take out the lines underground too, but that isn't certain.
No clutchfans? I think this is temporary -- the sun is known to be a big Lebron fan. <iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JeGRNT_Sd24" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Look, the sun goes up and the sun gets down. But, like the heart of the sun, my heart continues to pound.
My understanding is that CMEs take days to travel to Earth. When one is observed, we can simply shutdown the electrical grid for impact. Disaster avoided.
Damn, just realized. If China is facing the impact and we are facing away with the Earth protecting us as a shield, we wouldn't lose power; they would. We could invade them hours after impact...plunder their villages, steal all their hot women and take their tall basketball players.
Never mind we're going to freeze to death. _____ Rare Drop in Sunspot Activity Could Cause Little Ice Age The sun is most likely going into hibernation as the latest unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles suggest that we are headed towards a solar event that hasn't happened in hundreds of years, according to new data released Tuesday at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Even though the Sun has been active recently as it heads towards solar maximum in 2013, there are three lines of evidence including a missing jet stream in the solar interior, fading sunspots on the sun's visible surface, and changes in the corona and near the poles suggest that the next 11-year-long solar cycle will be far quieter than the current one or it may not even happen. There are some scientists at the conference who said the current findings from the studies mean that we are at the beginning of a Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period that began around 1645 when hardly any sunspots were observed. This decline in sunspots coincided with below-normal temperatures, in a climate period known as the Little Ice Age that struck Europe and North America, where temperatures dropped by 1.8 to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1-1.5 degrees Celsius). But scientists warn that the temperature change due to a decline in sunspot activity would likely be minimal and not enough to compensate for global warming. The Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period with virtually no sunspots, coincided with the Little Ice Age, a period of unusual cold. But it has not been proven whether there is a causal connection between low sunspot activity and cold winters as that period also coincided with an upswing in volcanic emissions, which are known more definitely to contribute to global cooling. link
Global warming has increased the world average temperature about 0.5 C since 1950 or so. It seems like their second sentence doesn't much agree with their first.
