Aug 30, 2010

Will the 2013 solar flare return us to the Stone Age?

Fox Business News Channel brought the "top physicist" (right after Al Gore, Lee Smolin, and Joe Romm) Michio Kaku who explained that we're doomed in 3 years:
Every 11 years the [Sun's] north pole and the south pole flip, releasing a burst of radiation. But, every 100 years or so, a monster Tsunami from the Sun emerges which could literally cause trillions in property damage. […]

It could paralyze the economy of the planet Earth. In 1859 we had a gigantic solar storm which knocked out telegraph wires back then, 150 years ago. If that had happened today it would knock out almost all our satellites, knock out power stations, there would be food riots around the country because refrigeration would stop, airplanes would probably crash without radar. […]



And again, this is a once in a century, once in two centuries storm…

We do have them and we have to worry about them. […]

We'd be thrown back 100 years.
Every 100 years, we're thrown back 100 years just by the solar storms, we're told. Because there are dozens of types of similar catastrophes, it is clear that every 100 years, we're thrown back several millennia. ;-)


Why 2013?
Well, it's simple. The Solar Cycle 24 is predicted to reach its maximum in May 2013. And this maximum has to be spectacular, some people said.

In reality, such a maximum occurs every 11 years and just very recently, we thought that the ongoing solar cycle would be one of the least active ones: the sunspot number at the maximum was predicted to be e.g. 90, the lowest peak in 1928, and many people used it to argue that the reduced activity will induce a substantial cooling on Earth. A low activity would also seem to imply a low intensity and frequency of the solar storms and flares.

Nevertheless, two months ago, "NASA" warned of the 2013 apocalypse:
Telegraph, Telegraph video, WUWT, Google News


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