Posted on 07/09/2012 7:30:40 PM PDT by markomalley
This has already been a summer of record heat in the continental United States. But our sun is not content with just breaking records in the first week of July. It has also been an intense period of solar flares - massive, violent outbursts from the sun that can wreck havoc here on Earth. And it shows no signs of stopping. Even on the surface of the sun, things are heating up.
Last week saw several huge solar flares, the biggest of which occurred on Friday, July 6. Labeled an X1.1 class solar flare - the strongest classification used by the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center - the sun storm caused radio blackouts here on Earth as particles ejected from the sun crashed into our planet's atmosphere. It was the fifth X-class solar flare of 2012.
Earlier in the week, several other powerful solar flares erupted from the sun. Most of them appear to be coming from the same area of our star: a giant sunspot called AR1515. Technically a group of sunspots, AR1515 is an enormous plain of volatile activity. NASA estimates AR1515 stretches across 118,681 miles, making it longer than fifteen Earths put together.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
I thought it was the jet stream ,giving England tons of rain
Bush’s fault.
“Wreck havoc”?
Illiterates.
remember back in the USSR days and the weather was strange ,the news said it was the soviets with those giant towers and they were zapping the jet stream and giving us bad weather ,now we have Algore
Sure wreaks havoc with shortwave reception.
Heavy dose of solar microwave radiation has much more to do with the current US heatwave than any man made “carbon footprint”.
Obviously someone must have sent an SUV to the sun. Nothing else could cause that kind of solar warming. </sarc>
“Algore, please pick up the super-hot red courtesy phone
located in the pizza oven!”
Well duh!! It's been so hot on Earth lately, the heat had to go somewhere. Any blonde knows that.
Is havoc a GM product? Not exactly environmentally correct if solar storms can wreck them.
Yes, the CBS News website says wreck havoc instead of wreak havoc.
They’re wrecking havoc on the English language!
Wait....what's the sun got to do with our record high temperatures? Everyone knows that they're being caused by the 0.04% carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Morons!
Obama sees himself as Apollyon, the sun god. It’s still Bushes fault
Fire a couple of nukes into it, that ought to calm it down!;)
So much for greenhouse gases. This is the true culprit of global warming over which we can do nothing.
Yes, there is really global warming. It comes from the Sun. Duuhhh!
It has been know for 100+ years that weather is more variable during sunspot minimums and sunspot maximums. The transition between min/max or max/min is the worst.
The sun, when at its spottiest, throws out more coronal material which is captured by the magnetic field of the earth. This acts to thwart incoming cosmic rays (speeding heavy atomic nuclei produced by novas in deep outer space). This provides fewer seeds for clouds, and the cloud cover diminishes allowing more sunlight to heat the ground.
Or so the theory goes. Anyhow spotty sun tends to mean warming earth. Lack of sunspots brings more clouds and cooling earth.
If Obama only thought himself a sun god. I think he believes himself to be a Higgs boson, without which nothing has any weight.
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