A new CME is headed our direction over the next few days.
From NOAA:
SWPC Forecasters are anticipating G3 (Strong) Geomagnetic Storm conditions to occur on January 9 and 10. The source of this disturbance is a fairly fast Earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME) launched from centrally-located Region 1944 at 1832 UTC (1:32 p.m. EST) on January 7.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://peakprosperity.com/geomagnetic-storming-expected/
I understand it is an X1 on the scale. An X15 (logarithmic progression, so many, many times greater) was responsible for the March 1989 Quebec Blackout.
Poet
Get a grip, solar flares are ten a penny - or would be if Cycle 24 wasn't the weakest solar maximum in a century.
And I see Poet's X15 and raise to the X17 flare in 2003 that was only noticed by aurora watchers and radio hams, without civilization crashing down.
This news is about as alarming as 5mm of rain in Belgium…
Hi Macs,
I find your comment's tone to be too harsh toward Jason. You had an opportunity to educate another member on a topic you know about yet you chose to attack him for his lack of knowledge. Perhaps you could re-read your future posts in that light before you poke the SAVE button.
Sorry if you thought it sounded harsh, the reassuring tone of voice obviously didn't make it down the tubes.
I'll admit I find the propagation of the 'Carrington Event' meme is getting irritating now, as though people have had nothing to keep them occupied since the Mayan Nothing-Happened Day. It does no-one any service to fret over the slightest hint of solar activity, and current levels are quite low despite the sun being near the expected peak of its current cycle.
Yes, solar activity could be a danger, if it was severe enough, but we need to see a hundred-fold increase in flare intensity before that is likely. Even then, the only risk is to satellites and large-scale electricity grids, which realistically are very remote risks at present. If we start seeing X10 + flares it may be worth paying attention, but to issue 'warnings' about X1s verges on scare-mongering and a diversion of much-needed attention from more important issues. It's not so much 'crying wolf' as 'crying mouse'.
Solar flaring may pick up for the next 12-18 months or so, as Cycle 24 appears to be double-peaked. However, 24 is noticeably weaker than 23 was, and though the jury's still out yet, it looks like 25 could be weaker still. We have lived through much stronger solar cycles than we can expect to see in the near future. Since then we have made ourselves more vulnerable through extension and dependence upon continental-sized power grids, but individually that's the sort of issue where our personal prepping ought to kick in. Certainly look to your grid-tie risks, but beyond that, there is a very poor ROI to worrying about solar activity.
quote=Macs It does no-one any service to fret over the slightest hint of solar activity, and current levels are quite low despite the sun being near the expected peak of its current cycle.
(…)
If we start seeing X10 + flares it may be worth paying attention, but to issue 'warnings' about X1s verges on scare-mongering and a diversion of much-needed attention from more important issues. It's not so much 'crying wolf' as 'crying mouse'.
[/quote]
First I would strongly encourage you to re-read the entirety of Jason's post and then illustrate which parts you feel constitute a warning, are scare-mongering, or would even lead to people fretting.
Second, we welcome any and all fact-based discussions about pretty much anything that might affect us, and we even had a NASA researcher on to talk about solar flares. That was highly informative, and her information runs counter to yours a bit, and I'm wondering if there's a way to reconcile these views.
Specifically:
Chris Martenson: Okay, so when we’re at a solar minimum, we might expect fewer of these. When we’re at a solar maximum, we would expect more of these. And we detect the solar maximum through sunspots, I guess, historically. The most sunspot activity would be a solar maximum in terms of magnetic activity and then the opposite would be a minimum, is that correct? Lika Guhathajurta: Absolutely. Although I kind of want to draw your attention because we are talking about solar cycles, these are all very important concepts that people always don’t think about. So while the frequency of solar storms, coronal mass ejections, typically tend to go down during solar minimum, the intensity of such coronal mass ejections doesn’t. As a matter of fact, most of our most severe solar storms tended to happen during sort of weak solar cycles and during the declining phase of our solar cycles. So we are talking about frequencies. During solar max, you can get on the order of three to four CMEs per day, whereas during solar minimum, it could be a CME every few days. And that’s kind of the difference.If what we are tracking is CME intensity, then where we are in the sunspot cycle is not all that predictive. Finally, I like to track solar flares because they do constitute a very small but potentially catastrophic risk, one that the military and U.S. government take seriously (and I believe in taking things seriously all on my own, whether or not the government does), but mainly because I am interested in ham radio and would love to see aurora again.
Hi Chris,
I think the warning was meta-textual - I would read the same post very differently on a ham chatboard, but posting it here has a different implication. A post in a forum called 'Daily Prep' has a strong inference of warning, which is to say it has a relevance towards something which requires preparation.
I also watch solar activity very closely as a keen VHF op. I've been begging for some Auroral activity for months, X1 is the point where it just begins to get interesting. This is my third cycle of close watching so I'm aware what sort of geomagnetic storms we've lived through with most people being none the wiser, as well as those which have tripped out power grids. In terms of daily prep, an X1 flare is barely a flicker on the scale. If it was an X15 with an Earth-directed CME, I'd be here saying 'take note, folks'.
I haven't listened to the podcast you indicated, but I shall - it looks too interesting to miss. I don't see any discrepancy of information though - I pointed out that (a) the current flare is orders of magnitude below the risk threshold and (b) that flares are more common on solar maxima. That seems to be in full accord with no need for reconciliation.
I'm not saying that solar activity doesn't have the potential for severely disrupting industrial society - it clearly does, and there are ways to prepare for that. What I am saying is that this is not the flare you're looking for.
_ _ … …_ _