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.
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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'.
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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.