The big GW

Right now as we speak (or type ferociously), world leader are convening in Copenhagen to debate, talk and generally communicate their concerns about Global Warming, which is great – IF anything comes of it. We have already seen several meetings of this kind with much excitement about possible changes for the betterment of our global dilemma – and guess what? No change. Okay to be fair some change or at least awareness and investigations into the possible causes of GW.

Poorer developing countries have high hopes that possible change (and hopefully finance) may come of this meeting – countries who are already feeling the effects of global warming (drought, floods). Scientists, of course, are still squabbling over the cause of global warming but the majorities, 2500 scientists in 130 countries, are pretty close to a consensus that current warming has been caused by us.

How did we manage that?
Industrialization coupled with deforestation, oh and how about a little pollution on the top? The fact is, we are pouring more carbon dioxide (and other long persisting gases) into the atmosphere than the trees and oceans can absorb. So that means that even if we stopped ALL emissions right now, it wouldn’t stop global warming.

So what are the effects knocking on our door currently?

• The average global temperatures have risen 0.8°C (1.4 F) since 1880
  
• The 20th century has been the hottest in 400 years – possibly the hottest in millennia, the last 11 years of which have been the warmest since 1850
  
• Arctic ice is disappearing and will be completely ice-free by the summer of 2040 or earlier
  Mountain snow and glaciers are melting at a rapid rate – glacier national park had 150 glaciers in 1910 vs. a measly 27 currently

And where does that lead?

• The IPCC said in 2007 that Global Warming could lead to large scale food and water shortages
  
• Sea level will rise by 18 to 59 cm (7 to 23 inches) by the end of the century – just 4 inches could flood many South Sea Islands and swamp parts of South East Asia
  
• Strong hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, wild fires and other natural disasters may become common place in many parts of the world
  
• Disappearing habitat, changing ecosystems and acidifying oceans could cause the extinction of millions of species
  
• The oceans circulatory system (oceanic conveyer belt) could be permanently altered causing and mini ice age in Western Europe.
  
  The fact is we have taken far too much for far too long from our planet without giving back to our beautiful blue home, and as with every thing in our infinitesimal human lives, the only time we stop and take notice long enough to change, is when we are forced to. It’s up to us to decide to change things and make them happen. Come on peeps let’s get it together and do something before it’s too late.

Solar storms and us PART 2

So here is some more info on Solar storms...

The expanded atmosphere increases drag on satellites and degrades radio and GPS signals. However the worst is yet to come – potentially more destructive than a flares radiation, CME’s boost the speed of the solar wind and create a shockwave of energetic protons. That shockwave distorts earth’s magnetic shield and the protons stream down on the poles creating geomagnetic disturbances like the northern lights. The shockwave can also disrupt and damage the electronics in satellites.

Now that you understand how solar storms work, we can move on.

The reason why NASA is watching the sun at the moment is because over the last 150 years our magnetic field seems to be weakening and that’s NOT good news. Our magnetic field protects us from solar storms and the radiation they produce as well as any other rays that reach us from the universe around us.

If we where to be hit by a major X (the highest class) factor solar flare it could rip through our failing magnetic field and seriously disturb all electronics in the area – planes; power plants, ships and all navigational equipment, the list is endless.

So how often does this happen?
Will the last blast from the sun happened in Canada in 2008 during a solar minimum, it was classified as a minor X class flare, shut down Quebecs power grid for 9 hours, mid winter… brrr much?
If that was a minor flare in the solar minimum, what would a major X class flare in the maximum do? Well some scientists have speculated that if a major flare where to hit us at the right place at the right time, it could not only shut down but overload and probably fry all electronics in the region – possibly thousands of miles in size.
What would that mean for you and me?
Just think about how much of your everyday life is dependent on electronics – lights, power, water, banks (who has any real cash nowadays? Most, if not all of it is in an electronic bank system!) etc. If America was hit by a super flare, like the one on 1 September 1859, it would cause devastation to environment and economy alike with costs running into billions of dollars.
Satellites controlling navigation and telecommunication (cell phones and navigation equipment would stop working) would be badly damaged, power stations and transformers would be shut down and possibly damaged beyond repair. Power lines and telephone cables could catch fire; electrical devices in the area would short circuit rendering them useless. Hospitals, police and fire stations would have to rely on back up generators for large amounts of time. We are so reliant on electricity today that if our power were jeopardized in any way it would bring our lives to a standstill.

Solar storms and Us - PART 1

There is always some kind of sun spot activity happening on the sun’s surface and every 11 years there’s a surge of activity called the solar maximum. NASA reports that 2012 will be the most intense solar maximum since 1958 – scientists are predicting that the next sunspot cycle will be 30 to 50% stronger than the last. We are entering the worst solar storm season for the next 11 years where we will be bombarded by energized particles from the sun. This has happened many times in the past as the sunspot cycle lasts on average 22 years; completing after two 11 years sunspot cycles. So for the next 11years (kind of like the sun’s summer) we will be watching the skies for nasty blasts headed out way.
But why? What can a solar storm really do to us?
Well let’s start at the beginning and explain the anatomy of a solar storm.

1. Sun Spots
Sunspots form where magnetic fields become concentrated and create areas of reduced surface temperature and appear visibly darker than the area around them. The magnetic fields twist on the surface, these knotted fields shut down the normal flow, or convection, of hot plasma from the sun’s interior to the surface, making the region cooler and darker than its surroundings.

2. Magnetic Field lines
Sunspots explode when the field lines twist to the point of snapping, much like a rubber band wound up too tightly. They link up again to form a new shape, but not before releasing enormous amounts of stored energy and hot gas into the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.

3. Solar Flare
The resulting eruption, called a solar flare, heats the surrounding gas to about 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. The explosion accelerates subatomic particles to near light speed and spews radiation (mostly ultra violet and gamma rays and x-rays) into space.

4. Plasma Burst
Flares are sometimes followed by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in which billions of tons of the sun’s plasma are flung into space. These huge bubbles of matter travel relatively slow (1000 miles a second – slow motion right?); even the fastest take 24 hours or more to reach earth.

5. Earth impact
Eight minutes after a flare erupts, Earth absorbs the radiation pulse. This pulse produces extra ions and electrons causing the atmosphere to puff out.

Phew. . . Thats alot o info to digest I'll put up the rest tomorrow!

Mayan Meltdown – 2012

So the buzz word on everyone’s lips lately seems to be 2012, well to do with the end of the world anyway – otherwise it’s all sparklepires (sparkly vampires) which we will of course explore at a later date.
2012 has become the next big apocalypse date, spurred on by the immanent release of Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster of the same name. NASA has received streams of emails from the worried public about whether or not 12-21-2012 will be the end or no. So let’s have a look at what its all about, shall we?

Why 2012?
The 2012 end date is based on the modern interpretation of the Mayan Cyclical calendar. The ancient Mayan Long count calendar marks its completion on December 21, 2012 at 11.11am universal time.
The Mayans were a highly developed civilization – as developed as the western civilizations of the time. The Maya had their own written language and had developed mathematics as well as a calendar that spanned 5,125 years with incredible accuracy.
In fact the Maya were obsessed with the passage of time – and had precise calendars that measured every thing from pregnancy to harvest time and insect cycles (lovely). With out any modern equipment or telescopes the Maya tracked the movements of the stars, planets, and the Milky Way galaxy; charted celestial alignments and events over massive amounts of time. That’s a pretty amazing feat for a civilization that did not even develop the wheel (not real useful in the jungle I imagine)!

So with out going into too much detail, the end of the Mayan long count calendar represented the end of an age or ‘Sun’, each of these ended with the destruction of the world, the birth of a new age and the beginning of the long count once again.

The 5th Sun
In Mayan creation stories, three previous worlds, or ages, have been destroyed. 2012 is the end of present age according to current interpretations of the Mayan calendars – they say this age will be destroyed by fire. According to the Maya this doesn’t mean the complete destruction of our world – it also means the birth of a new age. This makes the ending of the old age a time of purification and the beginning of the new age a time of transformation.

Here are the Suns or ages that have passed:

• 1st Sun (approximately 20 000 years ago) - Dominated by female energy and related
  to the Fire element – development of the emotions as a type of awareness. (Destroyed by floods)
• 2nd Sun - Dominated by male energy and related to the Earth element – manifestation of
  consciousness and represents the mind (Destroyed when sun fell out of the sky and set the world ablaze)
• 3rd Sun - Dominated by female energy and related to the Air element – about the need to add heart and soul. (Destroyed when the gods rained gravel and fire)
• 4th Sun (Currently completing) - Dominated by male energy and related to the Water element – the unity of mind, body and spirit. (Will it be destroyed?)
• 5th Sun (entering 12/21/12) - Energy is balanced between female and male and related to the Ether element - this will be an age of synthesis and harmony or expanded consciousness.

The Coba Stele, an important time keeping document was uncovered at Coba – a Mayan site in the Yucatan. Inscribed 1,300 years ago, the dates are written in powers of the largest numbers in the Mayan system and represent time spans along a continuum of 16.4 billion years. The time cycles recorded on the stele represent evolutionary ages of our planet – shockingly the timeline of the Mayan evolutionary ages matches almost exactly the evolutionary epochs of modern science!

Incredibly there are many other ancient civilizations that have a 2012 end date – the Maya are but one in a line of many that predict the end of the world as we know it. We will be discussing those predictions and how they came about in future blogs, so stay tuned.

Will 2012 be the end of our world as we know it? We don’t really know, but I do believe that the world and societies we live in cannot continue on the destructive path we’re on. There has to be a change because quite frankly our earth cannot continue to support almost 7 billion insatiable, destructive humans – whether that change is environmentally, economically, socially or all 3. Will it all come crashing down on us on a date predicted by an ancient civilization? Who knows? Whatever the out come, one thing is for certain – time will definitely tell.

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Baking in the Solar Storm

In life there are some things that we just take for granted; like water, electricity, food and the sun, and on most days we don’t even think about them.
Yet they are the very thing that makes our life possible, if we had to remove just one of these elements our life on earth would come to a sudden halt.

So let’s look at the sun as it is one of the most important aspects in our life.
Our sun, Sol, has been around for billions of years and will still be there long after man has been forgotten, but what if Sol was the cause for man’s destruction, or if Sol was the reason for man’s disappearance in the past?

We are constantly faced with civilizations that where very much more advanced than we give them credit for and then one day vanished leaving their cities to decay for thousands of years.

So what happened to these great civilizations?
There has been speculation that war, famine, pestilence and many other minor occurances caused these vast nations to disappear over night, but what if all these disappearances where mere results of a much bigger picture that has evaded us as it leaves no trace evidence?

What if, at the height of their civilization they where faced with an angry sun god?
We all know that many ancient civilizations worshipped the sun and not in a mindless tribal way but based calendars, religion, astronomy and even architecture on the one element that gave them life.

The ancients feared the sun so much that they would sacrifice friends and family to make sure that the sun was happy.
But why?
Did they know something we don’t?
I understand the basics of fearing the sun, but not to the extent of killing thousands of people to appease their sun god, I think that there was more to it than that.

For example: the lost civilization of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, most people have never even heard of these empires and yet they were very advanced civilizations dating back 6000 years.
The people of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa built cities made from clay bricks, 70 cities in total with populations of over 40 000 people each, they farmed Sheep, Goats, Cows, Water Buffalo, Barley, Wheat, Rice, Mustard, Cotton, Sesame Seeds and even had Dogs, Cats, Pigs, Elephants, Chickens and Camels.

Their cities had running water, advanced drainage systems that where more sanitary than what had been created in West Asia around 2600 BC, the streets where lined with shops that sold mass manufactured pottery and bronze work, plus all their houses had enclosed yards. In the center of each city was a building that housed a large furnace that heated the communal baths, much like what the Romans claimed they had invented some 2000 years later.

The Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa civilizations shared a sophisticated system of weights, measurements and arithmetic with decimals. It is sill under debate whether the written symbols that have been found were part of a full blown language or not, but with all the evidence of this advanced civilization, it has been assumed that their language was as advanced as the Babylonians.

The strange thing about this civilization was around 1800 BC the civilization all but vanished.
What befell these people is still a mystery as their language has never been translated; there are some speculations amongst archeologists that the rivers dried up or that the yearly rains dwindled causing the animals and crops to die, leaving a massive population with out food and water.
But what caused the land to dry up and why could these 2000 year old civilizations not overcome it?

I have had a look at similar civilizations and I have come up with a theory. I think that these civilizations, as many others before and after them, where affected by a Solar storm that killed off their agriculture and may have caused their climate to change reducing the annual rain fall leaving their rivers dry and forcing them into a devastating drought that lasted for several years.
The interesting thing about this is that they were not the only civilizations that just disappeared with no trace or just left their cities for no good reason.

For instance, for reasons that are still debated, the Maya centers of the southern lowlands went into decline during the 8th and 9th centuries and were abandoned shortly thereafter. This decline was coupled with a cessation of monumental inscriptions and large-scale architectural construction. Although there is no universally accepted theory to explain this “collapse,” current theories fall into two categories: non-ecological and ecological.
Non-ecological theories of Maya decline are divided into several subcategories, such as overpopulation, foreign invasion, peasant revolt, and the collapse of key trade routes. Ecological hypotheses include environmental disaster, epidemic disease, and climate change



There is evidence that the Maya population exceeded carrying capacity of the environment including exhaustion of agricultural potential and overhunting of game. Some scholars have recently theorized that an intense 200 year drought that led to the collapse of Maya civilization. The drought theory originated from research performed by physical scientists studying lake beds, ancient pollen, theorized climate maps and other data, not from the archaeological community.
If Solar Storms where the cause of these civilizations disappearing and it happened again today would we be the lost civilization dug up thousands of years from know?
We will be discussing the theory of Solar Storms and their effects on earth at a later date – stay tuned.