Articles Tagged "YouTube"

ScienceCasts: The Surprising Power of a Solar Storm



Uploaded by ScienceAtNASA on Mar 22, 2012

Visit http://science.nasa.gov/ for more.

A flurry of solar activity in early March dumped enough heat in Earth's upper atmosphere to power every residence in New York City for two years. The heat has since dissipated, but there's more to come as the solar cycle intensifies.

H/T NM

Also see solarimg.org

ISS Flies Above the Aurora Australis - YouTube.com


AURORAS UNDERFOOT: Solar activity is picking up, and no one has a better view of its effect on Earth than the crew of the International Space Station. During a geomagnetic storm on Sept. 17th, astronauts recorded a must-see movie of auroras dancing underfoot:

Note how the underbelly of the space station glows green from the reflected light of the auroras below. Also, in the distance, Sirius the dog star and Orion the Hunter can be seen rising feet-first into the night sky.

X-flares of Solar Cycle 24: There have been only a handful of X-flares since the beginning of new Solar Cycle 24. Here is a complete list so far, all in 2011: Feb. 15 (X2), March 9 (X1), Aug. 9 (X7), Sept. 6 (X2), Sept. 7 (X2). Before these five, the previous X-flare occured on Dec.14, 2006, (X1) during old Solar Cycle 23.

For the first time, a spacecraft far from Earth has turned and watched a solar storm engulf our planet. The movie, released today during a NASA press conference, has galvanized solar physicists, who say it could lead to important advances in space weather forecasting.

“The movie sent chills down my spine,” says Craig DeForest of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "It shows a CME swelling into an enormous wall of plasma and then washing over the tiny blue speck of Earth where we live. I felt very small.”



A wide-angle movie recorded by NASA's STEREO-A spacecraft shows a solar storm traveling all the way from the sun to Earth and engulfing our planet.

CMEs are billion-ton clouds of solar plasma launched by the same explosions that spark solar flares. When they sweep past our planet, they can cause auroras, radiation storms, and in extreme cases power outages. Tracking these clouds and predicting their arrival is an important part of space weather forecasting.

“We have seen CMEs before, but never quite like this,” says Lika Guhathakurta, program scientist for the STEREO mission at NASA headquarters. “STEREO-A has given us a new view of solar storms.”

April 14, 2011: If you've ever stood in front of a hot stove, watching a pot of water and waiting impatiently for it to boil, you know what it feels like to be a solar physicist

Back in 2008, the solar cycle plunged into the deepest minimum in nearly a century. Sunspots all but vanished, solar flares subsided, and the sun was eerily quiet.

"Ever since, we've been waiting for solar activity to pick up," says Richard Fisher, head of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. "It's been three long years."

While heat keeps returning to the mid-Atlantic where last winter all-time record snows fell, nothing but cool weather has plagued the west coast. (May 1 to July 27, 2010)

H/T IceCap.us

Edited extract: "Why did so many scientists get it wrong?" from David Archibald's book - The Past and Future of Climate:

If the data and forecasts in this book are correct, then the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, the Royal Society in the United Kingdom, the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO in Australia are all wrong.

How can this be? Firstly, there aren’t that many scientists involved in the IPCC deliberations. The inner core is possibly twenty souls. Secondly, they were untroubled by the necessity to concoct fraudulent data to get their desired results. The only unknown question regarding the IPCC scientists is “Did they actually believe in the global warming that they were promoting?”

It turns out that they did, and possibly still do. That is shown by the Climategate emails released on 20th November, 2009. The Climategate emails are a selection of emails amongst members of the inner core plus minor characters. The fact that the IPCC scientists believed in the global warming they were promoting means that their morality at that level was better than expected, but it also means that they are a lot more stupid than expected. Nevertheless, their behaviour in promoting the notion of global warming using fraudulent statistics is reprehensible and hopefully they will be duly punished in this world or the next.

The history of the global warming fraud has been detailed in a number of books published recently, including a number on the climategate emails alone. A good analysis of the emails can be found in a book entitled The Climategate Emails by John Costella, which can be downloaded from the Lavoisier Group website.

Updated below with Four YouTube's

A commenter on my piece about the new documentary “Not Evil, Just Wrong” provided a link to a video clip about the natural, cyclic and historical nature of climate change on our planet.

I’ve seen and heard much of this information before from various sources, but it’s fairly safe to say a number of people may not have. Given the astonishing amount of ignorance thrown around in pop culture about anthropogenic global warming, remarkably absence is any realization that temperatures have been going up and down drastically on earth for hundreds and even thousands of years.

Apostles of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) would have us believe that the planetary warming we’ve seen in the last 15-20 years (which has leveled off in the last few years, incidentally) is “undoubtedly” caused by human activity. How do they know this? Well, humans invented industry and internal combustion engines within the last 100 years, and it’s gotten warmer in the last 100 years. This is the obvious conclusion, right?