Strong new evidence that the sun is far from stable

John O'Sullivan

NASA reports an entire hemisphere of the sun has erupted. The U.S. space agency now admits the cataclysm puts existing solar theories in doubt.

We are forever being told that the sun is a vast gas ball of hydrogen and helium at the center of our solar system. But new evidence may help prove this isn’t the case after all, according to solar experts who say the sun has an iron core.

A stunned NASA admits, “Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big. It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity.”

The vast global solar eruption covers ~10^9 km of the solar photosphere. The US space agency reports, “The whole solar hemisphere erupted simultaneously in an avalanche effect that had been triggered in the tiny solar core and propagated outwards”

Scientists have confirmed that the explosion that occurred on August 1, 2010 is unprecedented in recorded history and caused filaments of magnetism to snap and explode creating enormous shock waves that raced across the stellar surface. This caused billion-ton clouds of hot gas to billow out into space.

This unprecedented event is claimed to give support to an alternative theory long held by Professor Oliver K. Manuel, a Postdoctoral Fellow of the University of California, Berkeley.

Iron core sun theorists believe its possible that our sun may now, in fact, be more like an atom rather than a huge gas ball with the atom, electrons occupy 99% of the volume and have less than 1% of the mass. In the Sun, the atmosphere and planets occupy 99% of the volume and may also have less than 1% of the mass.

Controversy about our understanding of the sun has been fomenting for years. In 1980, solar science researcher, Ralph E. Juergens lamented, “The modern astrophysical concept that ascribes the sun’s energy to thermonuclear reactions deep in the solar interior is contradicted by nearly every observable aspect of the sun.”

The astrophysics establishment has long shunned the idea of the sun having any such iron core. But this momentous event is consistent with the theory that there is a tiny dense neutron core the size of a city powered by neutron repulsion. Professor Manuel believes there is a super-conducting iron-rich shell the size of a moon or small planet surrounding the neutron core.

Backing the theory is astrophysicist Carl A. Rouse, who calculated a tiny iron-rich solar core from helioseismology data, but he has also been ignored up until now.

NASA's discovery of global solar eruptions is set to encourage a fresh look by scientists at Manuel’s ideas that are further detailed in the Journal of Fusion Energy (2002).

This monumental solar eruption may finally jolt NASA out of its complacency about how the key driver of Earth’s climate actually works. He sagely observes, “Although NASA seems to be catching up, after decades of ‘group-think’ it will be very difficult for NASA scientists to comprehend the Sun.”

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Driving US Families Into Poverty

The Obama Administration still hasn't gotten the message voters sent Washington on November 2.

The lame duck session and 111th Congress finally ended, without the White House getting key items on its wish list. So now, the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department intend to impose costly, job-killing, economy-strangling new rules for power plants and refineries, and implement more land-grabs that will lock up additional millions of acres and more billions of dollars of American energy.

Their goal is to end the hydrocarbon and nuclear era in America – and force us to convert to “renewable” energy. Contrary to clear voter mandates and consumer needs, they are using regulations and executive edicts to slash carbon dioxide emissions, impose “clean energy standards,” halt onshore and offshore drilling, and hobble the vehicles, electrical generating plants and factories that are the backbone of our nation’s economy, jobs and living standards.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson claims these actions are needed to ensure “environmental justice” for poor and minority families threatened by “manmade global warming.” Meanwhile, the United States and entire Northern Hemisphere are enduring yet another nasty winter, marked by early snow storms and record cold temperatures. Some scientists say Earth could be entering another prolonged period of cooler temperatures.

Businesses, workers and families face “fuel poverty,” injustice, bankruptcy and worse at the hands of their government, if this regulatory power grab continues.

The Congressional Research Service says average US households will pay almost $1000 this winter just for heat. That’s average: Alaska to Florida, Hawaii to New York. Northern states residents will pay double or triple that. Businesses, schools and hospitals will also be driven into fuel poverty.

In Cobb County, Georgia, hundreds shivered outside to apply for heating assistance from a welfare agency that may not have enough money for every family that needs help. Along the Canadian border, in St. Lawrence County, New York, over 8,000 households were approved for heating aid by cash-strapped local, county and state governments that wonder where the money will come from – while Albany has blocked drilling for shale gas that could fuel homes and power plants, and generate billions in revenue.

Even worse, all this is before the Feds actually implement more of the job-killing, family-freezing CO2 limits and other plans they are contemplating. To see what’s in store for millions of American businesses and families, one need only look at the planet’s one country that is still actually and obstinately plowing ahead to meet its climate change and renewable energy goals, regardless of the costs.

Across Great Britain, household energy bills could double by 2020, to $3,900 (£2,500) a year, market expert Mark Todd of EnergyHelpLine.com has warned. Gasoline prices are likewise climbing to unaffordable levels, and the majority of United Kingdom companies will see their natural gas and electricity prices skyrocket by 100% between 2012 and 2016 – on top of a carbon tax bill of “at least” $65,660 (£42,000) annually – according to the analytical firm Carbon Masters.

Moreover, most of Britain’s older coal-fired and nuclear power plants are scheduled to be shut down, with almost nothing to replace them, even as electricity demand rises. That will increase the danger of widespread blackouts, said the Daily Mail, and cause hundreds of thousands UK jobs to be outsourced to countries where energy costs are much lower, and air pollution and carbon dioxide emission standards far less stringent. That will hardly improve England’s economy or global environmental quality.

Far worse, more than 5.5 million households will be plunged into “fuel poverty” by early 2011 – forced to spend more than 10% of their family incomes on energy – National Energy Action and other charities said. That’s over one-fifth of all UK households and a huge increase from 4.5 million families in 2008. Most in these households are over age 60, but working families are also struggling to keep the heat on, as prices soar.

Nearly 28,000 people died in Britain last winter, most of them pensioners who could not afford adequate heat. Charities say this is the highest winter death rate in northern Europe, worse even than much colder nations like Finland and Sweden. And this winter has already seen the coldest December night for Wales in 169 years of record keeping. Britain is on track to having its coldest December in a century.

To stay warm, thousands of elderly are using travel passes to ride buses all day, while others seek refuge in libraries and shopping centers, the Sunday Express noted. Others are “putting their health at risk, in an attempt to keep costs down,” by bundling up and turning the heat down or off entirely, said Age UK Charity Director Michelle Mitchell.

Now, amid the Christmas and New Year holiday, two million homes, schools and hospitals face fuel rationing. Some families could wait weeks before they can get their fuel oil tanks refilled, as more snow falls across Great Britain.

Meanwhile, the British government has cut funding for its Warm Front heating assistance program from $470 million this year to $172 million in 2011, Consumer Focus campaigner Jonathan Stearn angrily noted. And because the winds barely blow during the coldest weather, Britain’s “shiny new green” turbines were able to supply only “one-500th of the exceptionally large demand” for electricity during the frigid weather of early December, Sunday Times columnist Dominic Lawson ruefully observed.

That’s a tiny fraction of the wind turbines’ “rated capacity.” But it is a situation commonly faced with turbines on freezing Minnesota winter nights and sweltering Texas summer afternoons, when they average a measly 10% of the electricity output their subsidy-hungry backers say they are capable of.

Is this what Lisa Jackson would call “environmental justice”? How do her actions, notions of “justice,” and government-driven energy price spikes square with a 2009 poll by Wilson Research Strategies? It found that 56% of blacks think politicians and bureaucrats setting climate change policy in Washington fail to consider economic and quality of life concerns in the black community. Fully 76% are unwilling to pay more than $50 a year more for electricity, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Northern US winters are far worse than even record-setters in Britain. Why would anyone want to impose costly and nightmarish energy and environmental policies on American families, rich or poor?

The outgoing Congress nearly enacted a bill that would have provided a much needed congressional check on EPA actions. The Murkowski bill fell just short in a Senate dominated by partisan Democrats. The incoming Senate should be far more supportive of such legislation, especially in the face of EPA and other attempts to override the will of Congress and the American people.

The Affordable Power Alliance will urge the new Congress to honor its constitutional duties and prevent the Obama administration from imposing excessive regulations inspired by extreme ideologies. The 112th Congress, including Democrats up for reelection in 2012, needs to heed the overwhelming public demand that America’s economy no longer be held hostage by an elitist environmental network – even if that network includes the President of the United States.

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What doesn’t prove global warming?

As much as I try to follow the global warming debate I have yet to find one succinct article that outlines precisely what we should expect to see if there were NO global warming.

The last few winters in Europe have been colder than normal and rather snowy. The Telegraph reports: "The average temperature of the season so far has be -0.8C (32F), colder than any year since 1683/84 when the mercury plunged to -1.17C (29.9F)." So, the UK is headed toward the coldest winter in over 300 years!

Met Eireann, the Irish weather office says that temperatures in Ireland are at the lowest they've been for 130 years and "December has officially been the coldest month ever on record." Gerald Fleming, of the Met office says: "At all our stations thus far it has been the coldest December on record. Those records in some cases go back to the the mid-1850s." Ireland also recorded the coldest day ever in its history. You should realize this is the third very cold winter in a row for the UK.

Chattanooga, TN, has had the 4th coldest winter ever on record. In Hong Kong, a sub-tropical city, "temperatures feel to six degrees Celsius" allowing the formation of ice and frost which is "hardly ever seen in the sub-tropical city." Sunny Tampa, Florida, is also facing "the coldest December on record for Tampa." So far this frigid weather has hit North America, Europe and Asia. And it is coming with heavy snowfall.

The left-wing Democracy Now site has any interview by Amy Goodman with Paul Epstein of the Center for Health and the Global Environment. He wants to make it clear that while natural variability is never absent the colder weather IS a result of warming. There has been no shortage of pundits and prophets explaining how warming is increasing the snow levels and decreasing temperatures.

But, if we go back just 10 years, we find that the same gang of pundits and prophets were arguing that the evidence for global warming would be warmer winters and less snow. Consider this article from The Independent, in March of 2000. It was entitled: "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past."

The article laid out the "consensus" "now accepted as a reality by the international community," that global warming was happening and it was "manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers." So 10 years ago the consensus was that warming would mean "less cold" winters. After three years of colder-than-normal winters the media is now telling us the consensus is that warming will cause colder winters. So warmer winters proves warming and colder winters prove warming. Exactly what doesn't prove warming?

The same article not only said warming would cause warmer winters but would mean that snow would become extinct.... The Independent sadly reported:

"The chance are certainly now stacked against the sort of heavy snowfall in cities that inspired Impressionist painters, such as Sisley, and the 19th century poet laureate Robert Bridges, who wrote in "London Snow" of it, "stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying."

Not any more, it seems. Not any more? Well, unless you count this year, last year, and the year before. Like temperature it appears that any level of snow proves global warming. If snow is absent then global warming is the reason. If snow is overly plentiful then global warming is the reason.

Let me state what I think happens. The warming theorists make predictions and when the predictions turn out wrong they revise them to fit what actually did happen. So that, the current state of warming theory is always "proven" by the past record.

But a theory that can't predict the future is useless. The most blatant example of changing forecasts after the fact came from the British Met Office in 2008. In September they sent out a press release forecasting a "milder than average" winter for the UK. In the middle of December they acknowledged "the UK has had the coldest winter in over 30 years." Instead of admitting they got it wrong they sent out a press release claiming: "The Met Office seasonal forecast predicted the cold start to the winter season with milder conditions expected during January and February."

But January remained cold without the milder conditions they predicted. No worries, a new press release announced: "The Met Office correctly forecast the spell of cold weather and kept the public informed via our various forecasts."

In the past I've reported on how increased rain was caused by global warming but when the same areas experienced dry conditions the media reported that too was the result of the warming. More snow in the UK is proof of warming, but warming will also mean snow disappears in the UK. Winters in Europe will be warmer because of warming except for those years when they will be cooler than normal.

I also note that when weather patterns go contrary to warming theory we are reminded that we shouldn't confuse weather with climate: which is good advice. But when weather patterns appears in line with warming theory they are presented as proof that the theory is correct.

I admit I'm a layman just trying to figure out the facts. But what really makes me skeptical about the whole warming theory is the way that everything proves warming. Global warming causes warmer winters, until the winters get colder and then they too are the result of warming. Global warming causes snowless winters and threatens to make snow entirely extinct, until there is massive amounts of snow which are then attributed to warming as well—and in the same area. Dryer summers in one country are the result of warming, but when the same country has wetter weather that too is the result of warming.

Apparently any outcome is proof that warming is happening and that mankind is responsible. Global warming causes everything and everything proves global warming.

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New Low: San Fran Chronicle Suggests Global Warming Caused Haiti Earthquake.

A revolution in geophysics: Earthquakes caused by deforestation, not movement of crustal plates. All the textbooks will have to be revised!

Just when you thought they couldn’t possibly stoop any lower . . .

Sick global warming advocate Cameron Scott of the San Francisco Chronicle’s ‘Thin Green Line’ blog has plumbed new depths of ruthless opportunism by trying to link Haiti’s horrific earthquake to global warming.

Here’s the argument which the article offers:

At the American Geophysical Union meeting late last month, University of Miami geologist Shimon Wdowinski argued that the devastating earthquake a year ago may have been caused by a combination of deforestation and hurricanes. Climate change is spurring more, stronger hurricanes, which are fueled by warm ocean waters.

It works like this: Deforestation leaves hillsides vulnerable to erosion, which hurricanes deliver in spades. Haiti’s hills have waned to a degree, says Wdowinski, that it could affect the stability of the Earth’s crust.

See here

Yes, you read that right – they’re asking you to believe that a magnitude SEVEN earthquake was caused by “a combination of deforestation and hurricanes” brought about by you wicked, wicked people who drive cars and live in houses.

Of course, as the BBC reported shortly after the quake, such a massive event can only be caused by two tectonic plates grinding against each other and settling (See here). Not deforestation. Not ‘hurricanes’. Not even melting ice in the Arctic.

Read the first paragraph quoted again – note how Dr Wdowinski himself doesn’t appear to link the earthquake with global warming – all he suggests is that slippage of land may precipitate a quake that was already waiting to happen anyway. But you’d hardly notice how the author glides smoothly from Dr Wdowinski’s position to something entirely different. This is hardly journalism to be proud of, to say the least.

What’s even worse, is that the article references a blog rather than any scientific paper for the wild assertions it makes. Scott refers to the ‘Treehugger’ blog as his source, which in turns refers to ‘Mongabay’, which – stay with me here – yet again refers to another blog, the ‘Weather Underground’ blog. Whew! Talk about dubious sources.

What is clear, is that there is no tragedy, disaster or catastrophe that these ghouls will not seize on and use to try and persuade decent people that if they don’t follow the party line on global warming they are personally responsible for every death they see on TV. Global warming activism is now the cult of the vulture, circling the planet looking for death, disease and disaster to feast on.

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Obama’s War on Energy

Rising gas prices are the elephant in the room that no one is talking about. With 87 octane gasoline now around $3 a gallon throughout the country, we can expect to start seeing increased prices for the delivery of goods and services, as UPS, FedEx, railroads and even airplanes feel the fuel cost pinch.

Unfortunately these skyrocketing prices are only the tip of the iceberg as Obama engages in an unprecedented war on American-produced energy.

For those who don’t believe that Obama is engaged in an undeclared war on domestic energy production, look at his actions in the offshore oil area. While his administration has thrown their bodies in front of the safe development of offshore oil resources in America, Obama is sending U.S. taxpayer money to Brazil to help fund the development of a massive oil field off the Brazilian coastline.

The one-world crowd who insist that the U.S. destroy our economic base on the altar of global warming because our CO2 emissions harm the rest of the world now are funding the offshore drilling of a major oil field in South America where environmental standards are much lower. Makes sense.

The really crazy part of the equation is that at the same time that U.S. taxpayers are anteing up to pay for offshore oil development in Brazil, China is investing heavily in the Brazilian power grid. In essence, U.S. taxpayers are paying to get the oil out of the ground, and Chinese investors will be benefiting by selling the power generated by that raw material.

Back here in the U.S., the entire domestic energy production industry is under assault, as the administration prefers amber waves of windmills across the fruited plain over proven, reliable sources of energy.

Let’s look at the energy development box score. Offshore oil drilling is out, even though the Chinese and Cubans drill for oil in the same oil fields outside of our waters. Texas gas refineries are unlikely to be allowed to reopen by the Environmental Protection Agency, after they shut down in a few weeks to retool for the spring gasoline mixture. It seems they don’t meet the congressionally rejected, but Obama EPA-imposed global warming regulations. If you think $3 a gallon is a lot, just realize $4 a gallon is on its way courtesy of the global warming zealots at the EPA.

The war on coal is even more severe. In spite of 2008 campaign promises to support “clean coal” technology, the administration has aggressively sought to cut coal out of the energy mix. The EPA has sought to end mountaintop mining, expanded global warming-based regulations that make coal a much less cost-efficient alternative for electric power plants and attacked coal production under the guise of the Clean Water Act. All this, in spite of the fact that our nation is the Saudi Arabia of recoverable coal reserves, with more than 40 percent more coal available than any other country.

Nuclear power is a clean energy source, but Obama pulled the rug out from under it by joining with Harry Reid to shut down the Yucca Mountain disposal site, effectively eliminating the expansion of nuclear power as a solution.

At the same time that China is aggressively seeking oil and gas reserves, France gets a majority of its energy from nuclear and Brazil drills one of the largest oil reserves in the world using U.S. taxpayer dollars, our president, Obama, is actively working to destroy our domestic oil, coal and nuclear industries.

Apparently, in Obama’s world, you just turn up the thermostat and heat comes out without any recognition that some energy needed to be converted to make that heat. Let’s hope he is defeated before the whole country goes cold due to his extremist and dangerous energy policies.

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Leftist media in full court press backing Warmism

Russell Cook

If a major news story casts doubt on man-caused global warming, does it make a sound? If you are a promoter of the global warming crisis, those stories misdirect public opinion and prevent everyone from solving the crisis, while the rest of us see them as specks of gold in raging torrents of stories affirming Al Gore's settled science.

Consider the ClimateGate story and its recent one-year anniversary. According to the Media Research Center,

Even though many considered it a huge scandal, the three broadcast networks didn't think so. They ignored the story for roughly two weeks, and have only mentioned it in a dozen stories in the past year.

My own favorite mainstream media punching bag, PBS' NewsHour did at least give the story cursory mention ten days after it broke, but then couldn't be troubled to offer in-depth discussion of it until four months later, its solitary effort of lengthy analysis on the topic. This was noteworthy if only because it featured skeptic scientist Pat Michaels, the first such skeptic to appear on the NewsHour offering any opposing viewpoint of significance since George Taylor in 2007. That 2007 program was the NewsHour's first major foray into global warming skeptic opinion since the interview of an industry executive in 1997, and was one of just a few bits that prevented the NewsHour from having a 100% bias against presenting such viewpoints, as I quantified in a prior American Thinker article.

Yet, Joe Romm had this to say about ClimateGate's anniversary in his 11/15 ClimateProgress blog titled "A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice" (hat tip to Michael Wiant),

The media will be doing countless retrospectives, most of which will be wasted ink...focusing on climate scientists at the expense of climate science...the overwhelming majority of the mainstream media...devoted a large fraction of its climate ‘ink' in the last 12 months to what was essentially a non-story...

Meanwhile, we have the infamous recent op-ed in the NY Times in which the ‘science' tells us to expect nasty snowstorms caused by global warming, and the NewsHour telling us about the ‘science' of rapidly melting glaciers, and ‘studies' of how to save polar bears.

Romm's efforts to frame the media as not doing its job properly are nothing new, Ross Gelbspan had this to say in his 2004 Boiling Point book about the media,

For many years, the press accorded the same weight to the "skeptics" as it did to mainstream scientists. This was done in the name of journalistic balance. In fact, it was journalistic laziness.

And for good measure, he said this about snowstorms in his 1997 The Heat is On, when speaking about a series of weather patterns being proof of global warming,

The severe weather has continued into 1996. My own back yard became a snow-buried casualty of New England's 1995-96 winter from hell.

It's a no-win exercise: excess snow is proof of global warming... unless someone in the mainstream breaks ranks and seriously asks if the prior "warming" from a few years ago couldn't be proof for the original 1970s global cooling crisis.

Everyone knows how fickle the mainstream media is, and how they are ultimately driven to out-scoop each other for ratings gains. If they smell blood in the water of an imminent collapse to this entire so-called crisis, they will turn on each other and promoters like Romm and Gelbspan in a heartbeat, no doubt with yells of being hoodwinked or assumptions that other news outlets had initially checked the veracity of the "warming" science everyone else relies on.

2011 could turn out to be quite an entertaining year.

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