Jeez, not that insane site again. Is there anything in particular in that mass of b.s. you'd like addressed? I'm not going through all of that with a fine-toothed comb, because pointing out the "wrong things" will basically entail addressing the entire website, which might require a book. As an aside, does that look like a credible source to you? "Mega-Disaster Planner: 2012 Survival Guide" — c'mon….
The earth's magnetic field always has "holes" in it. NASA's THEMIS project discovered a larger-than-expected hole in 2007 that was bizarrely triggered by a flare with northern polarity. Two things to keep in mind:
1) The hullabaloo over this discovery occurred prior to the revising of the Solar Max 24 prediction in May 2009. People were still expecting a nasty Solar Maximum in 2011 or 2012.
2) Direct studies of Sun-Earth electromagnetic dynamics, such as those enabled by SOHO and STEREO, have not been possible for very long. Just as detailed earthquake records go back only a century at most, not allowing us to derive any particularly telling trends over geologic time scales, solar observations such as those we can conduct now are still in their youth and operate from a very limited sample of data.
As always, a strong CME can potentially cause problems for communications and power grids on Earth at any given time, and the state of the planet's geomagnetic field at that moment can certainly influence how severe a storm is or whether there is a storm at all. This is true during solar minimums and maximums alike, day in and day out.
Tony (guest) 09 Aug 2010 14:56
