Up to you, until it isn’t
Written for High Plains Journal
My grandfather, Calvin J Loos born in 1918 was tremendous at passing down all of the old wise tales about reading the signs of nature. In today’s world we have become so reliant on technology we most likely don’t even know what it means when you see massive number of snakes crossing the road. The trees leaves that have turned over, the first croak of a frog in spring or simply things like the dense fog of fall. Not to mention the ring around the moon, or a moon that is holding water. Of course my favorite that I experience on a daily basis is the simple behavior of my cows. That is just name a few of the observations that back in the day they needed to understand for weather forecasting. I might mention they are still more reliable than the $2 million worth of meteorological equipment.
So, every Wednesday on Rural Route Radio now for the past 3 years I have had JC Cole from New Jersey on the program talking about earth is due to receive massive solar flares from the sun. Of course, JC is talking about the risk we have created by not hardening the electric grid to protect ourselves. Well suddenly after this past weekend, as most are talking about brilliance of the Northern Lights the farmers are asking, how am going to get this planting fixed?
For the record which is my true motivation for writing this piece, there will be a group of control freaks caming that the solar showers of this past weekend are the result of climate crisis. Well that may be true if you are ignorant of history. You see solar showers only proof of dating back 9200 years. In fact most people today remembers parts the 2005 solar showers, back when we had disc markers on the planter and it was no big deal just drop the marker and plant away. Not the case anymore because we have become far too reliant upon the eye in the sky.
I found this solar storm from March 1989 to quite interesting and relevant to where we are today. A powerful solar flare provoked a geomagnetic storm which subsequently set off a major March 13 power blackout in Canada that left six million people without electricity for nine hours. Seems like this should have been a modern day wake up call but we are too busy funding crime in Ukraine and Israel.
But in my research on this today I learned to origins of a term I have used once in a while but did know what it meant until now. “It was a Carrington event.” Well in 1859 we have the first documented solar flare impacting Earth. It occurred in Sept and an amateur astronomer observed in this private observatory by Richard Carrington. It was the most severe documented solar event in the past 500 years.
Some never connected the dots, but Carrington did as two days after the solar storm there were reports of sparks showering from telegraph machines, operators receiving electric shocks and papers set ablaze by the rogue sparks.
Space.com reports
The flare was a major coronal mass ejection (CME), a burst of magnetized plasma from the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona. In 17.6 hours, the CME traversed over 90 million miles (150 million km) between the sun and Earth and unleashed its force on our planet. According to NASA spaceflight, it usually takes CMEs multiple days to reach Earth.
It's from these spots that solar flares, coronal mass ejections and other electromagnetic phenomena can emerge — with potentially hazardous consequences for our technological way of life.
Sunspot activity rises and falls on an 11-year cycle, and we're currently approaching the next solar maximum in 2025. So now is a good time to look at the worst solar storms.
Researchers from Lloyd's of London and the Atmospheric and Environmental Research agency in the U.S. have estimated that a Carrington-class event today would result in between $0.6 and $2.6 trillion in damages to the U.S. alone, according to NASA spaceflight.
An earlier study, from 2020, suggested that severe geomagnetic storms occurred in 42 of the preceding 150 years — far more often than had previously been thought.
So today it is my goal to shed light on the fact that the signs of nature are present every single day, whether you rely on the singing of birds as your weather indicator or your phone is totally up to you until it ins’t.