Archives for May 2008

In a NASA media release entitled ‘Electric Hurricanes’ it was suggested that because Emily, Rita and Katrina were all exceptionally powerful hurricanes, their sheer violence somehow explains their lightning. But in the same media release, Richard Blakeslee, from the Global Hydrology and Climate Centre, says that this explanation is too simple.

“Other storms have been equally intense and did not produce much lightning,” he says. “There must be something else at work.”

That “something else at work” is the electric Birkeland currents that power the hurricanes, operating in dark current plasma mode, so little or no lightning is observed.

Birkeland currents are really filaments of electric current that from magnetic attraction are free to rotate around each other, but at the same time coming closer together generates a short range repulsive force that insulates them from each other, thereby maintaining their identity and forming a twisting rope that as the filaments get closer, just like a spinning ice skater bringing in her arms, start to spin even faster. Paired Birkelands are really just electric whirlwinds or a plasma vortex.

The movement of hurricanes over the earth’s surface seems much like that observed for sunspots.

Kristian Birkeland showed the gross features of sunspots in his Terrella experiments where electric discharges, from a donut of plasma around the magnetised sphere, move from mid to low latitudes on the sphere as the electric current increased.

The sun’s plasma torus in UV from the SOHO Mission.

The simplest model for the 22 year magnetic sunspot cycle involves modulation of the electrical power input from the galaxy to the solar circuitry which seems to behave like a secondary winding on a transformer responding to varying DC currents to produce a magnetic field which switches polarity.

The earth is linked to the sun by enormous magnetic flux ropes (or Birkeland currents), and from the behaviour of the auroras and sunspot activity it is entirely likely that the earth’s weather might also be an electrical phenomenon linked to the magnetosphere.

Birkeland rope

Louis Hissink
Perth

We Live in an Electric Universe, Part 1
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/003038.html

We Live in an Electric Universe, Part 2
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/003047.html

A letter that was recently published in the UK Daily Mail about the work of Raymond H Wheeler prompted me to find out more:

Professor Raymond H. Wheeler (University of Kansas) compiled 20 centuries of historical records, and concluded from his studies that there exists a most important 100-year-cycle of climatic changes that influences human affairs in a profound manner.

The cycle occurs in four distinct phases, which are descriptive of worldwide conditions rather than specific areas. The four phases are disturbed by secondary leads and delays — as much as 10 years — in isolated and widely separated areas. Prof Wheeler stated:

“The climatic curve is intended to represent — as far as one curve can — the weather trend in the world as a whole at any one time. The curve has no absolute significance. The meaning of the curve at any one time is relative to the pattern of the 100-year old cycle as a whole.”

The 100-year weather cycle and its phases are not of precisely equal duration. The cycle can contract to 70 years or expand to 120. The cycle is divided into a warm and a cold phase, each of which has a wet and dry period. Because people are affected by weather, the cycles of weather produce similar patterns of behaviour and events in history during the same phases of the century-long weather cycle. The phases are: (1) Cold-Dry, (2) Warm-Wet, (3) Warm-Dry, and (4) Cold-Wet. We are now in a cold-dry phase, which will prevail until about 2000 A.D.
Dr. Wheeler extended his research to reveal a continuous, universal cultural pattern of “mechanism” alternating with “humanism” that occurs throughout history synchronously with the 100-year weather cycle……………….

I find this phrase uncannily representative of the modern warm period:

“Second, the decline, onset of decadence, the growing excesses of centralized government, the emergence of dictators, tyranny, fanaticism, communism, and socialism, as the warm epoch continued, and as temperatures and dryness increased.”

Most of the material that we have about Wheeler is found in the book Climate: The Key To Understanding Business Cycles by Raymond Wheeler, (Revised & Edited by Michael Zahorchak). This volume summarizes Raymond H. Wheeler’s extensive research with long climatic cycles and their relationship to the business cycle. In the 1930’s Wheeler began a lifetime study that analysed world climate and cultural activities back to the dawn of recorded civilization.

Wheeler was also the creator of a huge volume known as “The Big Book” which was housed at the Foundation for the Study of Cycles until the late 1990s.

Cycles Research Institute: Raymond H Wheeler

Letter published in the UK Daily Mail:

As a result of the recent budget, the Rudd government will be spending $2.3 billion over five years to “tackle climate change by reducing emissions, adapting to change and helping Australia play a leadership role.”

An Australian climate realist recently remarked, “This represents a huge pitch by Kevin Rudd for the youth and environmental vote, and helps explain why our new government has determinedly resisted listening to any alternative, wiser voices on the issue of global warming.

Penny Wong’s new ministry (of Climate) is reputed to already have 124 staff, and that’s on top of an already established federal dept. of the environment, a national greenhouse office that gets a few hundred million dollars a year, eight states and territories with both DOEs and GOs, and several major university-CSIRO research centres. The cost of maintaining such an army of bureaucrats and (by Australian standards) regiment of scientists must be in the region of $2 billion, to which treasurer Swan is now adding another couple of billion.

The resulting Australian figure of $4 billion annually is similar to what USA is estimated to spend on greenhouse R&D each year (though the US figure probably doesn’t include all their climate bureaucracy). On a per capita basis, as for sport, Australia now appears to be ‘punching above our weight’.”

I think it’s worth posting the graphic below again:

Borrowing the phrase often attributed to UK Aussie Rolf Harris, ” Can you tell what it is yet!?”