A month after a historic winter storm brought Texas’s grid to its knees, leaving 5+ million without power, preliminary data recently released by the Texas Department of State Health Services reveals a grim picture — at least 57 Texans lost their lives.
The unlucky 57 perished as a direct result of the storm, according to data.
The majority of the deaths were associated with hypothermia — in ordinary terms: “They froze to death, some in their beds, like an 11-year-old boy in Conroe,” reads a guest editorial at dentonrc.com.
Others died of carbon monoxide poisoning after burning all-sorts of outdoor appliances inside, in desperation.
Some perished because of medical equipment failure, such as when their last oxygen tank ran empty.
Others of falls.
Some of fire, as in the case of three children and their grandmother in Sugar Land — all killed in a blaze suspected to have started near the fireplace they had used to keep warm. Their mother, Jackie Nguyen, who had to be physically restrained from going back into the house to save them, described her children as “phenomenal, amazing, little badass humans.”
So, last month we had tens of people dying of the cold, in a U.S. state, in 2021, on a supposedly catastrophically warming planet. Something doesn’t add up–and putting Texas’s mismanaged power-grid to one side, solar activity is the overlook component here.
The Sun’s historically low activity in cycle 24 took the majority of researchers and solar physicists by complete surprise, particularly with regards to its very long minimum period between cycles 23 and 24 (more than two years in 2008–2010) in which there was a lack of any activity at all.
As discussed by Simon J. Shepherd et al. in their 2014 paper PREDICTION OF SOLAR ACTIVITY FROM SOLAR BACKGROUND MAGNETIC FIELD VARIATIONS IN CYCLES 21-23: “this minimum solar activity was evident not only in the lack of sunspots but also in solar magnetic field variations (de Toma et al. 2010a, 2010b), modulation of cosmic rays (McDonald et al. 2010), and in interplanetary coronal mass ejections (Barnard et al. 2011).”
This prolonged minimum in cycle 24 was all the more surprising because the previous five cycles had been extremely active and so sunspot-productive that they were designated as a Grand Solar MAXIMUM (Solanki et al. 2004; Usoskin 2008; Usoskin et al. 2008; Solanki & Krivova 2011).
“In cycle 24, the Grand Maximum was followed by much lower solar activity, prompting some authors to suggest that the Sun is on its way toward a Maunder Minimum of activity (Lockwood et al. 2011),” writes Shepherd. “This reduced appearance of sunspots in the current cycle 24 was not anticipated by many researchers before the cycle began but has since given birth to a slew of papers suggesting we are indeed now headed into the next Grand Solar MINIMUM.”
Simon J. Shepherd et al. concluded in 2014, with a sufficient degree of confidence, that the solar activity in cycles 24–26 will be systematically decreasing: “we predict a noticeable decrease of the average sunspot numbers in cycle 25 to ≈80% of that in cycle 24 and a decrease in cycle 26 to ≈40%”:
Even NOAA’s PREDICTED SUNSPOT NUMBER AND RADIO FLUX data appears to show a ‘full-blown’ Grand Solar Minimum running from the late-2020s through the 2040s (at least).
NOAA are still (as of March 24, 2021) predicting a weak Solar Cycle 25 –one comparable to SC24– with the maximum peaking at 114.6 sunspots in July, 2025. The agency then goes on to plot the descent into the minimum of SC25, which they say will start in mid-2025 and bottom out around 2031 — and while this paints SC25 as another historically weak cycle, it isn’t the story here: NOAA aren’t expecting a ramp-up into SC26! When the sunspot number should be ramping back up, the agency’s data (linked again here) reveals the number of sunspots instead continues dropping.
NOAA are predicting all-but ZERO sunspots throughout the 2030s.
There is no ramp-up into Solar Cycle 26.
In fact, there is no SC26, nor are there any signs of SC27 (due to commence around 2040):
NOAA is predicting a ‘full-blown’ Grand Solar Minimum (GSM).
GSM’s can result in zero sunspots on our Sun, for often decades at a time — the impacts this can have on Earth’s climate have been well documented throughout history: the most famous example being the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) which saw plummeting temperatures, crop loss, famine, and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people ACROSS the planet.
Unfortunately, we modern humans will suffer something of a double-whammy this time round; because unlike those living during the Maunder Minimum, we have an additional cosmological forcing to contend with. Earth’s magnetosphere –a key line of defense against incoming radiation– is waning at an increasing rate as north and south magnetic poles continue their wander. Our magnetic field is expected to be considerably weaker by the 2030s (the onset of the GSM-proper, according to NOAA), and as with previous magnetic excursions/reversals, these events lead to an uptick in volcanic/seismic activity, solar outbursts (including CMEs), and even the onset of ice ages. These two independent factors (a GSM & a Pole Shift) occurring simultaneously is throwing us something of a curve-ball. Each factor alone leads to a dramatic waning of earth’s magnetosphere, but together they are delivering a double-whammy — the upshot will be an unprecedented level of Cosmic Rays entering our atmosphere nucleating clouds, sending volcanoes a’poppin’, dropping terrestrial temperatures, and affecting biology across the planet.
For all those out there who sense that “something is coming” ––and I believe there are many of us– the Grand Solar Minimum & Pole Shift could be that something. We humans are programmed to recognize cycles, them having been ingrained within us throughout our evolution, and the activity of the cosmos runs like clockwork.
Climate is cyclic, never linear; and after a spell of cumulatively high solar output, which brought about hundreds of years of prosperity and progress, human civilization is now reentering some very hard times.
I’m headed out to transplant a patch of Sorghum — what are you doing to prepare…?
The COLD TIMES are returning, the mid-latitudes are REFREEZING in line with the great conjunction, historically low solar activity, cloud-nucleating Cosmic Rays, and a meridional jet stream flow (among other forcings).
Both NOAA and NASA appear to agree, if you read between the lines, with NOAA saying we’re entering a ‘full-blown’ Grand Solar Minimum in the late-2020s, and NASA seeing this upcoming solar cycle (25) as “the weakest of the past 200 years”, with the agency correlating previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling here.
Furthermore, we can’t ignore the slew of new scientific papers stating the immense impact The Beaufort Gyre could have on the Gulf Stream, and therefore the climate overall.
Prepare accordingly— learn the facts, relocate if need be, and grow your own.
Social Media channels are restricting Electroverse’s reach: Twitter are purging followers while Facebook are labeling posts as “false” and have slapped-on crippling page restrictions. EV has also been blacklisted by ad networks, meaning the site is no longer allowed to run advertising.
So, be sure to subscribe to receive new post notifications by email (the box is located in the sidebar >>> or scroll down if on mobile).
And/or become a Patron, by clicking here: patreon.com/join/electroverse.
The site receives ZERO funding, and never has. So any way you can, help us spread the message so others can survive and thrive in the coming times.
Grand Solar Minimum + Pole Shift
The post Winter Storm Killed [at least] 57 in Texas appeared first on Electroverse.
via Electroverse
You must be logged in to post a comment.