Posted on 03/21/2008 2:35:24 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Gee, just think, if the Sun is taking a breather, you might come to look upon -50F as downright balmy.
...The prescient Birkeland again: "According to our manner of looking at the matter, every star in the universe would be the seat and field of activity of electric forces of a strength that no one could imagine. We have no certain opinion as to how the assumed enormous electric currents with enormous tension are produced, but it is certainly not in accordance with the principles we employ in technics on the earth at the present time. One may well believe, however, that a knowledge in the future of the electrotechnics of the heavens would be of great practical value to our electrical engineers. It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. We have assumed that each stellar system in evolutions throws off electric corpuscles into space."
Birkeland was right. The "stringy things" that puzzled astronomers are proof positive of electric currents in plasma. Venus-and Jupiter, the archetypal god of thunder,-are part of an electric circuit that involves the Sun. The Sun is part of a circuit that involves the entire galaxy. The Earth with its own Langmuir sheath (misnamed magnetosphere) is wired in to the same power grid. This raises a serious question about the study of weather and climatology because a crucial energy input to the Earth is unrecognized. If that is so then predictions about the Earth's climate are presently worthless because they ignore the largest single influence on Earth's weather.
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