Julian Simon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Julian Lincoln Simon (February 12, 1932 – February 8, 1998) was an American professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute at the time of his death, after previously serving as a longtime economics and business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Simon wrote many books and articles, mostly on economic subjects. He is best known for his work on population, natural resources, and immigration. His work covers cornucopian views on lasting economic benefits from natural resources and continuous population growth, even despite limited or finite physical resources, empowered by human ingenuity, substitutes, and technological progress. His works are also cited by libertarians against government regulation.

He is also known for the famous Simon–Ehrlich wager, a bet he made with ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich. Ehrlich bet that the prices for five metals would increase over a decade, while Simon took the opposite stance. Simon won the bet, as the prices for the metals sharply declined during that decade.

Theory

Simon's 1981 book The Ultimate Resource is a criticism of what was then the conventional wisdom on resource scarcity, published within the context of the cultural background created by the best-selling and highly influential book The Population Bomb in 1968 by Paul R. Ehrlich and The Limits to Growth analysis published in 1972. The Ultimate Resource challenged the conventional wisdom on population growth, raw-material scarcity and resource consumption. Simon argues that our notions of increasing resource-scarcity ignore the long-term declines in wage-adjusted raw material prices. Viewed economically, he argues, increasing wealth and technology make more resources available; although supplies may be limited physically they may be regarded as economically indefinite as old resources are recycled and new alternatives are assumed to be developed by the market. Simon challenged the notion of an impending Malthusian catastrophe—that an increase in population has negative economic consequences; that population is a drain on natural resources; and that we stand at risk of running out of resources through over-consumption. Simon argues that population is the solution to resource scarcities and environmental problems, since people and markets innovate. His ideas were praised by Nobel Laureate economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the latter in a 1998 foreword to The Ultimate Resource II, but they have also attracted critics such as Paul R. Ehrlich, Albert Allen Bartlett and Herman Daly.

Simon examined different raw materials, especially metals and their prices in historical times. He assumed that besides temporary shortfalls, in the long run prices for raw materials remain at similar levels or even decrease. E.g. aluminium was never as expensive as before 1886 and steel used for medieval armor carried a much higher price tag in current dollars than any modern parallel. A recent discussion of commodity index long-term trends supported his positions.

His 1984 book The Resourceful Earth (co-edited by Herman Kahn), is a similar criticism of the conventional wisdom on population growth and resource consumption and a direct response to the Global 2000 report. For example, it predicted that "There is no compelling reason to believe that world oil prices will rise in the coming decades. In fact, prices may well fall below current levels". Indeed, oil prices trended downward for nearly the next 2 decades, before rising above 1984 levels in about 2003 or 2004. Oil prices have subsequently risen and fallen, and risen again. In 2008, the price of crude oil reached $100 per barrel, a level last attained in the 1860s (inflation adjusted). Later in 2008, the price again sharply fell, to a low of about $40, before rising again to a high around $125. Since mid-2011, prices were slowly trending downward until the middle of 2014, but falling dramatically until the end of 2015 to ca. $30. Since then prices were relatively stable (below $50).

Simon was skeptical, in 1994, of claims that human activity caused global environmental damage, notably in relation to CFCs, ozone depletion and climate change, the latter primarily because of the perceived rapid switch from fears of global cooling and a new ice age (in the mid-1970s) to the later fears of global warming.

Simon also listed numerous claims about alleged environmental damage and health dangers from pollution as "definitely disproved". These included claims about lead pollution & IQ, DDT, PCBs, malathion, Agent Orange, asbestos, and the chemical contamination at Love Canal. He dismissed such concerns as a mere "value judgement."

But also, to a startling degree, the decision about whether the overall effect of a child or migrant is positive or negative depends on the values of whoever is making the judgment – your preference to spend a dollar now rather than to wait for a dollar-plus-something in twenty or thirty years, your preferences for having more or fewer wild animals alive as opposed to more or fewer human beings alive, and so on.

Influence

Simon was one of the founders of free-market environmentalism. An article entitled "The Doomslayer" profiling Julian Simon in Wired magazine inspired Danish climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg to write the book The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Simon was also the first to suggest that airlines should provide incentives for travelers to give up their seats on overbooked flights, rather than arbitrarily taking random passengers off the plane (a practice known as "bumping"). Although the airline industry initially rejected it, his plan was later implemented with resounding success, as recounted by Milton Friedman in the foreword to The Ultimate Resource II. Economist James Heins said in 2009 that the practice had added $100 billion to the United States economy in the last 30 years. Simon gave away his idea to federal de-regulators and never received any personal profit from his solution.

Although not all of Simon's arguments were universally accepted, they contributed to a shift in opinion in the literature on demographic economics from a strongly Malthusian negative view of population growth to a more neutral view. More recent theoretical developments, based on the ideas of the demographic dividend and demographic window, have contributed to another shift, this time away from the debate viewing population growth as either good or bad.

Simon wrote a memoir, A Life Against the Grain, which was published by his wife after his death.

Wagers with rivals

Paul R. Ehrlich – first wager

Simon challenged Paul R. Ehrlich to a wager in 1980 over the price of metals a decade later; Simon had been challenging environmental scientists to the bet for some time. Ehrlich, John Harte, and John Holdren selected a basket of five metals that they thought would rise in price with increasing scarcity and depletion. Simon won the bet, with all five metals dropping in price.

Supporters of Ehrlich's position suggest that much of this price drop came because of an oil spike driving prices up in 1980 and a recession driving prices down in 1990, pointing out that the price of the basket of metals actually rose from 1950 to 1975. They also suggest that Ehrlich did not consider the prices of these metals to be critical indicators, and that Ehrlich took the bet with great reluctance. On the other hand, Ehrlich selected the metals to be used himself, and at the time of the bet called it an "astonishing offer" that he was accepting "before other greedy people jump in."

The total supply in three of these metals (chromium, copper and nickel) increased during this time. Prices also declined for reasons specific to each of the five:

• The price of tin went down because of an increased use of aluminium, a much more abundant, useful and inexpensive material.
• Better mining technologies allowed for the discovery of vast nickel lodes, which ended the near monopoly that was enjoyed on the market.
• Tungsten fell due to the rise of the use of ceramics in cookware.
• The price of chromium fell due to better smelting techniques.
• The price of copper began to fall due to the invention of fiber optic cable (which is derived from sand), which serves a number of the functions once reserved only for copper wire.

In all of these cases, better technology allowed for either more efficient use of existing resources, or substitution with a more abundant and less expensive resource, as Simon predicted, until 2011.

Paul R. Ehrlich – proposed second wager

In 1995, Simon issued a challenge for a second bet. Ehrlich declined, and proposed instead that they bet on a metric for human welfare. Ehrlich offered Simon a set of 15 metrics over 10 years, victor to be determined by scientists chosen by the president of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. There was no meeting of minds, because Simon felt that too many of the metric's measured attributes of the world were not directly related to human welfare, e.g. the amount of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere. For such indirect, supposedly bad indicators to be considered "bad", they would ultimately have to have some measurable detrimental effect on actual human welfare. Ehrlich refused to leave out measures considered by Simon to be immaterial.

Simon summarized the bet with the following analogy:

Let me characterize their [Ehrlich and Schneider's] offer as follows. I predict, and this is for real, that the average performances in the next Olympics will be better than those in the last Olympics. On average, the performances have gotten better, Olympics to Olympics, for a variety of reasons. What Ehrlich and others say is that they don't want to bet on athletic performances, they want to bet on the conditions of the track, or the weather, or the officials, or any other such indirect measure.

David South

The same year as his second challenge to Ehrlich, Simon also began a wager with David South, professor of the Auburn University School of Forestry. The Simon / South wager concerned timber prices. Consistent with his cornucopian analysis of this issue in The Ultimate Resource, Simon wagered that at the end of a five-year term the consumer price of pine timber would have decreased; South wagered that it would increase. Before five years had elapsed, Simon saw that market and extra-market forces were driving up the price of timber, and he paid Professor South $1,000. Simon died before the agreed-upon date of the end of the bet, by which time timber prices had risen further.

Simon's reasoning for his early exit out of the bet was due to "the far-reaching quantity and price effects of logging restrictions in the Pacific-northwest." He believed this counted as interference from the U.S. government, which rendered the bet worthless according to his economic principles. Simon's bet only considered the possibility of prices being driven up by Alabama's government; he did not believe anything worthwhile was shown when U.S. logging restrictions drove the prices up.

Main statements and criticism

Jared Diamond in his book Collapse, Albert Bartlett and Garrett Hardin describe Simon as being too optimistic and some of his assumptions being not in line with natural limitations.

We now have in our hands—really, in our libraries—the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years. (Simon along The State of Humanity: Steadily Improving 1995)

Diamond claims that a continued stable growth rate of earth's population would result in extreme over-population long before the suggested time limit. Regarding the attributed population predictions Simon did not specify that he was assuming a fixed growth rate as Diamond, Bartlett and Hardin have done. Simon argued that people do not become poorer as the population expands; increasing numbers produce what they needed to support themselves, and have and will prosper while food prices sink.

There is no reason to believe that at any given moment in the future the available quantity of any natural resource or service at present prices will be much smaller than it is now, or non-existent. (Simon in The Ultimate Resource, 1981)

Diamond believes, and finds absurd, Simon implies it would be possible to produce metals, e.g. copper, from other elements. For Simon, human resource needs are comparably small compared to the wealth of nature. He therefore argued physical limitations play a minor role and shortages of raw materials tend to be local and temporary. The main scarcity pointed out by Simon is the amount of human brain power (i.e. "The Ultimate Resource") which allows for the perpetuation of human activities for practically unlimited time. For example, before copper ore became scarce and prices soared due to global increasing demand for copper wires and cablings, the global data and telecommunication networks have switched to glass fiber backbone networks.

This is my long-run forecast in brief, ...The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.

This and other quotations in Wired are supposed to be the reason for Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg has stated that he began his research as an attempt to counter what he saw as Simons' anti-ecological arguments but changed his mind after starting to analyze the data.

Legacy

The Institute for the Study of Labor established the annual Julian L. Simon Lecture to honor Simon's work in population economics. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign held a symposium discussing Simon's work on April 24, 2002. The university also established the Julian Simon Memorial Faculty Scholar Endowment to fund an associate faculty member in the business school. India's Liberty Institute also holds a Julian Simon Memorial Lecture. The Competitive Enterprise Institute gives the Julian Simon Memorial Award annually to an economist in the vein of Simon; the first recipient was Stephen Moore, who had served as a research fellow under Simon in the 1980s.

Personal life

Simon was married to Rita James Simon, who was also a longtime member of the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later became a public affairs professor at American University. Simon suffered from a long time depression, which allowed him to work only a few productive hours in a day. He also studied psychology of depression and wrote a book on overcoming it. Simon was Jewish. He died of a heart attack at his home in Chevy Chase in 1998 at age 65.

Education

• BA, Harvard University, experimental psychology, 1953
• Approximately four graduate courses in experimental psychology, Harvard, 1953
• MBA, University of Chicago, 1959
• PhD, University of Chicago, business economics, 1961

Honors

• Doctor honoris causa, University of Navarra, (Spain), Economics, 1998

Works

• Simon, Julian (August 1981). The Ultimate Resource (Hardcover ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 069109389X. Retrieved 6 December 2017.
• Simon, Julian L (1996). The Ultimate Resource 2 (Paperback ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691042691. Retrieved 6 December 2017.
• The Resourceful Earth: A Response to "Global 2000" (1984), ISBN 0-631-13467-0, Julian Simon & Herman Kahn, eds
• The Economic Consequences of Immigration into the United States
• Effort, Opportunity, and Wealth: Some Economics of the Human Spirit
• Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression ISBN 0-8126-9098-2 (Forewords by Albert Ellis and Kenneth Colby)
• The Hoodwinking of a Nation ISBN 1-56000-434-7 (hard), ISBN 1-4128-0593-7 (soft)
• A Life Against the Grain: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Economist ISBN 0-7658-0532-4
• Scarcity or Abundance? A Debate on the Environment (1994), (with Norman Myers), ISBN 0-393-03590-5
• The Philosophy and Practice of Resampling Statistics
• Basic research methods in social sciences: The art of empirical investigation, ISBN 0-394-32049-2
• Resampling: A Better Way to Teach (and Do) Statistics (with Peter C. Bruce)
• The Science and Art of Thinking Well in Science, Business, the Arts, and Love
• Economics of Population: Key Modern Writings, ISBN 1-85278-765-1
• The State of Humanity, ISBN 1-55786-585-X
• It's Getting Better All the Time : 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years by Stephen Moore, Julian Lincoln Simon ISBN 1-882577-97-3 manuscript finished posthumously by Stephen Moore

Coronal mass ejection, solar storm of 1859, and possible damage.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Play media

This video shows the particle flow around Earth as solar ejecta associated with a coronal mass ejection strike.

A coronal mass ejection (CME) is a significant release of plasma and accompanying magnetic field from the solar corona. They often follow solar flares and are normally present during a solar prominence eruption. The plasma is released into the solar wind, and can be observed in coronagraph imagery.

Coronal mass ejections are often associated with other forms of solar activity, but a broadly accepted theoretical understanding of these relationships has not been established. CMEs most often originate from active regions on the Sun's surface, such as groupings of sunspots associated with frequent flares. Near solar maxima, the Sun produces about three CMEs every day, whereas near solar minima, there is about one CME every five days.

Description

Play media

Follow a CME as it passes Venus then Earth, and explore how the Sun drives Earth's winds and oceans.

 

Arcs rise above an active region on the surface of the Sun.

 

Coronal mass ejections release large quantities of matter and electromagnetic radiation into space above the Sun's surface, either near the corona (sometimes called a solar prominence), or farther into the planetary system, or beyond (interplanetary CME). The ejected material is a magnetized plasma consisting primarily of electrons and protons. While solar flares are very fast (being electromagnetic radiation), CMEs are relatively slow.

Coronal mass ejections are associated with enormous changes and disturbances in the coronal magnetic field. They are usually observed with a white-light coronagraph.

Cause

Scientific research has shown that the phenomenon of magnetic reconnection is closely associated with CMEs and solar flares. In magnetohydrodynamic theory, the sudden rearrangement of magnetic field lines when two oppositely directed magnetic fields are brought together is called "magnetic reconnection". Reconnection releases energy stored in the original stressed magnetic fields. These magnetic field lines can become twisted in a helical structure, with a 'right-hand twist' or a 'left hand twist'. As the Sun's magnetic field lines become more and more twisted, CMEs appear to be a 'valve' to release the magnetic energy being built up, as evidenced by the helical structure of CMEs, that would otherwise renew itself continuously each solar cycle and eventually rip the Sun apart.

On the Sun, magnetic reconnection may happen on solar arcades—a series of closely occurring loops of magnetic lines of force. These lines of force quickly reconnect into a low arcade of loops, leaving a helix of magnetic field unconnected to the rest of the arcade. The sudden release of energy during this process causes the solar flare and ejects the CME. The helical magnetic field and the material that it contains may violently expand outwards forming a CME. This also explains why CMEs and solar flares typically erupt from what are known as the active regions on the Sun where magnetic fields are much stronger on average.

Aurora borealis stretch across Quebec and Ontario early on the morning of 8 October 2012.

Impact on Earth

When the ejection is directed towards Earth and reaches it as an interplanetary CME (ICME), the shock wave of traveling mass causes a geomagnetic storm that may disrupt Earth's magnetosphere, compressing it on the day side and extending the night-side magnetic tail. When the magnetosphere reconnects on the nightside, it releases power on the order of terawatt scale, which is directed back toward Earth's upper atmosphere.

Solar energetic particles can cause particularly strong aurorae in large regions around Earth's magnetic poles. These are also known as the Northern Lights (aurora borealis) in the northern hemisphere, and the Southern Lights (aurora australis) in the southern hemisphere. Coronal mass ejections, along with solar flares of other origin, can disrupt radio transmissions and cause damage to satellites and electrical transmission line facilities, resulting in potentially massive and long-lasting power outages.

Energetic protons released by a CME can cause an increase in the number of free electrons in the ionosphere, especially in the high-latitude polar regions. The increase in free electrons can enhance radio wave absorption, especially within the D-region of the ionosphere, leading to Polar Cap Absorption (PCA) events.

Humans at high altitudes, as in airplanes or space stations, risk exposure to relatively intense solar particle events. The energy absorbed by astronauts is not reduced by a typical spacecraft shield design and, if any protection is provided, it would result from changes in the microscopic inhomogeneity of the energy absorption events.

Physical properties

Play media

A video of the series of CMEs in August 2010.

 

Play media

This video features two model runs. One looks at a moderate coronal mass ejection (CME) from 2006. The second run examines the consequences of a large coronal mass ejection, such as the Carrington-class CME of 1859.

 

A typical coronal mass ejection may have any or all of three distinctive features: a cavity of low electron density, a dense core (the prominence, which appears on coronagraph images as a bright region embedded in this cavity), and a bright leading edge.

Most ejections originate from active regions on the Sun's surface, such as groupings of sunspots associated with frequent flares. These regions have closed magnetic field lines, in which the magnetic field strength is large enough to contain the plasma. These field lines must be broken or weakened for the ejection to escape from the Sun. However, CMEs may also be initiated in quiet surface regions, although in many cases the quiet region was recently active. During solar minimum, CMEs form primarily in the coronal streamer belt near the solar magnetic equator. During solar maximum, they originate from active regions whose latitudinal distribution is more homogeneous.

Coronal mass ejections reach velocities from 20 to 3,200 km/s (12 to 1,988 mi/s) with an average speed of 489 km/s (304 mi/s), based on SOHO/LASCO measurements between 1996 and 2003. These speeds correspond to transit times from the Sun out to the mean radius of Earth's orbit of about 13 hours to 86 days (extremes), with about 3.5 days as the average. The average mass ejected is 1.6×10¹² kg (3.5×10¹² lb). However, the estimated mass values for CMEs are only lower limits, because coronagraph measurements provide only two-dimensional data. The frequency of ejections depends on the phase of the solar cycle: from about one every fifth day near the solar minimum to 3.5 per day near the solar maximum. These values are also lower limits because ejections propagating away from Earth (backside CMEs) usually cannot be detected by coronagraphs.

Current knowledge of coronal mass ejection kinematics indicates that the ejection starts with an initial pre-acceleration phase characterized by a slow rising motion, followed by a period of rapid acceleration away from the Sun until a near-constant velocity is reached. Some balloon CMEs, usually the slowest ones, lack this three-stage evolution, instead accelerating slowly and continuously throughout their flight. Even for CMEs with a well-defined acceleration stage, the pre-acceleration stage is often absent, or perhaps unobservable.

Association with other solar phenomena

Play media

Video of a solar filament being launched

Coronal mass ejections are often associated with other forms of solar activity, most notably:

• Solar flares
• Eruptive prominence and X-ray sigmoids^[13]
• Coronal dimming (long-term brightness decrease on the solar surface)
• Moreton waves
• Coronal waves (bright fronts propagating from the location of the eruption)
• Post-eruptive arcades

The association of a CME with some of those phenomena is common but not fully understood. For example, CMEs and flares are normally closely related, but there was confusion about this point caused by the events originating beyond the limb. For such events no flare could be detected. Most weak flares do not have associated CMEs; most powerful ones do. Some CMEs occur without any flare-like manifestation, but these are the weaker and slower ones. It is now thought that CMEs and associated flares are caused by a common event (the CME peak acceleration and the flare impulsive phase generally coincide). In general, all of these events (including the CME) are thought to be the result of a large-scale restructuring of the magnetic field; the presence or absence of a CME during one of these restructures would reflect the coronal environment of the process (i.e., can the eruption be confined by overlying magnetic structure, or will it simply break through and enter the solar wind).

Theoretical models

It was first postulated that CMEs might be driven by the heat of an explosive flare. However, it soon became apparent that many CMEs were not associated with flares, and that even those that were often started before the flare. Because CMEs are initiated in the solar corona (which is dominated by magnetic energy), their energy source must be magnetic.

Because the energy of CMEs is so high, it is unlikely that their energy could be directly driven by emerging magnetic fields in the photosphere (although this is still a possibility). Therefore, most models of CMEs assume that the energy is stored up in the coronal magnetic field over a long period of time and then suddenly released by some instability or a loss of equilibrium in the field. There is still no consensus on which of these release mechanisms is correct, and observations are not currently able to constrain these models very well. These same considerations apply equally well to solar flares, but the observable signatures of these phenomena differ.

Interplanetary coronal mass ejections

Illustration of a coronal mass ejection moving beyond the planets toward the heliopause

CMEs typically reach Earth one to five days after leaving the Sun. During their propagation, CMEs interact with the solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). As a consequence, slow CMEs are accelerated toward the speed of the solar wind and fast CMEs are decelerated toward the speed of the solar wind. The strongest deceleration or acceleration occurs close to the Sun, but it can continue even beyond Earth orbit (1 AU), which was observed using measurements at Mars and by the Ulysses spacecraft. CMEs faster than about 500 km/s (310 mi/s) eventually drive a shock wave. This happens when the speed of the CME in the frame of reference moving with the solar wind is faster than the local fast magnetosonic speed. Such shocks have been observed directly by coronagraphs in the corona, and are related to type II radio bursts. They are thought to form sometimes as low as 2 R_s (solar radii). They are also closely linked with the acceleration of solar energetic particles.

Related solar observation missions

NASA mission Wind

On 1 November 1994, NASA launched the Wind spacecraft as a solar wind monitor to orbit Earth's L₁ Lagrange point as the interplanetary component of the Global Geospace Science (GGS) Program within the International Solar Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) program. The spacecraft is a spin axis-stabilized satellite that carries eight instruments measuring solar wind particles from thermal to >MeV energies, electromagnetic radiation from DC to 13 MHz radio waves, and gamma-rays. Though the Wind spacecraft is over two decades old, it still provides the highest time, angular, and energy resolution of any of the solar wind monitors. It continues to produce relevant research as its data has contributed to over 150 publications since 2008 alone.

NASA mission STEREO

On 25 October 2006, NASA launched STEREO, two near-identical spacecraft which, from widely separated points in their orbits, are able to produce the first stereoscopic images of CMEs and other solar activity measurements. The spacecraft orbit the Sun at distances similar to that of Earth, with one slightly ahead of Earth and the other trailing. Their separation gradually increased so that after four years they were almost diametrically opposite each other in orbit.

NASA mission Parker Solar Probe

The Parker Solar Probe was launched on 12 August 2018 to measure the mechanisms which accelerate and transport energetic particles i.e. the origins of the solar wind.

History

First traces

The largest recorded geomagnetic perturbation, resulting presumably from a CME, coincided with the first-observed solar flare on 1 September 1859. The resulting solar storm of 1859 is now referred to as the Carrington Event, The flare and the associated sunspots were visible to the naked eye (both as the flare itself appearing on a projection of the Sun on a screen and as an aggregate brightening of the solar disc), and the flare was independently observed by English astronomers R. C. Carrington and R. Hodgson. The geomagnetic storm was observed with the recording magnetograph at Kew Gardens. The same instrument recorded a crochet, an instantaneous perturbation of Earth's ionosphere by ionizing soft X-rays. This could not easily be understood at the time because it predated the discovery of X-rays by Röntgen and the recognition of the ionosphere by Kennelly and Heaviside. The storm took down parts of the recently created US telegraph network, starting fires and shocking some telegraph operators.

Historical records were collected and new observations recorded in annual summaries by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific between 1953 and 1960.

First clear detections

The first detection of a CME as such was made on 14 December 1971, by R. Tousey (1973) of the Naval Research Laboratory using the seventh Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO-7).^[24] The discovery image (256 × 256 pixels) was collected on a Secondary Electron Conduction (SEC) vidicon tube, transferred to the instrument computer after being digitized to 7 bits. Then it was compressed using a simple run-length encoding scheme and sent down to the ground at 200 bit/s. A full, uncompressed image would take 44 minutes to send down to the ground. The telemetry was sent to ground support equipment (GSE) which built up the image onto Polaroid print. David Roberts, an electronics technician working for NRL who had been responsible for the testing of the SEC-vidicon camera, was in charge of day-to-day operations. He thought that his camera had failed because certain areas of the image were much brighter than normal. But on the next image the bright area had moved away from the Sun and he immediately recognized this as being unusual and took it to his supervisor, Dr. Guenter Brueckner, and then to the solar physics branch head, Dr. Tousey. Earlier observations of coronal transients or even phenomena observed visually during solar eclipses are now understood as essentially the same thing.

1989-present

On 9 March 1989 a coronal mass ejection occurred. On 13 March 1989 a severe geomagnetic storm struck the Earth. It caused power failures in Quebec, Canada and short-wave radio interference.

On 1 August 2010, during solar cycle 24, scientists at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) observed a series of four large CMEs emanating from the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Sun. The initial CME was generated by an eruption on 1 August that was associated with NOAA Active Region 1092, which was large enough to be seen without the aid of a solar telescope. The event produced significant aurorae on Earth three days later.

On 23 July 2012, a massive, and potentially damaging, solar superstorm (solar flare, CME, solar EMP) barely missed Earth, according to NASA.

On 31 August 2012 a CME connected with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, with a glancing blow causing aurora to appear on the night of 3 September.^[28][29] Geomagnetic storming reached the G2 (Kp=6) level on NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center scale of geomagnetic disturbances.

14 October 2014 ICME was photographed by the Sun-watching spacecraft PROBA2 (ESA), Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (ESA/NASA), and Solar Dynamics Observatory (NASA) as it left the Sun, and STEREO-A observed its effects directly at 1 AU. ESA's Venus Express gathered data. The CME reached Mars on 17 October and was observed by the Mars Express, MAVEN, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Science Laboratory missions. On 22 October, at 3.1 AU, it reached comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, perfectly aligned with the Sun and Mars, and was observed by Rosetta. On 12 November, at 9.9 AU, it was observed by Cassini at Saturn. The New Horizons spacecraft was at 31.6 AU approaching Pluto when the CME passed three months after the initial eruption, and it may be detectable in the data. Voyager 2 has data that can be interpreted as the passing of the CME, 17 months after. The Curiosity rover's RAD instrument, Mars Odyssey, Rosetta and Cassini showed a sudden decrease in galactic cosmic rays (Forbush decrease) as the CME's protective bubble passed by.

Future risk

According to a report published in 2012 by physicist Pete Riley of Predictive Science Inc., the chance of Earth being hit by a Carrington-class storm between 2012 and 2022 is 12%.

Stellar coronal mass ejections

There have been a small number of CMEs observed on other stars, all of which as of 2016 have been found on M dwarfs. These have been detected by spectroscopy, most often by studying Balmer lines: the material ejected toward the observer causes asymmetry in the blue wing of the line profiles due to Doppler shift. This enhancement can be seen in absorption when it occurs on the stellar disc (the material is cooler than its surrounding), and in emission when it is outside the disc. The observed projected velocities of CMEs range from ≈84 to 5,800 km/s (52 to 3,600 mi/s). Compared to activity on the Sun, CME activity on other stars seems to be far less common.

---

Solar storm of 1859

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Sunspots of September 1, 1859, as sketched by Richard Carrington. A and B mark the initial positions of an intensely bright event, which moved over the course of five minutes to C and D before disappearing.

The solar storm of 1859 (also known as the Carrington Event) was a powerful geomagnetic solar storm during solar cycle 10 (1855–1867). A solar coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth's magnetosphere and induced one of the largest geomagnetic storms on record, September 1–2, 1859. The associated "white light flare" in the solar photosphere was observed and recorded by British astronomers Richard C. Carrington (1826–1875) and Richard Hodgson (1804–1872). The now-standard unique IAU identifier for this flare is SOL1859-09-01.

A solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would cause widespread disruptions and damage due to extended outages of the electrical grid. The solar storm of 2012 was of similar magnitude, but it passed Earth's orbit without striking the planet.

Carrington flare

From August 28 to September 2, 1859, many sunspots appeared on the Sun. On August 29, southern auroras were observed as far north as Queensland, Australia. Just before noon on September 1, the English amateur astronomers Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson independently made the first observations of a solar flare.^[6] Carrington and Hodgson compiled independent reports which were published side-by-side in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and exhibited their drawings of the event at the November 1859 meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The flare was associated with a major coronal mass ejection (CME) that travelled directly toward Earth, taking 17.6 hours to make the 150 million kilometre (93 million mile) journey. It is believed that the relatively high speed of this CME (typical CMEs take several days to arrive at Earth) was made possible by a prior CME, perhaps the cause of the large aurora event on August 29 that "cleared the way" of ambient solar wind plasma for the Carrington event.

Because of a geomagnetic solar flare effect ("magnetic crochet") observed in the Kew Observatory magnetometer record by Scottish physicist Balfour Stewart and a geomagnetic storm observed the following day, Carrington suspected a solar-terrestrial connection. Worldwide reports on the effects of the geomagnetic storm of 1859 were compiled and published by American mathematician Elias Loomis, which support the observations of Carrington and Stewart.

On September 1–2, 1859, one of the largest recorded geomagnetic storms (as recorded by ground-based magnetometers) occurred. Auroras were seen around the world, those in the northern hemisphere as far south as the Caribbean; those over the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. were so bright that the glow woke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning. People in the northeastern United States could read a newspaper by the aurora's light. The aurora was visible as far from the poles as south-central Mexico, Queensland, Cuba, Hawaii, southern Japan and China, and even at lower latitudes very close to the equator, such as in Colombia. Estimates of the storm strength range from −800 nT to −1750 nT.

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving telegraph operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks. Some telegraph operators could continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies.

On Saturday, September 3, 1859, the Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser reported:

Those who happened to be out late on Thursday night had an opportunity of witnessing another magnificent display of the auroral lights. The phenomenon was very similar to the display on Sunday night, though at times the light was, if possible, more brilliant, and the prismatic hues more varied and gorgeous. The light appeared to cover the whole firmament, apparently like a luminous cloud, through which the stars of the larger magnitude indistinctly shone. The light was greater than that of the moon at its full, but had an indescribable softness and delicacy that seemed to envelop everything upon which it rested. Between 12 and 1 o'clock, when the display was at its full brilliancy, the quiet streets of the city resting under this strange light, presented a beautiful as well as singular appearance.

In 1909, an Australian gold miner C.F. Herbert retold his observations in a letter to The Daily News in Perth:

I was gold-digging at Rokewood, about four miles from Rokewood township (Victoria). Myself and two mates looking out of the tent saw a great reflection in the southern heavens at about 7 o'clock p.m., and in about half an hour, a scene of almost unspeakable beauty presented itself, lights of every imaginable color were issuing from the southern heavens, one color fading away only to give place to another if possible more beautiful than the last, the streams mounting to the zenith, but always becoming a rich purple when reaching there, and always curling round, leaving a clear strip of sky, which may be described as four fingers held at arm's length. The northern side from the zenith was also illuminated with beautiful colors, always curling round at the zenith, but were considered to be merely a reproduction of the southern display, as all colors south and north always corresponded. It was a sight never to be forgotten, and was considered at the time to be the greatest aurora recorded... The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes, recognising, the divine immanence, immutable law, cause, and effect. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it a foreshadowing of Armageddon and final dissolution.

In June 2013, a joint venture from researchers at Lloyd's of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) in the United States used data from the Carrington Event to estimate the current cost of a similar event to the U.S. alone at $0.6–2.6 trillion.

Other evidence and similar events

Ice cores containing thin nitrate-rich layers have been analysed to reconstruct a history of past solar storms predating reliable observations. Researchers state that data from Greenland ice cores show evidence of individual solar-proton events, including the Carrington event. More recent work by the ice core community shows that nitrate spikes are not a result of solar energetic particle events, and, indeed, no consistency is found in cores from Greenland and Antarctica, and nitrate events can be due to terrestrial events, such as burnings, so use of this technique is in doubt.

Less severe storms have occurred in 1921 and 1960, when widespread radio disruption was reported. The March 1989 geomagnetic storm knocked out power across large sections of Quebec. On July 23, 2012 a "Carrington-class" solar superstorm (solar flare, coronal mass ejection, solar EMP) was observed; its trajectory missed Earth in orbit. Information about these observations was first shared publicly by NASA on April 28, 2014.

Carrying capacity

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The carrying capacity of a biological species in an environment is the maximum population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water, and other necessities available in the environment. In population biology, carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load, which is different from the concept of population equilibrium. Its effect on population dynamics may be approximated in a logistic model, although this simplification ignores the possibility of overshoot which real systems may exhibit.

Carrying capacity was originally used to determine the number of animals that could graze on a segment of land without destroying it. Later, the idea was expanded to more complex populations, like humans. For the human population, more complex variables such as sanitation and medical care are sometimes considered as part of the necessary establishment. As population density increases, birth rate often increases and death rate typically decreases. The difference between the birth rate and the death rate is the "natural increase". The carrying capacity could support a positive natural increase or could require a negative natural increase. Thus, the carrying capacity is the number of individuals an environment can support without significant negative impacts to the given organism and its environment. Below carrying capacity, populations typically increase, while above, they typically decrease. A factor that keeps population size at equilibrium is known as a regulating factor.

Population size decreases above carrying capacity due to a range of factors depending on the species concerned, but can include insufficient space, food supply, or sunlight. The carrying capacity of an environment may vary for different species and may change over time due to a variety of factors including: food availability, water supply, environmental conditions and living space. The origins of the term "carrying capacity" are uncertain, with researchers variously stating that it was used "in the context of international shipping" or that it was first used during 19th-century laboratory experiments with micro-organisms. A recent review finds the first use of the term in an 1845 report by the US Secretary of State to the US Senate.

Humans

Several estimates of the carrying capacity have been made with a wide range of population numbers. A 2001 UN report said that two-thirds of the estimates fall in the range of 4 billion to 16 billion with unspecified standard errors, with a median of about 10 billion. More recent estimates are much lower, particularly if non-renewable resource depletion and increased consumption are considered. Changes in habitat quality or human behavior at any time might increase or reduce carrying capacity. In the view of Paul and Anne Ehrlich, "for earth as a whole (including those parts of it we call Australia and the United States), human beings are far above carrying capacity today."  (DJS:  For what it's worth, I disagree; and Ehrlich has been disastrously wrong in the past about this.)

The application of the concept of carrying capacity for the human population has been criticized for not successfully capturing the multi-layered processes between humans and the environment, which have a nature of fluidity and non-equilibrium, and for sometimes being employed in a blame-the-victim framework.

Supporters of the concept argue that the idea of a limited carrying capacity is just as valid applied to humans as when applied to any other species. Animal population size, living standards, and resource depletion vary, but the concept of carrying capacity still applies. The number of people is not the only factor in the carrying capacity of Earth. Waste and over-consumption, especially by wealthy and near-wealthy people and nations, are also putting significant strain on the environment together with human overpopulation. Population and consumption together appear to be at the core of many human problems. Some of these issues have been studied by computer simulation models such as World3. When scientists talk of global change today, they are usually referring to human-caused changes in the environment of sufficient magnitude eventually to reduce the carrying capacity of much of Earth (as opposed to local or regional areas) to support organisms, especially Homo sapiens.

Factors that govern carrying capacity

Some aspects of a system's carrying capacity may involve matters such as available supplies of food, water, raw materials, and/or other similar resources. In addition, there are other factors that govern carrying capacity which may be less instinctive or less intuitive in nature, such as ever-increasing and/or ever-accumulating levels of wastes, damage, and/or eradication of essential components of any complex functioning system. Eradication of, for example, large or critical portions of any complex system (envision a space vehicle, for instance, or an airplane, or an automobile, or computer code, or the body components of a living vertebrate) can interrupt essential processes and dynamics in ways that induce systems failures or unexpected collapse. (As an example of these latter factors, the "carrying capacity" of a complex system such an airplane is more than a matter of available food, or water, or available seating, but also reflects total weight carried and presumes that its passengers do not damage, destroy, or eradicate parts, doors, windows, wings, engine parts, fuel, and oil, and so forth.) Thus, on a global scale, food and similar resources may affect planetary carrying capacity to some extent so long as Earth's human passengers do not dismantle, eradicate, or otherwise destroy critical biospheric life-support capacities for essential processes of self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, and self-repair.

Thus, carrying capacity interpretations that focus solely on resource limitations alone (such as food) may neglect wider functional factors. If the humans neither gain nor lose weight in the long-term, the calculation is fairly accurate. If the quantity of food is invariably equal to the "Y" amount, carrying capacity has been reached. Humans, with the need to enhance their reproductive success (see Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene), understand that food supply can vary and also that other factors in the environment can alter humans' need for food. A house, for example, might mean that one does not need to eat as much to stay warm as one otherwise would. Over time, monetary transactions have replaced barter and local production, and consequently modified local human carrying capacity. However, purchases also impact regions thousands of miles away. For example, carbon dioxide from an automobile travels to the upper atmosphere. This led Paul R. Ehrlich to develop the I = PAT equation.

I = P ∙ A ∙ T

where:

I is the impact on the environment resulting from consumption

P is the population number

A is the consumption per capita (affluence)

T is the technology factor

This is a graph of the population due to the logistic curve model. When the population is above the carrying capacity it decreases, and when it is below the carrying capacity it increases.

An important model related to carrying capacity (K), is the logistic, growth curve. The logistic growth curve depicts a more realistic version of how population growth rate, available resources, and the carrying capacity are inter-connected. As illustrated in the logistic growth curve model, when the population size is small and there are many resources available, population over-time increases and so does the growth rate. However, as population size nears the carrying capacity and resources become limited, the growth rate decreases and population starts to level out at K. This model is based on the assumption that carrying capacity does not change. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that carrying capacity of a population can increase or decrease and there are various factors that affect it. For instance, an increase in the population growth can lead to over-exploitation of necessary natural resources and therefore decrease the overall carrying capacity of that environment.

Technology can play a role in the dynamics of carrying capacity and while this can sometimes be positive, in other cases its influence can be problematic. For example, it has been suggested that in the past that the Neolithic revolution increased the carrying capacity of the world relative to humans through the invention of agriculture. In a similar way, viewed from the perspective of foods, the use of fossil fuels has been alleged to artificially increase the carrying capacity of the world by the use of stored sunlight, even though that food production does not guarantee the capacity of the Earth's climatic and biospheric life-support systems to withstand the damage and wastes arising from such fossil fuels. However, such interpretations presume the continued and uninterrupted functioning of all other critical components of the global system. It has also been suggested that other technological advances that have increased the carrying capacity of the world relative to humans are: polders, fertilizer, composting, greenhouses, land reclamation, and fish farming. In an adverse way, however, many technologies enable economic entities and individual humans to inflict far more damage and eradication, far more quickly and efficiently on a wider-scale than ever. Examples include machine guns, chainsaws, earth-movers, and the capacity of industrialized fishing fleets to capture and harvest targeted fish species faster than the fish themselves can reproduce are examples of such problematic outcomes of technology.

Agricultural capability on Earth expanded in the last quarter of the 20th century. But now there are many projections of a continuation of the decline in world agricultural capability (and hence carrying capacity) which began in the 1990s. Most conspicuously, China's food production is forecast to decline by 37% by the last half of the 21st century, placing a strain on the entire carrying capacity of the world, as China's population could expand to about 1.5 billion people by the year 2050. This reduction in China's agricultural capability (as in other world regions) is largely due to the world water crisis and especially due to mining groundwater beyond sustainable yield, which has been happening in China since the mid-20th century.

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, has said: "It would take 1.5 Earths to sustain our present level of consumption. Environmentally, the world is in an overshoot mode."  ^{(DJS:  Again, disagree.)}

Ecological footprint

One way to estimate human demand compared to ecosystem's carrying capacity is "ecological footprint" accounting. Rather than speculating about future possibilities and limitations imposed by carrying capacity constraints, Ecological Footprint accounting provides empirical, non-speculative assessments of the past. It compares historic regeneration rates, biocapacity, against historical human demand, ecological footprint, in the same year. One result shows that humanity's demand footprint in 1999 exceeded the planet's bio-capacity by >20%. However, this measurement does not take into account the depletion of the actual fossil fuels, "which would result in a carbon Footprint many hundreds of times higher than the current calculation."

There is also concern of the ability of countries around to globe to decrease and maintain their ecological footprints. Holden and Linnerud, scholars working to provide a better framework that adequately judge sustainability development and maintenance in policy making, have generated a diagram that measures the global position of different countries around the world, which shows a linear relation between GDP PPP and ecological foot print in 2007. Possible answers to the question of where we are as individual countries attempting to reach sustainability and development methods to reduce ecological foot print. According to the Figure 1 diagram, the United States had the largest ecological foot print per capita along with Norway, Sweden, and Austria, in comparison to Cuba, Bangladesh, and Korea.

Top Data Science Online Courses to Learn

Top Data Science Online Courses to Learn – If you are looking for making career in data science then you are on right place. Working as a data scientist is a really cool occupation for those who like math and programming. In the field of Data Science you can gain knowledge of different fields such as machine learning, statistics, programming, math, etc. In simple word, learning data science can take you very far, not only professionally but also personally. Following are some best Data Science online courses you can consider to learn.

Original link:  https://gainfromhere.com/top-data-science-online-courses-to-learn/

 

Machine Learning A-Z™: Hands-On Python & R In Data Science (view) – In this course, you will learn to how to create Machine Learning Algorithms in Python and R from two Data Science experts including code templates.

Python for Data Science and Machine Learning Bootcamp (view) – In this course, you will learn how to use NumPy, Pandas, Seaborn , Matplotlib , Plotly , Scikit-Learn , Machine Learning, Tensorflow , and more!

Data Science, Deep Learning, & Machine Learning with Python (view) – This course teaches you neural networks, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques.

Data Science and Machine Learning Bootcamp with R (view) – This  courses teaches you how to use the R programming language for data science and machine learning and data visualization!

Data Science: Supervised Machine Learning in Python (view)– This  courses teaches you how to implement classic machine learning algorithms in Python

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Group if you find this blog very helpful. Find and learn new skills of your choice here-> View

 

Posted in Data ScienceTagged data science, deep learning, machine learning, python, supervised machine learning

 

Published by admin