Planet Debate Solar Storms Neg Update

Impact Assessment DAs Outweigh.............................................................................................................2 General Case Defense....................................................................................................................................3 General Case Defense....................................................................................................................................4 General Case Defense....................................................................................................................................5 Ext: Status Quo Solves...................................................................................................................................6 Ext: Status Quo Solves...................................................................................................................................7

Planet Debate Solar Storms Neg Update

Impact Assessment DAs Outweigh

Time-frame -- Sun will have minimum solar activity for at least the next 30 years Space.com, 11/17/11, http://www.space.com/13660-solar-activity-cycle-grand-minimum.html
A relatively quiet stretch for the sun in recent years does not necessarily herald an impending solar activity low of historic proportions, a new study reports. The sun was quiescent from 2005 to 2010, spouting off relatively few flares and eruptions of solar plasma known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). That dry spell lasted about twice as long as usual, prompting some scientists to predict that a "grand minimum" of solar activity the likes of which hasn't been seen in 300 years could be on the way. But the opposite could just as easily be true, the study suggests. "[A]fter looking at data of past solar activity, we have pointed out that it is just as likely that the sun will go into a grand maximum again (it just came out of one) than into a grand minimum," said study lead author Sami Solanki, of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPISSR) in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany. "However, neither of these is likely to happen within the next 30 years or so," Solanki told SPACE.com via email. "Most probable is that the sun will continue at a moderate level of activity (such as displayed in the present solar activity cycle)." [Stunning Photos of Solar Flares & Sun Storms]

Their impact is empirically denied we have survived many solar storms Space.com, 11/11/11, http://www.space.com/13587-killer-solar-storm-earth-2012-nasa.html
The sun is indeed building up toward the peak of its 11-year activity cycle. But that peak is expected to come in 2013 or 2014, not 2012, researchers said. Also, countless solar maxima have come and gone over the years, and we and the Earth are still here. But that reasoning is all secondary to the main point, which is that a flare's sizzling heat cannot make it all the way to our planet, researchers said.

Time 9/27/11, http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/09/27/a-solar-storm-strikes-earthand-provides-awarning-for-the-future/

But maybe I should start keeping tabs on what's going on above us. On September 24 the sun unleashed a strong solar storman outburst of energy known as a coronal mass ejection that sent a massive cloud of plasma and magnetic energy hurting through space and toward the Earth at 5 million mph. The edges of that energy struck the planet on September 26, producing a medium-size solar storma G3 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) five-point scale. If solar storms are like space hurricanesclose enoughthe planet received the equivalent of a glancing blow, enough to cause some possible minor problems with satellite communications and GPS, but nothing most of us would have noticed.

Planet Debate Solar Storms Neg Update

General Case Defense

No solar storm that will kills us all Daily Mail, 11/11/11, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2060456/The-world-end-2012-wont-solar-flare-says-Nasa-expert.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
The internet is buzzing with 2012 doomsday predictions, but an expert at Nasa has blown a hole in at least one of the scenarios - that a giant solar flare will fry Earth and all things on it. Dr Alex Young, a heliophysicist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, said we don't need to worry about the sun for another few billion years - and certainly not in 2012. He said: 'We understand the sun well enough, with all the technology and all the science - and all of the many spacecraft we have that are monitoring it 24 hours a day, seven days a week - to know that this super storm that is going to wipe out the earth simply isn't going to happen.' He said that, apart from a nasty skin burn on a hot summer's day, there was very little to fear from our 'active star'. There simply isnt enough energy in the sun to send a killer fireball 93 million miles to destroy Earth. And, while solar flares and coronal mass ejections are currently increasing on the surface of the sun, this is a normal cycle. Indeed, anyone over 11 years of age has already lived through at least one of these cycles. Dr Young said: 'This up-and-coming solar cycle, roughly 2014, is not really going to be significantly different to the next one and the next one, or the previous one.

Scientists can predict solar stroms now Space.com, 11/17/11, http://www.space.com/13660-solar-activity-cycle-grand-minimum.html

Scientists are getting better and better at predicting solar activity hours or days in advance, thanks in large part to sun-watching spacecraft such as NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency. But it's not surprising that astronomers still have a hard time forecasting the sun's behavior on the scale of years or decades, Solanki said. "Solar activity is driven by the magnetic field, which is produced by a dynamo that in turn is a highly non-linear process (at least the way it works in stars)," Solanki said. "Small changes in the initial conditions, or in the conditions in the solar interior, where the dynamo mainly resides, can produce large changes in solar activity." We just don't know very much about the plasma flows that drive the sun's internal dynamo, he added. SDO and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft, which is due to launch in 2017, should teach researchers more about the sun's interior, but our star's rumblings will likely remain mysterious for a while. "Multidecadal predictions will remain problematic even then, however," Solanki said.

Planet Debate Solar Storms Neg Update

General Case Defense

We are protected from solar flare harms Daily Mail, 11/11/11, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2060456/The-world-end-2012-wont-solar-flare-says-Nasa-expert.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
'The sun is what we call an active star, and it has a cycle of activity. Over 11 years we go to higher activity and back down to lower activity, and this 11 years is fairly steady and it's been happening through time as far as we can tell. 'We always have solar flares - sometimes we have big ones, sometimes we have small ones. 'Even in the largest events that we've seen in the past 10,000 years, we see that the effect is not enough to damage the atmosphere such that we are no longer protected.' 'We live on a planet with a very thick atmosphere, and so that atmosphere stops all the harmful radiation that is produced in a solar flare.' Outside the atmosphere is an even stronger barrier - arcing magnetic fields that extend into deep space and deflect much of the sun's harmful radiation. The solar storms batter and stretch the magnetic fields as they pass, until the trailing field springs back into place - creating light shows at the poles, the aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis. But Dr Young said that coronal mass ejections, or CME as they are known, do little more than cause a dazzling light show in the sky. 'Coronal mass ejections are happening on the sun all the time, and they hit the Earth once or twice a week, sometimes more, and in general the effects are minimal. 'If we have a really big one you can have a very strong aurora, but then it can effect satellites and power grids, and so these are the kind of things that people who run these systems know about.

The sun doesnt have enough energy to send a giant fireball

Space.com, 11/11/11, http://www.space.com/13587-killer-solar-storm-earth-2012-nasa.html Contrary to what some doomsayers would have you believe, our star isn't capable of blasting out a solar flare powerful enough to burn our planet to a crisp, according to the space agency. "Most importantly, however, there simply isn't enough energy in the sun to send a killer fireball 93 million miles to destroy Earth," NASA officials wrote in a Nov. 10 statement.

We already have enough warning time to adapt 10 News. 11/15/11, http://www.wtsp.com/news/article/220625/81/Solar-flares-won39t-kill-Earth-NASAsays

But even with all that power, NASA says the sun doesn't have enough energy to hurl a fireball 93 million miles to destroy Earth. And Pulkkinen says scientists have made a lot of progress in predicting solar flares and CMEs, giving time for operators to power down their satellites and for you to buy a hand-crank emergency battery charger for your smartphone.

Planet Debate Solar Storms Neg Update

General Case Defense

Grid can withstand the most probable solar storm National Geographic, 8/3/11, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/08/110803-solarflare-storm-electricity-grid-risk/
"The concern is if the electric grid lost a number of transformers during a single storm, replacing them would be difficult and time-consuming," said Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for power delivery and utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). "These power transformers are very big devices, and the lead time to get a replacement can be two monthsif there's a spare one stored nearby. If a utility has to order a new one from the manufacturer, it could take six months to up to two years to deliver." The danger is becoming more critical, as the sun is approaching what's known as solar maximumthe high point in our star's roughly 11-year cycle of activity. Scientists anticipate stronger storms around solar max, in 2013. Using the latest sun-watching satellites and computer models, scientists have been trying to improve solar storm predictions. At the same time, electricity operators are developing plans for how to respond to solar storm warnings and determine what the consequences for the grid might be in a worst-case scenario. "Geomagnetic storms are low-probability, high-impact events," Lordan said. "When assessing the risk to the grid, one has to ask, What's the level of storm intensity that the grid system should be prepared for? "Based on the data and the scenarios we can reasonably expect, I believe the power-delivery system can operate through a solar storm."

Planet Debate Solar Storms Neg Update

Ext: Status Quo Solves

SWPC Solves Time, 9/27/11, ttp://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/09/27/a-solar-storm-strikes-earthand-provides-awarning-for-the-future/
The good news is that we do have a way to predict space weather before it hits. The SWPC is a 24/7 operation that monitors the sun for any abnormalities, looking for tipoffs like a sudden surge in solar X-rays. The SWPC also makes use of coronagraphic equipment included aboard NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite which enables scientists to monitor what is going on inside the sun's corona, the plasma atmosphere around the sun. When a coronal mass ejection event occurs, the SWPC can see it as it happens. "We want to make sure there's nothing out there that's going to surprise us," says Beisecker. "It's just like seeing a hurricane beginning to from off the coast of Africa and being able to predict it."

Planet Debate Solar Storms Neg Update

Ext: Status Quo Solves

New earth monitoring techniques solve CS Monitor, 8/19/11, http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0819/Solar-storms-Two-breakthroughscould-lead-to-better-warnings
Intense solar storms can disrupt satellites, airline and electric-utility operations, and, in the case of astronauts on orbit, directly endanger lives. Thursday, independent teams of researchers unveiled a pair of storm-tracking techniques that could significantly improve forecasts of "space weather" storms, the researchers say. One team's approach tracks magnetic fields while they are still taking shape nearly 40,000 miles below the sun's surface, well before they form and corral groups of sunspots on the solar surface. These sunspot groups represent active regions that spawn coronal-mass ejections outbursts that can send up to 1 billion tons of hot plasma hurtling through space at up to 1 million miles an hour. SPACE PHOTOS OF THE DAY: Plasma The second team used a pair of sun-watching satellites to build detailed images of a coronal-mass ejection and its evolution as it traveled from the sun to Earth. Until now, researchers had been able to track these eruptions in detail for only about the first 20 percent of the trip, yet a cloud's structure and speed, among other traits, can change markedly across the missing 80 percent of the trip. Between the two projects, the teams have developed tools to track some of the most severe types of space weather from gestation within the sun to delivery at Earth's doorstep. "For the first time, we're beginning to see a complete, predictive system," says Craig DeForest, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who led one of the two teams. For federal space-weather forecasters, these techniques could lead to substantial improvements in the accuracy of their forecasts. The largest coronal-mass ejections most often come from active, sunspot-dotted regions of the solar surface. "It is pretty exciting to be able to look underneath the sun and try to predict when an active region will appear," says Alysha Reinard, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo. With the new ability to track in detail a coronal-mass ejection along its complete trip, it should be possible to predict effects at Earth to within eight hours of its arrival, as opposed to today's 12- to 14-hour window, she says. Such an improvement could, for instance, allow airliners flying intercontinental routes to travel along the most fuel efficient routes longer before they have to change course to avoid air space subject to radio blackouts, which solar storms can bring. The developments come as two scientists in Britain suggest that over the next several decades, solar storms could become a more significant problem than they are today. And it isn't just because of the spread of vulnerable technologies, such as power grids.